perestroika

It sure is possible.

A typical "obscenely bright" LED chip might be Cree XML, but many similar chips exist. You'd need a plano-convex or equivalent Fresnel lens - shorter focal lengths favour compact design. Then you need a driver. Some are fixed while some adjustable with a tiny potentiometer. You'd need an 18650 cell holder (it can be made too, an 18650 will go into a leftover piece of 20 mm electrical cabling pipe with a spring-loaded metal cap engineered of something).

Myself, I bought a nice head lamp, but it broke after one year. The driver board failed. Being of the lazy variety, I replaced the board with a resistor to limit current and now it's been working 3 years already. Not at peak luminosity, the resistor wasn't optimal of course. :)

I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/nuclear-energy/small-modular-reactors/small-modular-reactors-explained_en

They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:

• if they are serially manufactured without design chances, manufacturing is more efficient than big unique projects
• you can choose a site with less cooling water
• you can choose a site where a fossil-burning plant used to be (grid elements for a power plant are present) but a renewable power plant may not be feasible
• some of them can be safer, due to a higher ratio of coolant per fuel, and a lower need for active cooling*

Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).

The overview of the Commission mentions:

SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.

I don't think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.

Wow, that's a nice one. :)

Also, both of your links to solar-powered tool projects were educational. I knew this could be done, but I had never read about peope doing that. :)

I noticed a journalist mention (hopefully based on good sources) that this months's storm was estimated to be 4-5 times weaker than the 1859 storm.

NASA, in their article mentions the recent storm as a G5 level geomagnetic storm caused by an X8.7 level solar flare.

X is the strongest class of solar flares and G is the strongest class of geomagnetic storms, but this was definitely not a record - an X20 flare has been observed once, but as I understand, the ejected particles didn't hit Earth.

Where I live (latitude 59), a short electrical grid event occurred during the display of auroras. Something tripped and something immediately switched over to replace it, most people didn't notice anything, but some had to restart various heat pumps and similar devices. Then again, in Europe, the power grid has relatively short lines and many transformers between them, which makes it comparatively less vulnerable.

Regarding transformers: it's easier to let a power grid trip offline (and transformers are designed to behave so instead of being overpowered) rather than to keep operating despite a Carrington level solar storm and suffer failure on all longer east-west connections.

Also, I don't think they used capacitors to protect their high voltage lines back in 1921, because the article Overvoltage Protection of Series Capacitor Banks notes:

"Their first application dates back to 1928 when GE installed such a bank – rated 1.2 MVar – at the Ballston Spa Substation on the 33 kV grid of New York Power and Light. Since then, series capacitor banks have been installed on systems across the globe."

Also, failure on north-south connections isn't nearly as likely, so a considerable part of the transformer "population" would be spared from impact.

Thus, while a single strong solar storm within the limit charted out in 1859 would be an extreme inconvenience and strong economic setback, it seems unlikely to end civilization.

A long period of severe solar storms could also result in ozone depletion in the atmosphere and become another extreme inconvenience - through increased UV exposure. However, most forms of life have seen such things in their evolutionary past, and humans have the ability to wear glasses, clothes and apply sun screen.

The author does not seem to have read Azarov or at least his references to sources leave this impression. If he was doing his research right now, I would recommend him to browse one book for hints about how the RIAU called themselves, and for additional sources of literature. But in general, I think he has the right conclusion. :)

Kontrrazvedka: The story of the Makhnovist intelligence service - Vyacheslav Azarov

The PDF sadly isn't searchable (it's image, so it's a black hole for most search engines).

My understanding: they called themselves the "Insurgent Army", sometimes the "Insurgent Division" and did not declare a state or claim a territory. When they were popular and widespread, they were more formally known as the "Revolutionary People's Army of Ukraine" and "Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine" (kontrrazvedka was the counterintelligence branch which did dirty deeds like assassinations, espionage, counter-espionage, sabotage, expropriation / grand theft, etc)

A related story:

The first known anarchist state, and perhaps the only one, was to my understanding a republic declared by rebelling sailors and fortress-builders of the Russian fleet on the tiny North Estonian island of Naissaar (Nargen). (source) The "state" was laughably tiny and the population too - but the name was backed by possession of two battleships (Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk), with the ironic twist that the crew far outnumbered island dwellers. The only body to ever recognize the "state" was the Soviet of Tallinn, which existed during a double rule (togehter with the prototype Republic of Estonia) in the power vacuum between the Czarist retreat and the advance of imperial German troops. Evacuating before the German advance, the battleships sailed first to Finland and then Kronstadt, and the anarchists of the short-lived republic became core organizers among the sailors who later rose up in the Kronstadt Rebellion.

