Suomi?

Don’t let this distract you from Epstein.

Don’t let this distract you from Epstein.

“Don’t worry dear, Ms Frizzle said you were going on a field trip to Donbas”

Don’t worry, with those flower stuffs already in the bath, a few slices of cucumber won’t make much of a difference. Bringing a tablet into a bathtub was already a bad idea to begin with, so a submarining android was the expected outcome anyway.

I remember never being able to tape it anywhere except for my friends football game. Fifa 97, I think?

Yup, as a foreign national, I had to jump through a myriad of hoops to get a TWIC which enables me to enter and exit US ports freely without someone escorting me around. Fun fact: A TWIC allows even foreigners to register as a known traveler and TSA pre-screening, allowing me to skip a lot of the hassle when flying in the US.

Hell, getting a TWIC was the only reason why I bothered with getting an actual US work visa. I now hold B1, B2, C1/D, and it was all for the TWIC. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be fine just going on a tourist visa.

Saved you a click: Netherlands. Because of high-strength illegal fireworks often used between rivaling gangs.

Usually I. My GF is usually exhausted after work in the afternoon (while I have a pretty chill Wfh-situation going on), I don’t mind it, I’m reasonably good at it, and I usually get to do it in peace.

In our house people know that if they’re hanging in the kitchen while food prep is happening, they get assigned something to do, usually mostly so I get left alone.

Yeah, there was this trend starting 15-20ish years ago where people from Eastern Europe came here to beg. Apparently it’s profitable to travel all the way to set up shop. I never give these people anything. If they truly were so down on their luck as they claim to be, they probably would not be able to invest the necessary resources into traveling across the continent to begin with.

At home: Nothing. Genuine homelessness isn’t really a problem. There’s this joke that we have a government programme called “winter” that takes care of this. Truth is, there are actual government programmes in place that takes care of this as well - It is written in law that anyone who cannot afford a place to stay, as well as basic necessities will have this covered.

Abroad: When not in what causes fox news talking heads to clutch their pearls over socialist hellscape societies (Norway), I’m a lot more giving. Plus, I usually carry some currency that I will no longer need once I leave. I especially remember the happy outcry of a beggar I walked past while visiting this developing country. I was on my way to pick up some supplies the last day before heading for home. Repeated “Bless you!”-s once he realized that the stack of leftover cash included quite a few 20$ bills.

In short, he obviously needed them more than I, so I gave what I could.

Oh, and if it counts, I often give to buskers as some of them are actually pretty good.

I’m building this hosting service and while testing the torrent aspect of it I uploaded the Linux mint torrent and I’ve been seeing it ever since.

In general, most large FOSS torrents benefit from additional seeders (although I don’t think many are in lack thereof). Beyond that, I think I vaguely remember wikipedia and internet archive having a torrent component.

I’m convinced there’s no right answer to this. Whatever works for you. The internet will never agree no matter what you do. Hell, put it in the dishwasher and (optional) re-apply the seasoning if you want to.

Personally I put it on the stove just to heat it up slightly, and them I rinse it under hot water while scrubbing with a light plastic brush just to get and chunks and gunks out. Once done I put it on the stove to burn/polymerize any leftover grease and add to the seasoning.

Sometimes I use some mild dish soap if I suspect that any flavor might carry over.

“swam”, I think.

I never quite learned to swim. Well, I can stay afloat and intentionally move in a direction, but it’s more like tactical flailing. Back in school the teacher gave up on me learning to swim with proper swimming strokes. I stick to what works for me.

I’ve “swam” a lot in the ocean, and I’ve found that unless you know how to bodysurf (which I sometimes manage to pull off) a vertical style is better as it makes it easier to keep your head high and above the waves.

That makes sense - I never looked into why bin/cue was sometimes used. Would that mean that bin/cue is better for multitrack and mixed mode CDs?

Ripping it to an ISO file is basically the “industry standard”. Something else I used to see when sailing the high seas back in the day is bin/cue pairs, but iso was by far the most prevalent. I have long since forgotten how this is done on windows, but on Linux it’s basically dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/studmuffin2000/somecd.iso

My understanding is basically that it’s up to what local laws allow, combined with ship owners policies.

We saw what was most likely pirates a few times, but we had armed escorts so they were never openly hostile. You can’t just shoot at any that vaguely resembles pirates, as there are fishing boats in the area as well, and they don’t look that different.

Story time!

