A [fun?] question for the group: what is the most under-used yet widely-available technology that you can think of?

I was thinking about it today, and I'd have to suggest that a strong contender is ethernet over HDMI. I've literally never seen this implemented in any setup I've every encountered. Has anyone here?

What would you folks say?

IPV6...

Rather good start, that.

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The empeg tuner module

I thought the world was going to run out of IPV4 addresses, why hasn't it?

Not tech but I'm mystified as to why Passive House is not the standard for construction in temperate regions. We've built two so far, just started on our third.

And yet people still aren't adopting it? Seems ridiculous

It is difficult to adopt if your ISP doesn’t, most don’t.

And it is much easier for an ISP to throw NAT at the problem rather than moving to IPV6.

Also, when it comes down to it, IPV6 is harder to work with.

IPv6 also eliminates the need for web browser tracking tricks by sites --> the protocol pretty much guarantees exact identification without need for trickiness or possibility of blocking the tracking. Bye bye most attempts at on-line privacy.

Not every building site has a suitable orientation/exposure for Passive House. But yes, the insulation and air-barrier standards from it should be near mandatory. Expensive though, not everyone is wealthy enough to be able to put the capital up front for such construction.

Cheers

I don't think it's that expensive. The airtightness isn't expensive to achieve as long as you understand where problems might occur, eliminating thermal bridges also costs very little. Yes, triple glazing and MVHR cost money but relative to the overall cost of construction I don't think it's crazy.

On our last project we think the PH elements might have added 5% cost overall. We're committed to it for all of our projects going forward including some quite cheap apartments built for rental.

It certainly seems to be cheaper/easier now than when we built our house in 2010/2011, the more mainstream it becomes the cheaper it'll be

I guess my house could be considered a passive house, in that there are no systems in place for heating or cooling it. My inside temperature is always the same as outside temperature, give or take maybe two or three degrees F.

Of course on a really cold day where I live the temperature will drop all the way down into the 60's. And days when the temperature gets as high as the mid-80's are rare.

Not bad for a house that is more than 60 years old.

tanstaafl.

I guess a passive house isn't really passive; it's a superinsulated airtight house with mechanically controlled ventilation. You'd expect a fairly stable temperature inside regardless of outside conditions.

Most passive houses do have a heating system, it just doesn't get used much.

The secure digital features of SD cards.

Apparently some Windows phones used it to lock the card to the device so you couldn't use the card in anything else (yeah, like that's a great use of the feature...) but I can't find anything else.

See also, masses of complex stuff on SIM cards, including whole Java stacks.

All of which makes our phones worryingly open to attack, if/even when the phone/OS is secure.

I know we have the technology available, without even needing to invent new protocols, to send video from our laptops, tablets, and phones, to nearby TV sets and displays.

This is depicted in a lot of science fiction: A simple gesture allows someone to swipe or fling the display from their handheld device to a nearby wall display or holographic display. You see them do it a lot on The Expanse, for example.

Existing firmware and software on the devices could do this with a few minor tweaks. But for now, we have a needlessly complex system of conflicting proprietary protocols, mostly exemplified by Google Chromecast and Apple TV which are not interoperable. In the past, we had Intel WiDi/Miracast which was very poor and didn't manage to go anywhere. The process of using a secondary display for your device is currently a barely-functional mess.

It could be so much better, if the folks at Google and Apple would stop playing walled-garden and just let it work as it should.

Spellcheck?

Proofreading before posting.

And the closely related ‘thinking before posting’.

This is my 5,420th post on ths bbs. I hove nevar, not evem once, make a past without profreeding, and at last 90% of the the time I hav maid editts to to the post befour subbmitting it.

tanstafl.

That's true of many areas of tech