Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.

That would force you to selectively use it since often times reality is somewhere between our personal view of it and other opposing views.

Chose the wrong situation and you'll both be crying in the corner with shatter worlds. Chose the ones where the people are truly disconnected from reality and perhaps you'll change their lives - hopefully for the better.

My favorite is https://solarham.net/

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to understand what any of it means. But it's pretty much all the raw data you could want on solar activity.

I'm also skeptical.

That article is dated yesterday as well, so an even earlier prediction.

I've checked https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/forecast-discussion and it looks to be saying it should remain relatively quiet into mid next week.

Maybe there will be something - but my usual sources are currently all pointing to "meh"

I'm conflicted on this.

The adult side of me wants to have this info on labels/menus so I can make informed choices.

The side of my that used to be in high school knows that kids will buy the highest number for bragging rights among friends.

I'm open to suggestions for alternatives for functional part 3D modeling.

I use Fusion 360 because it's free for hobbyists and it's features for functional 3D modeling blow away any other software I've tried in the open source/free/low cost market.

Fusion 360 handles parameters beautifully, has a very flexible timeline editing system, and generally is very forgiving about how you use the software.

I'd happily pay up to $120/year for hobby use. It's that good. I can't afford $600 a year for a hobby tool though.

The closest alternative I know is FreeCAD. It has a notable following, but compared to Fusion it's slow, clunky, buggy, and fights you every step of the way you use it. In FreeCAD, there is usually one right way to do something, and dozens of wrong ways that all end up with you having to redo tons of work.

TLDR: I've created all sorts of useful things in Fusion. All I've created in FreeCAD is tears.

Is this a good or bad thing?

EInk displays are very cool in their specific use cases, but not where the screen need refreshed frequently.

Pros:

• very crisp display. Work great in full sun.
• text usually looks very good on these displays
• 0 power usage when not refreshing the screen.
• display remains as-is even if power is removed. Potentially for hours/days

Cons:

• expensive vs LCD
• refreshing the whole screen can take several seconds
• limited to B&W or sometimes one additional color
• not visible in the dark or in low light.

Some good use cases:

• Price/ID tags
• Thermometer or other slowly changing sensors
• Clocks (without seconds)

Biggest cost then would be electric. Older PC, probably...70 watts. So about 600kWh/year. Maybe about between $60-$150 per year.

Much cheaper than any hosting I know and bandwidth costs are absorbed into your monthly bill.

The real risk would be hardware failure. Hopefully you'll have backups or a user base that won't care if the instance goes offline for quite a while.

There's also a risk of unexpected security vulnerabilities letting an attacker compromise your public facing machine to get into your home network if you don't have it physically firewalled off.

Personally, I'll just let someone else deal with all the hosting issues. I'd rather donate if they requested than deal with all of that indefinitely.

One concern I have with these things is that device can be built in a way where the batteries can be replaced, but there may not be any batteries available for the device when it's old enough to require a new one.

Standardized batteries could really help with that, but with small devices often the batteries are custom built.

Hrm - would you want federated wikis? What's the benefit vs wikis run independently?

For example, wikipedia has a corner on encyclopedia type knowledge. No reason to federate as the central moderation on Wikipedia seems to work well. To be honest, I wouldn't trust encyclopedia type information from another wiki site as I don't know how active the community is there to maintain the accuracy of the information.

Then there's other wikis I know about like for games (thinking fandom.com) - but again not really a reason to federate between those that I can think of.

To be honest, my gut reaction is that I want fewer wiki sources, not more.