x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback

By a factor of 2 with the same bitrate. But you only need half the bitrate for the same quality (SNR) so it really isn’t.

However, encoding is about 10x more demanding in terms of bitrate, or 5x for the same quality. This may be worth it for long-term storage or wide distribution over limited bandwidth (torrenting), but not for one-time personal use.

signal theft

Who did they steal signal from?

I live in the Czech Republic and I did expect it to be worse than Poland, Hungary or France, but not by that much. I assume the terrible way communism scarred us and the rushed privatization, as well as opportunistic behavior (especially in Bohemia) have their ripple effects.

I know, I’m an electrical hobbyist. Most 10mΩ resistors (no space because it’s an adjective) are SMD because leads would introduce significant resistance that changes when bending. Unless the wire is the shunt, of course. They have large pads and are thick to accommodate the current and power dissipation because their main use is measuring current in the order of A.

Meanwhile, 10MΩ ones are usually THT and normal size, the occasional ones rated for multiple kilovolts or spikes of even higher voltage are longer to prevent arcing.

Makes sense. I don’t think latency is a great issue when transferring large files, I would be more concerned about packet drop. (Unless latency is part of the reason the tracker thinks I’m too slow to bother requesting data from, which would explain why American-based trackers barely let me seed but local ones work great.) The overhead of TCP torrenting is about 3-4 % for me, and even if an IPv6 tunnel increases that to say 25 %, I will be able to use 80 % of my upload bandwidth for seeding, assuming IPv6 allows me to reach enough peers to request 1.6 Mb/s from me, which would be much higher than the current <1 %. My logic was that I could reach people that don’t have a publically reachable IPv4 port but an IPv6 one (because of IPv4 exhaustion of course), but now I understand that this is way less of an impact than I thought.

When inconsequential, capitalization gets messed up all the time, and the mistakes are overlooked: everyone understands that a weight labeled “10 KG” has a mass of 10 kg, but it’s better to get used to good practice for when it does matter. Thankfully, the “M/m” mistake of 9 orders of magnitude is usually caught by humans before it gets out of hand: you wouldn’t order 1 mm³ of wood instead of 1 m³. Very few quantities span 9+ orders of magnitude, for instance 10mΩ and 10MΩ resistors exist quite commonly, and you can imagine one being mistaken for the other with people copying each other’s handwritten component list. However, I’d bet that the bit/byte dichotomy confuses hundreds of people every day so we better make that clear by not breaking rules.

BTW, the word is “megavolts”, not “MegaVolts” or any other capitalization, similarly “byte” is correct unless at the start of a sentence, with title case, or in German, and perhaps in words like “MByte”, which I discourage in favor of the full form or complete abbreviation.

It’s supposed to say “Mbit” or “Mb”. Capital B infers bytes. Incorrect capitalization is one of the most common mistakes when using the metric system. It may be popular but it becomes a problem when 1 B = 8 b, or when 1 MJ = 10⁹ mJ. By the way, common ad-hoc abbreviations like “kbps” as opposed to “kb/s” or “PSI” instead of “lbf/in²” also grind my gears, luckily most such mistakes only occur in imperial units.

Byte is the 8x bigger one – longer word – capital B (but the word, unless shortened, is “byte”, not “Byte”),
bit is the 8x smaller one – shorter word – lowercase b.
There is a roughly 0.8% difference per order of magnitude between 1024-based binary prefixes (ki=kibi, Mi=mebi, Gi=gibi, often incorrectly written as k, M, G) and 1000-based metric prefixes (k=kilo, M=mega, G=giga) but these ballpark numbers are not affected.

Anyway, do you think it’s worth trying in terms of security against threats and law enforcement, or should I use a VPN on top?

Please don’t say “MBit”, it makes my eyes hurt.

My internet plan tops out at 2 Mb/s upload so that wouldn’t nearly fill such a public tunnel broker’s bandwidth, and I would be glad for even half that, but right now I seed 500 GB of reasonably popular movie packs and the long-term average upload is a few kilobits per second, not worth spinning up the 10W HDD motor for. Yes, I expect some overhead with tunneling but not three orders of magnitude, and I need at least 100 kb/s to get a good ratio on those movie packs.

They are transitioning to their .com domain, whose only bonus, other than the wait time and ads, is serving files directly rather than zipped. They could offer this feature on the original .org site with no downsides (the traffic won’t increase because 99% of devices will support gzip on the application layer anyway) but I wonder why they don’t.

They are also used as parking ticket machines (in Europe we don’t have parking meters, you buy a ticket and display it on the dashboard, or in some places get a virtual ticket for your license plate). I don’t think the company exports these outside the Czech Republic, and Euro coins are not magnetic. So I’m afraid you’ll have to find another magnet-related exploit (maybe this)?

Here is a datasheet of one / photo. I don’t have the video of me fishing coins, I probably deleted it because it was unwatchable (it’s hard to fish coins while filming covertly!) but about 5 coins fit into the space behind the keyhole before they start being visible. The front panel is non-magnetic, unlike CZK coins, and the sound of fishing them out is very similar to throwing them in, so there is little suspicion unless you are at the wrong-gender toilet. Unfortunately, 10 CZK coins take effort to jam into the slot, so almost only coins up to 5 CZK ($0.25) get accidentally thrown in. Still, pays for my bus home.

A common public toilet till machine has a keyhole that looks like a coin slot. Turns out, HDD magnets are the perfect shape to fish out any coins mistakenly thrown in there.

I’m pretty sure turkey is a bird

Mining for fossil fuels can still go quite deep, unfortunately, at least in some parts of the world. The difficult part is getting everyone to stop before the atmosphere is ruined from their combustion.

No cap

Congratulations!

Thanks for using the spoiler tag. It’s working now.

And yes, I took into account that electronic nerds’ houses are different from most others.

No.

Sorry for the inconvenience, I’m just trying to help people find hints in comments without someone ruining their experience by accidentally revealing the answer without a spoiler tag. This will keep the game fun even after someone guesses correctly.

Okay, I’ll drop the rule but I hope the correct guessser will retroactively do it anyway.

It’s not a bank card for the same reason it’s not a SIM (form factor)