While 50 is north enough and the absolute majority of Canadians live south of it, “Northern Canada” generally refers to the three territories (as opposed to the ten provinces), that start at 60 (mostly, there are some islands south of that).

As it should be… Navigators could determine latitudes pretty accurately by using astronomy. It was the longitude that was a big problem (maybe that’s part of the reason Japan is placed in the middle of the Pacific).

That may be relativists (they would actually measure anything in units of mass, with everything else defined through G = c = 1). Astrophysicists commonly measure mass in solar masses, long distances in parsec (or kiloparsec, megaparsec), short distances in solar radii or AU, and time in whatever is relevant to their problem (could be seconds or gigayears)

Astrophysicist here. Yes, space is crazy, but interesting things to keep in mind:

1. The size of a star is determined by something called the photosphere. With those extremely massive stars, you can be hundreds of millions of kilometres “inside” and not yet know it.
2. Similar story with supermassive black holes, from the perspective of an astronaut falling in, they wouldn’t really be able to tell when they cross the horizon because the tidal forces there are very small (they will inevitably fall towards the centre and get spaghettified at some point)

You can’t successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)

You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

I’ve heard this trope before but I’m skeptic. I’m not a C expert but I can’t believe memory bugs in that language are so much more benign than in C++.

Came here to say that!

Digital for sure. Who has room for physical books? The physical books that I’ve somehow gathered over the years are the worst items I have in terms of volume (or mass) relative to their utility.

Piper is my choice. Very easy to use from the command line, fairly good sounding voices. Prior to that, for years (decades?) I used espeak-ng, had a very robotic voice but articulated almost everything very clearly, and I got used to it so didn’t actually mind.

I’m very happy with self-hosted Vaultwarden.

Nothing wrong with that… Most people don’t need to reinvent the wheel, and choosing a filename extension meaningful to the particular use case is better then leaving it as .zip or .db or whatever.

Same, with Pixel 4A. But now that the Pixel line has abandoned the 3.5mm jack I will look elsewhere for my next phone and ROM.

🤣

Baikal is lean and great. I use it and sync to my Thunderbird (using the TbSync extension) and Android phone (using DAVx⁵).

Agree about Joplin. No need for a full NextCloud instance, I use the WebDAV option which Apache has pretty much out of the box.

If your email server is offline then mail won’t be delivered. The sender’s server will retry as other have noted, but how often and how many times varies. Hosting at home, even when possible, is not a great idea in my opinion.

There are endless options for hosting out there, I don’t want to name names since I only really have experience with one.

That is not my experience.

Not for everyone, but self-hosting isn’t so bad.

I joined WhatsApp after many years of holding out, there was simply no other practical way to keep in touch with many people. The ways I mitigate the privacy concerns are:

1. I got an international eSIM, for the purpose of cheap roaming abroad but since I now had this extra phone number not tied to my identity, I used it for WhatsApp.
2. I installed WhatsApp using Island so it has access to just the contacts in the “work profile”, that is, just people who have WhatsApp anyway.

Matrix was introduced a few months before Discord was launched in 2015, so better say that Discord is the proprietary and centralized alternative to Matrix 😜