I remember chilling on the back deck, doing my hour of lookout in case someone were trying to board us. One of our chase boats (armed escorts) contacted me via the portable VHF I was carrying to let me know there was a small boat looking like it was trying to approach. I found this odd, as the only boats I saw in the vicinity were boats that were supposed to be there. I looked over the railing, and knew what the chase boat was talking about: Yup, there was a boat there, alright. But it was one of ours, they were just normally much further away. Turned out they were almost out of water after being in an open boat for an entire day that was abnormally hot even by Nigerian standards. I gave them a tray full of ice cold coke cans and a few bags of doritos from the workshop next to me, and they grinningly went back to their job of towing away fishing nets that had drifted into our survey area.

Yeah, your antenna is fine. AIS contains more information than can be fit into a single packet, so it’s spread out over several. Every packet contains the MMSI of the ship, which you can use to link every packet together. If I remember correctly, there are three or so packet types. Position and speed is sent relatively often. And static info such as name and other info that doesn’t change a whole lot is sent much more infrequently.

Maritime radio license is easy to get. An ROC which covers the basics is a day or two. It’s basically just a course on how to properly operate a VHF. GOC covers a lot more (telex, inmarsat, EPIRBs, etc) and basically certifies you as a radio operator for any ship. It takes about a week.

The ship state (at anchor, etc) is a manual setting that the bridge crew will have to change. Same goes for destination. And bridge crew has enough on their plates already, so updating it isn’t exactly a priority. That’s why you often see “Ch 16” set as destination, as it’s basically shorthand for “If you really need to know, ask us on VHF Ch 16”.

As for receiving AIS data, if you’re able to decode the data, it’s easy to plot it yourself. AIS messages (AIVDO is the one you’re interested in) consists of several messages, and most of them contains the ships position. Every so often, the ships name is transmitted (The MMSI number is the primary identifier).

No-ish. There’s something to it, tho: The more users on a carrier, the less bandwidth available per uplink. With VSAT (which pretty much every large ship has), this isn’t really a problem, as there’s plenty of bandwidth available. Bandwidth allocation is pretty expensive, so most ships cap their bandwidth relatively low. With the ships I work with these days it’s usually between 0.5mbit/s to 2mbit/s. I’ve never seen this degrade when entering high traffic areas.

With starlink there’s a bit more to it - I installed one of the first offshore starlink antennae, and back then it was insanely fast. Nowadays there are a lot more starlink terminals around, so it’s not that fast anymore. So in general, bandwidth is a lot lower per terminal due to the large amount of customers, so a large ship or two nearby probably won’t make much difference. Large ships don’t get more bandwidth just because they’re large. But it’s common that they have several terminals (I usually installed two per ship), but that’s mostly for redundancy and avoid that the ships superstructure comes between the dish and the satellite.

As for pirates disabling AIS, I doubt they have AIS to begin with. I used to work in nigerian waters, and the pirates in question usually use very small boats loaded with fuel for endurance. We’re talking something that is marginally larger than a hollowed out log with an engine strapped on it. We used to call them “war-canoes”.

Locked out of comms: Depending on what you call comms, this doesn’t really happen. Sure, internet can go out (and it sometimes did when I was offshore myself), but anyone who might need to reach you in case of emergency know how - Usually by calling your employer. There’s a myriad of ways of talking to someone onboard a ship. Normal internet is the most common nowadays. If that doesn’t work, they still usually have phone service. And if that doesn’t work, it’s actually possible to route phonecalls via MF or VHF radios (expensive as fuck, though). And if that doesn’t work, there are things such as Telex that enable you to send text. The available hardware depends on the ship and which areas it’s rated for, but it basically boils down to ships being required to have comms equipment that enable voice AND text for the rated area. Near the polar regions this basically means Telex and HF radio. For anywhere else, this usually means MF radio and Inmarsat.

Fun anecdote: A coworker of mine, during a period of no internet being available, was instructed that he needed to head to the bridge ASAP due to urgent communications from home. I was his shift leader at the time, and it was not a fun message to relay, as we knew this often meant serious illness in close family. We were all relieved to learn that it was just his dad who had come across a really good offer for a quad bike, and my guy onboard needed to let him know yes or no within the day.

Just to clarify, as this overlaps with several jobs I’ve had, including my current one:
2008-2012: Offshore seismic survey tech.
2015-2019: Maritime comm and navigation tech 2020-Now: Support/IT dude for offshore seismic survey hardware.