Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Sure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
They’re also just more user friendly in general. I have a nearly decade old Kobo that still serves its purpose well and I love how it shows up as a mass storage device when plugged into my computer. No clunky management software (Calibre may be functional, but its UI is godawful) or file conversions required, you just manage plain old epubs in your file browser. That functionality can’t randomly vanish one day, either (unlike e.g. Amazon’s email-to-Kindle service). It’s great.
As a side effect of its openness I’ve bought more books through the Kobo store than I would have otherwise. A perfect counter example is my Oculus Quest 2 which I go out of my way to not buy games from its associated marketplace on; as long as that device is hard-tethered to Facebook and its software, I’m better off as using it as a “dumb” headset with VR purchases going to PC marketplaces like Steam.
Kobo devices ship two different rendering engines: the obsolete, appallingly bad Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (RMSDK), and their own, bespoke, WebKit-based renderer. By default, files with an .epub extension are rendered with RMSDK. Consequently, you'll get all sorts of weird issues. Some of the ones I've encountered: I've had cover images not displaying in the library, misbehaving internal links (footnotes), inability to override typefaces/text size.
Easy fix: rename the file to .kepub.epub[0].
Slightly more involved fix: run the file through Kepubify[1] first. This tool makes further tweaks to the books to enable a few other features, like remaining read time estimation.
I had no idea! I'd switched from Kindle to Boox because Boox runs Android, which is more hackable, but if Kobo supports SSH, I'll have to give it another look!
I have a Poke since 2022 because amazon deleted my library from my Paperwhite. Same functions, better format and I can buy my books directly via browser from Kobo. No more perpetual airplane mode. Also, tons of formats, not limited to awz or epub.
I've had a Boox Page for about two years now as a Kindle Oasis replacement (current model is Boox Go 7 B&W). I get a bit more than a week of battery life typically which is good enough for me. And most valuable is using the same third party/self hosted apps for sync with my other devices. I've haven't used the Boox native store/reader even once.
What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
The craziest thing about Metro Nashville (the city/county entity we are discussing) is that the wealthiest enclaves (independent cities) voted to retain certain city-powers (because of course they did!) – mostly Southern Davidson County, as you approach WilCo/Franklin.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
VA independent cities aren't that, though. They're what they say on the tin: Cities without a county, they're not a nominal county and city both existing on paper but governed as one
Yes, Nashville has a huge number of council members, and it's much better that way. I moved from there to Seattle, and there's 9 council members (7 districts + 2 city-wide) here so we share a representative with a huge area (six times the people and two and a half times the land) and our local concerns have no voice.
I don't think this phenomenon has anything to do with nobel laureates' tendency to be a bit erratic. This pretend to be stupid thing became common around the 90s....
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