Category: facebook

“We are almost there!” said Susanin, peeling a banana on the go.

I finally got around to using FaceApp) well done guys, impressive

I hope everything will be alright there. But there are two interesting points about this news: the speed at which it hit the media and the fact that it’s about a Superjet with engine failure.

This morning, the entire sky was covered in these horizontal clouds (they stretch left and right to the horizon, hard to capture from a car) Looks like morning glory

Interestingly, in the states there are license plates with either two or even just one character. Some of them are sold for a decent amount of money, while others belong to government agencies. Another interesting fact is that you can check a car for free by its plate number to find its VIN and complete history. For instance, this 2015 Chevrolet Suburban has 13 recalls from the manufacturer, do not buy a Chevrolet Suburban)

https://www.vehiclehistory.com/vin-report/1GNSKHKC5FR249852

Playing transparent chess with Vitalii Menshutin. Didn’t get past two moves. (Who came up with that!)

Nadezhda and I released another report over the weekend about the opening of a small trail. When I learned about the event, it seemed very amusing to me. I immediately sent Nade an image of deputies in Tula opening a backyard clothes dryer and a grand opening of trash bins in Novokuznetsk.

However, upon closer inspection, everything turned out to be more interesting. And considering nearly four years have passed, it’s even more understandable.

So, a simple paved path along the road about a couple of kilometers long took 14 years to build. Partly, the opening was so grand because it was a very important event for many, taking years to happen. The funding was mainly local, literally by the residents of the settlement. A small segment received federal funding because this piece of road is in the registry of historic roads, and there needed to be detailed planning and coordination involving various slow-moving organizations. Meanwhile, $90,000 remained from the construction, which was transferred to the next stage.

A nonprofit organization, where all participants are volunteers (meaning, they don’t get paid, only spend their time), is managing this construction.

Building a path in the States along a road, as it turned out, is not a trivial matter. The thing is, there’s only a small right-of-way zone around the road that road workers still control, but beyond that starts someone’s property. Designing a path that does not touch anyone’s property while being safe and convenient is quite challenging.

Great Falls, where all this is happening, is a very nice place. We have already written a lot about local events, and each one gives the impression that people in this quite large settlement live as one whole, and highly value this unity. If I ever have an extra four to five million dollars, I’ll buy myself a little house there.

In Houston, there’s an interesting startup – Griddy (GoGriddy dot com). It’s an alternative electricity provider. Here’s the concept. A typical provider bills you at a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, which is almost always significantly higher than the wholesale rate, and that’s where they make their profit. The wholesale rate, which is what the typical provider pays for the electricity, fluctuates – like lower at night, higher during heatwaves. Plus, the volume is important – if their customers only use 80 percent, the rest just burns off. So, in Texas, you can switch providers. In zip code 77060 (north Houston), there are 55 providers available. One of them, Griddy, bills at the actual wholesale rate, updating it every hour. Allegedly, in 96% of cases, this rate is below the Texas average. Plus, they charge ten bucks for membership to cover peaks and make earnings. There’s an app that shows you a chart – actual electricity usage, rate schedule by the hour. They have API and FTTT to set up a smart home to use less electricity during high-cost periods, or just to receive SMS notifications.

Since Griddy collects and analyzes data from all clients, they can predict quite accurately how much energy to purchase. This allows them to get a better price than traditional energy providers who also calculate but maintain a flat rate and make a profit on the delta. And Griddy calculates more precisely and doesn’t buy excess.

It’s claimed that this allows for significant savings. However, this past August, many Griddy clients took a hit because there was extreme heat, electricity consumption was at its peak, and the wholesale rate was above the Texas average, a lot of people found out that their bills didn’t go down at all, and there was an uproar. It was like “we did warn about those four percent,” but Griddy decided to be accommodating and refunded everyone’s ten-dollar membership.

Additionally, there’s a prepaid account that automatically (or manually) gets replenished from a card, and Griddy takes the money from there on its own.

But overall, the concept is interesting. In Russia, I could never have imagined that there could be “virtual electricity network operators.”

I, Robot

There’s one thing in macOS Finder that really annoys me. You download a zip archive into the Downloads folder, where you already have a million files (I clean it every six months). And then you unpack it. The folder from the archive doesn’t appear next to the zip file, but somewhere lower down, sometimes much lower. This is because the files are sorted by creation/modification date (which puts the zip file at the top since I just downloaded it), and the unpacked file ends up somewhere in the middle because its creation date is in the past. And finding that folder or file can sometimes be very non-trivial, because you don’t always remember what it was named in the archive.

UPDATE: Thanks to Naumov Aleksey – you need to sort by Date Added. To do this, you need to enable this column, which is not enabled by default. Sorting by created/modified date is now out the window