Quote from the article:

In Sydney, south-facing panels typically produce around 30% less energy than north-facing ones. The steeper the roof, the less they’ll produce. They’ll also produce much more energy in summer than winter.

In the far north, the difference isn’t as great and in Townsville south-facing solar panels will only produce around 15% less energy overall than north-facing ones. Because Queenslanders generally use more electricity in summer than winter due to air conditioner demand, the fact that south-facing panels have considerably higher output in summer can improve self-consumption.

In Darwin, south-facing panels produce about 17% less electricity overall than north-facing ones, and, like in Townsville, they have considerably higher output in summer than winter.

In Australia where North is “optimal”, even South facing panels produce only 20-30% less and East/West about 15%. It does vary a bit by latitude but it’s not at all pointless to install them in other orientations in many places. I have not done the math to see how much of the world this extends to, but it applies to a fairly large chunk of Australia. Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/direction/

Tesla’s system also had non solar tiles so you could just skip the panels in whichever parts you wanted.

Roof construction is quite different here to the US though. We never have the plywood layer, it’s either ceramic tile or Colorbond steel directly onto usually wooden sometimes steel beams.

This hotel and the one which has a red phone “Popsicle Hotline” at the pool to order a waiter to bring your kids a tray of icy poles: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/power-free-popsicle

Sort of though. Still private beta since July 2025.

My other favourite is I very often SSH with -v to figure out why the connection is hanging, you rapidly figure out if DNS is failing, the TCP connection doesn't open, it does open but no traffic flows at all or it opens and SSH negotiation starts but never finishes. You can learn a lot just from this about what is wrong.

They had a very long and comprehensive manual. The manual on each page inter-linked easily to switch between the relevant page for different major versions with a dropdown version selector (3.x, 4.x, 5.0, 5.1, 5.5..etc).. and if a page had moved or didn't exist it always accurately redirect to the correct page as you did that switch.

And almost every single engineering change that ever mattered to me made it into the changelog and also had relevant docs. I could largely rely on it and didn't need "git log" like I mostly need today to figure out what changed in a version.

Partly this was process, every closed bug/change went to the docs team to process.. but the team was also fantastic and converting that into relevant docs and writing great docs.

A shame if that has been lost, they did have a stack of layoffs recently in MySQL.. apparently the developer team is also heavily down from where it was. I am sure this writing is a little biased but interesting reading never the less: https://mariadb.org/reading-the-room-what-europes-mysql-comm...

The project was quite interesting and exciting, and I really miss the era of custom linux desktops, phones, tablets etc being viable projects, it's a shame the project never really directly worked out.

While this has left a long tail of inconveniences, many resolved and some not, I am very confident that using 1 app on my iPhone/iPad will not leak data to another in any case that I am likely to care about as a non-significantly interesting person (political figure, etc).

... and for those people Apple even makes lockdown mode to move the bar, while acknowledging it adds extra inconvenience: https://support.apple.com/en-au/105120

I have no such confidence about macOS, Linux or Windows, in fact the reverse. macOS has done the best at trying to bolt on some sandboxing (and linux has it too) but that's still very holey and not all-in like iOS/iPadOS has ended up.

Yes, I know there have been many bugs and leaks in iOS but the security level is far and above the desktops currently, and designed that way from the ground up. So when they finally make something work like copy and paste or sharing between apps, etc... it's by and large done very well.

It's been very difficult to add that kind of thing to Linux because you're trying to do the reverse and lock things down and it breaks everything... making it very challenging.. as opposed to Apple where basically nothing useful worked at the start (no copy/paste, one app at a time, no meaningful filesystem, etc).. but managed to get the product successful in the limited state and has slowly unlocked that stuff over time. Admittedly very slowly.

I cannot speak for Android as I just have never used it or surrounded myself in info about it's design, security, etc.. it may well be very similar although they from my casual observation seemed to do a much worse job at granular privacy permissions (e.g. for the longest time permissions were all granted at install time, and so many apps want so many most people are blind to it.. as opposed to Apple's model where even if notarised for something on the app store in most cases you have to agree to it when the app first uses it.. I know they fixed that a while back but I have no idea how well things have transitioned to that now). As a very techy person deeply knowledge in many things, and using desktop Linux since 2002, it's kindof a hilarious personal failing that I have never used Android.. I really should try and resolve that at some point.

Example: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

But just a guess.

But is not a true raw dump like we see in a bunch of other media preservation projects.