Thanks, that looks like something I might have to try. :) Myself, over the network, I still don't do filesystem level incremental backups, sticking to either directories or virtual machine snapshots (both of which have their shortcomings).

I've been hearing about ZFS and its beneficial features for years now, but mainstream Linux installers don't seem to support it, and I can't be bothered to switch filesystems after installing.

Out of curiosity - can anyone tell, what might be blocking them?

Edit: answering my own question: legal issues. Licenses "potentially aren't compatible".

Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel. ZoL is a project funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a native Linux kernel module for its massive storage requirements and super computers.

Source: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS

“The City is evaluating the chemical compounds in the spray to determine if they are a hazard either inhaled in aerosol form by humans and animals, or landing on the ground or in the bay.”

If it comes from the bay, I think it's safe to assume it can go into the bay. :)

As for the rest, I think it's OK for them to evaluate - and they are likely to reach the concusion that spraying seawater into the air is what the sea does on its own, and humans are pretty well adapted to reasonable amounts, so the instruction will be:

• "spray it from the leeward side, it's polite that way"
• "don't put your face in front of the working sprayer"
• "don't use the sprayer during algal blooms"

Being informed that "from now on, we'll use Microsoft development tools" because our branch in $other_country decided to.

Soon after that, I informed the boss that I'd wrap my projects up (using development tools of my choosing) during the subsequent year, and then leave, and support the projects in future as a subcontractor.

So I went and started my one-person-company. It was hard, but so far it has worked.

There's a pretty high chance that when it does come together, it will be presented somehow on c/offgrid on this very server. :)

I generally agree with CrimethInc articles so extensively that I I find it hard to pick at something in them.

This time, however, I find the claim...

Palestinian liberation will only come about as the result of a full-scale political crisis in the United States

...but I don't find the evidence.

Firstly, Israel is not wholly dependent on US weapons, and according to most measures, it has already secured a military victory - at such cost in civilian lives that it's a diplomatic defeat - everyone who can count the casualties and destruction knows that Israeli politicians gave zero fucks, alienated many supporters (they had great international support when Hamas attacked them) and very likely will receive an invitation to the ICC (hopefully along with Hamas leaders, so they can be tried together - reality may differ as both will try to avoid the court).

Also, if the claim were true, and a full-scale political crisis in the US was required for Palestinian liberation, then sadly, assuming a full political crisis incapacitates the government to some degree - there would be considerable risk that Palestinian liberation and Ukrainian independece sit on opposite plates of the scale. Myself, I don't like the concept that one group's liberation and another group's freedom can be contradictory. However, it seems undeniable that the US war machine is currently supplying weapons for two main causes, one of them reasonably ethical (defending Ukraine) and the other not (bombing Gaza into a previous epoch of history).

Regarding what the US government actually does... I don't read every article and post about diplomacy (so I could be missing a lot) but it appears to me that the US government is at the moment actively dissuading Israel from going into Rafah (the remaining comparatively less damaged settlement) - both by talk and refusal to send heavy air-dropped bombs.

This could be due to international pressure (the US has Arab allies and has to present some facade to them), could be due to protests (Biden surely worries about approaching elections). It could even work - but might not, because Israel has other sources of weapons and might empty its stockpiles of some categories to make the final push. :( Still, as a long-time and reliable donor, the US government has much leverage on Israel. Especially as it recently helped mitigate the Iranian missile and drone attack, downing Iranian munitions above Jordan and Iraq and perhaps elsewhere before they reached Israel. Biden can - overly simplified - send a message of "we assisted and protected you, we have your best interest in mind, and it's in your best interest to stop now". Netanyahu might listen or ignore the message.

In the end, however, a word of caution - whatever happens, whatever the US does - if Hamas returns to power, that will not be Palestinian liberation, because the Hamas guys weren't liberating anyone. In fact, they were beating, imprisoning and killing some of their Palestinian political competitors for the old-fashioned goal of staying in power.

I literally cannot find the word "Hamas" in the article at all. It speaks of everyone except those who started the current war. That's a massive oversight - oversight to the point of blinding oneself to a serious setback right around the corner. I'm not happy to see some of my comrades blinding themselves.

If one seeks a path to liberation, it has to include some recipe of not letting Hamas recover and return to power. And somehow getting lunatics out of Israeli government. The US has a role to play, and it may even be a decisive role, but as long as one side has rulers who prefer shooting civilians, and the other side has rulers who prefer to obliterate urban centers with bombardment... local political leadership must change, and no liberation will come unless it changes.