It would be interesting to contrast the unicycle experience with tandem bike experiences. When I ride my tandem bike with a partner I almost universally experience smiles and happy waves from people that see us.
I can ride a unicycle and rode it more often as a teenager. Lots of comments about getting lost from the circus. But they were meant to be funny. I think.
I don't unicycle but I used to be an avid juggler.
My experience is that greatest predictor of what kind of response you get when doing something unusual in public is whether or not the activity is solitary. If you do a solitary activity that takes a lot of practice, it suggests you're some kind of weirdo loner who has to fill the empty days with hobbies because no one wants to hang out with you, and responses in public may reflect that.
If you're doing an activity with someone else, then at least one person doesn't think you're an intolerable weirdo, so people seem to be more accepting of it.
The responses I got between when I was juggling alone versus club passing with another person in a park were very different.
My wife and I did a couple of tandem tours throughout the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. By far the most comments we had were in the UK, the most common being: “she’s not pedalling!” jokingly informing me that my wife who sits at the back isn’t doing her part.
The amount of comments were nowhere close what the author describes, and I can’t recall any negative comments. Just humorous ones.
I guess a tandem isn’t as uncommon / funny as a unicycle.
I ride a recumbent and get my share of comments, mostly positive. (Others have talked of getting "one of your wheels is bigger than the other" comments, but I don't remember hearing that one yet)
Same--folks are generally interested and/or amused. It's been ages since I unicycled in public [I'm not great at it], but none of what's been posted here about reactions surprises me.
I ride a recumbent bike, and honestly the random commentary is way more positive than I'd expected it to be. Kids go nuts for it, 90%+ of adults' reactions are friendly, too. Lycra-clad street bicyclists are the negative exception, but are easily enough ignored. And it's always fun when you come across another recumbent rider; a friendly wave is all but guaranteed.
A traditional geosynchronous satellite is 22,000 miles above you. A starlink satellite is only 340 miles above you. And when you are outside you have a great line of sight with nothing in the way.
And your regular cell tower is within a few miles of your mobile at most. A few hundred meters in most cases. The phone is transmitting a few watts tops. I am very skeptical of them promising anything other than very-very low bandwith data, but I would love to hear from someone who actually knows about this stuff.
I make voice contacts with folks via the ISS repeater using a 5W radio and an omnidirectional antenna. It's much easier if you have an antenna with better directional gain, but it's definitely possible.
I'm assuming the Starlink satellites have higher gain antennas than the ISS's amateur radio setup, and they definitely have better coverage than the single space station. :)
> They're trying to solve the "how do log into this captive portal" problem, and they needed to make this change to handle that typing "neverssl.com" now often evaluates to "https://neverssl.com".
So, yes, it's still useful for WiFi logins. The change in question was specifically for that purpose. https://neverssl.com now redirects to http://neverssl.com so you can log in to WiFi even if your browser thinks it knows better.
Where can I go that has a bigger payload? When I've successfully opened a site on an unfamiliar WiFi network I'd like to know up front if I'm gonna have trouble loading stuff.
captive.apple.com is just for captive portals - technically networks can (and do) spoof it, but it's just a connectivity check. Past that you can do any test you want over https.
It is a nice idea. But I don't believe Facebook actually follows through on letting you mute or unfollow people. Their posts will slowly creep back into the main timeline that you see.
This is very transparent and a good write-up. I wonder if someone at Slack could explain how they calculate their downtime on their status page. This outage was for 3 hours and 14 minutes but they claim 99.79% uptime for the month of February.
