The 'outdoor unit that looks awful' is an interesting quirk especially with US equipment - most Japanese and European residential units actually look fine, I'm not sure why American ones have tended to look especially ugly.
I notice this with electrical stuff too - things like switchboards etc. in residential and light commercial installations we have quite neat stuff that's usually quite streamlined and in light white/grey/cream colours, whereas the switchboards and conduits and thigns I see in videos of US home installations look like grey chunky metal stuff that you'd only see in heavy industrial sites here!
Electrical panels are installed in mechanical/electrical rooms or outdoors, there’s zero point in having a cream colored panelboard cover or enclosure. The coating is to protect the metal, not for aesthetics.
Colored conduit is available, but it’s more expensive and specifically used for different low-voltage (under 50V) control wiring, like red for fire alarm wiring, blue for BAS wiring, and so on.
Buying the panel box which is unchanged from the last 70 years and costs $50 less than a nicer new style, but also our houses are big enough the panel is nearly always in a mechanical room so who cares what it looks like.
The ones I think they are referring to a more like industrial control cabinets with DIN mounted breakers, which are indeed (paradoxically) less ‘old industrial’ looking. That Leviton board has a similar look, but with the standard bus bar type mounting in a heavy metal box.
The metal box does serve a useful purpose, which is protecting the flammable wood framing typical in North American construction from fire, where most European and Asian boxes are either much thinner metal, or plastic. Because their construction is often concrete and fire danger is much lower.
That's the legal loophole that I'm sure a tiny number of people are using. In the real world, reportedly around 3/4 of kids under 16 that were using social media still are by either having changed their age during the window and using a sibling or older friend to do face scans for age recognition, or by creating new accounts and again using an older friend/sibling/relative etc. for the age verification. I heard about the ways children of some of my cousins got around it at Christmas, and their parent's didn't care!
The most embarrassing thing is that our Government thought the idiotic idea was workable in the first place... But of course now they've gone and made things worse, because now kids' profiles pretend to be older, so more inappropriate stuff (like gambling ads for those who put an over-18 birthdate) can get targeted at them - great job, eSafety Commissioner!
The number of times I've had to lie to websites on my kid's behalf is horrendous. I resent governments and companies for putting me in that situation.
But it's a good lesson, I suppose. It changed the lesson to my kids about lying from "lying is bad", to a more sophisticated "lying is bad for these reasons, and so these lies are bad, but those lies are not."
Yeah, I think it's overall bad for society, but on an individual I'd definitely do it too (within reason) for certain services if I had kids that age.
But it feels like by making silly laws like this that aren't likely to be respected by much of the population is bad for the rule of law, which is bad for society. But fair enough, the rule of law is only a good thing as long as the laws are (on the whole) good.
We have a lot of this problem in Australia because as much as we pretend not to be, we're pretty authoritarian in regulating personal behaviour. For example in my state they're currently criminalising riding EN15194 compliant e-bikes above 10 km/h (literally 6 mph, slower than a jog) in my state on 90% of the bicycle path network (90% of the network are 'shared paths' so you'd only be allowed to ride at the bike's full 25 km/h (15 mph) motor limit on the small amount of dedicated bicycle paths). That and requiring anyone with any e-bike to have a drivers license - which cuts out people who can't have a license due to disability, medical issues but who could still ride a bike, or anyone under-16.
It's very silly, almost completely unenforceable and again just going to create huge non-compliance and further teach people that laws are silly things to be ignored... I really don't think that is good for society, and I've observed that the more Government has tried to regulate our behaviour, the less responsibility people seem to take, and the more the Government tries to further regulate.
So I think a big criteria of evaluating any new bill is "are most people actually going to respect this law", but all my experience with politicians is that they prefer magical thinking of believing that anything you make a law will immediately be fixed, even if it's impossible to adequately enforce or even technologically impossible to implement. Every time I've been involved in public consultation processes I'm constantly arguing practicality of the actual bill and they're arguing about the ideals that drove the poorly thought out laws...
> Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.
Where and how? Pretty sure our Federal and State Governments here in Australia publish the current in-force law (original Act amended with all amendments) - I assumed that was normal, do they not do that elsewhere?
See for example the Telecommunications Act (1997) [1] but current version amended to October 2025 (the most recent amendment). Then you click ‘All Versions’ and you can read any of the 116 or so versions back to the original in 1997.
Sorry not sure what books would be good (I learnt the bits and bobs I know mostly on the job from grey-beards!) but I always like to chime in when people talk about black magic that part of learning about RF it's not that crazy - just unintuitive if you think in terms of the lower frequency and DC stuff - because once you lean about it, it basically turns out that really low frequency stuff and DC are basically a special case of RF, and you can see the RF effects in all sorts of things, like any decently fast UART or other signals.
So yeah, I would encourage any EE to look into it, because having an idea about RF can make any electronic design better (especially around things like EMC!)
Yeah, I mean if you think about why do LLMs use this kind of phrasing so much, it's just because it was already a common sentence construction in the training data written by humans!
That's incredible, here in Australia they not only shut down all 2G networks almost a decade ago, but they've already shut down 3G as well!
Although now looking at Wikipedia there are a lot more 2G networks sticking around than I realised, still hard for me to believe given what's happened here!
Funny enough its the tower that tells the cellphone modem which network is "better" and it does this in an unencrypted cell reselection message. So it is easy to force a phone to select 2G.
Cool hack - I have the ‘smart’ managed version of that switch (although the PoE version of it I think), and it looks exactly the same to the unmanaged one - absolutely makes sense that it’s basically identical (just a BOM change for the different flash to fit the larger firmware).
Often it’s way cheaper to have one hardware version and control features in firmware, and that principle is even more true for silicon (same die but fuses that are blown to disable parts of it, or the chip clocked down because it might not perform properly at the speed of the more expensive SKU), so not surprising it’s this way!
Wow, I didn’t know you could kill these in the registry, will definitely do this. They are absolutely maddening in my case, which is where I only boot into my Windows SSD sporadically, so there seems to be some time out so I get it basically every single time I boot Windows. It’s really not making me want to use it any more than the absolute minimum…
The original reasoning can be found in medical texts from the mid to late 19th century when it was first discussed. My recollection is not strong enough to repeat it with confidence but it was to the effect of: the removal of the foreskin should restrict the ease of movement* and therefore restrict the ease of “self-abuse” as it was termed then.
* the foreskin functions as a sleeve which eases movement and reduces friction during sexual acts.
I don’t know what’s going on with this kind of stuff in the US - similarly I’ve heard stories of people getting quotes in the States for anything from US$10-15K for the kind of air source mini-split heat pumps you can have supplied and installed for US $1200-2000 in Australia! (That is ~3.5 to 7 kW range - super common and cheap as chips here).
Can't prove it, but it seems vendors collude in (very hot) Arizona on all sorts of necessities (plumbing, A/C, electricians). they all seem to know what each charges, and the prices seem not kept in check by any real competition.
I notice this with electrical stuff too - things like switchboards etc. in residential and light commercial installations we have quite neat stuff that's usually quite streamlined and in light white/grey/cream colours, whereas the switchboards and conduits and thigns I see in videos of US home installations look like grey chunky metal stuff that you'd only see in heavy industrial sites here!
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