litchralee

Another example of 120: the California State Legislature is a bicameral body with 120 total members, with 80 in the Assembly (lower house) and 40 in the Senate (upper house).

And a related piece of trivia regarding fractional currencies: although the USD has been decimalized more-or-less since its inception, the USA stock markets continued to use fractional prices for shares up until 2001, down to 1/16 of a dollar.

are not audio drivers but PWM drivers

They can be both! A Class D audio amplifier can be constructed by rendering an audio signal into a PWM or PDM output signal, then passed through an RC filter to remove the switching noise, yielding only the intended audio.

That said, in this case, using the unfiltered PWM output would work for greeting cards, where audio fidelity is not exactly a high priority, but minimal parts count is.

This made me wonder if normal PWM controllers could be used to drive more power full LEDs.

What exactly did you have in mind as a "normal PWM controller"? There's a great variety of drivers that produce a PWM signal, some in the single watt category and some in the tens of kilowatts.

Whether they can drive "more powerful" LEDs is predominantly a function of the voltage and current requirements to fully illuminate the LEDs, plus what switching frequency range the LEDs can tolerate. Some LED modules that have built-in capacitors cannot be driven effectively using PWM, as well as anything which accepts AC rather than DC power. You'd need a triac to dim AC LED modules, and yet still, some designs simply won't dim properly.

My idea was to just remove the potentiometer and feed in music from Aux at that point.

You'll have to provide a schematic, as I'm not entirely sure where this potentiometer is. But be aware that the output current needed to drive a small speaker is probably insufficient to light up a sizable LED, nevermind the possibility of not even having enough voltage to meet the required forward voltage drop of the LED.

Is there a chance of this working?

It might, but only if everything just happens to line up. But otherwise, it's likely that it won't work as-is, due to insufficient drive current.

A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone's location could be ascertained.

But that still doesn't say anything about where you are, since not everyone -- even in 2025 -- carries their phone every time they leave home.

But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action (eg a VPN), then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.

And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.

Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.

In much of the USA, the county-level is the administrator for deed recording and for land parceling. Municipalities (eg cities, towns) within the county may have their own zoning rules, and so the question can be divided in two:

1-meter-squared chunks

Zoning laws can enforce minimum lot sizes. For example, an agricultural or business district might disallow plots smaller than 5 acre or 2000 sqft, respectively, because anything smaller would become economically infeasible for those purposes. A legitimate goal of zoning is to make land more economically productive, and plots that are oddly-shaped or impractically small would be counterproductive. The county and cities would also be concerned with tax revenue per area, which scales up with productivity of land (for whatever use is permitted in zoning). Note: I'm not a fan of American-style zoning, which has proven to be quite overburdening and frequently racist over the last 100 years.

But setting aside zoning, there's also the matter of land administration. Subdividing a parcel into smaller lots is common, but since those small lots will take up ledger and deed records at the registrar's office, that adds a non-insignificant cost per plot. Easily several hundred dollars per subdivision, as the process is normally meant for larger real estate transactions in preparation for development.

sell each of those sections to different people

Land transaction costs in the USA are not uniform throughout the country, but they often amount to several thousands just to verify title to land. Part of the problem is that most states don't keep an authoritative land registry that shows exactly who owns what. Instead, title insurance companies make money by assuring the title after a process that investigates the land's title history. Here in California, that history often has to be traced back to Mexican land grants in the 1800s, which is kinda nuts just to sell a small home.

Sure, for a 1 sq meter plot -- which no one should ever buy using a mortgage -- the buyer might not need/want title insurance. But the lack of title provenance inflates purchase prices, simply because people do want to know that they're actually buying something real and it's not a worthless deed.

(as an aside, it's entirely possible in California and other states to sell a deed for land you might own, but which the seller makes no guarantee that they do in fact own. It's kinda like a fork in cryptocurrency, where if the fork is later rejected, then that part of the ledger history is entirely dead and you're SOL. Again, we could really use a central land registry, and not a process based wholly on easily-forged deeds...)

If I wanted to ensure that my land would never be used for a shopping mall or sports stadium

The simple answer is to donate your land to a conservation group, who often buy land to protect it from development. They can and do pay market rates, but if you did want the land to be something that isn't a wildlife preserve, then alternatively, you can sell the land but retain the development rights. That way, you (and your heirs) would retain a choice in whatever future development happens, though how long this deed restriction lasts will depend on jurisdiction. Or you can sell the development rights to a conservation group, so that the party owning the land and the party owning the development rights are separate entities with different objectives.

I'm hoping to take my Tucktec with me by cycling to the nearby lake later this summer, once I finish building a suitable carrier. This is the only nearby body of water that doesn't require me to drive out to, so I'm hoping it works out.

Here in California, we too know the dangers of wildfires and I'm sorry for your loss. I hope you do find something to fill the paddling void.

"running start" would be the closest thing I could think of in American English, but it's not a perfect match. As it pertains to kayaking, a "running start" would be understood as some sort of momentum transfer while simultaneously hopping into the kayak.

But still, that definition is what a typical American would imagine if you said "kayak running start". So perhaps not totally identical to what I think you're describing.

You can't just point your spacecraft into space, give it a boost and be flying off into the void forever.

To be clear, is the reason this is not sufficient for flying forever is due to orbital mechanics making "point and shoot" not feasible if aiming in a straight line for the void? Or because the boost isn't sufficient to escape the planetary system's influence and thus still predominantly subject to its gravitation pull? Or both?

shouting style betting

I don't have the answer to your question at large, but your description reminded me of the old method of how stock trading floors used to work. My understanding is that it involved lots of yelling and hand signals, with video of the whole process likely available online.

This 100%. It behooves anyone that isn't interested in the credit "rat race" to keep and use credit union accounts regularly, because credit unions can and do lend based solely on long-standing financial relationships, even if that means just having a 4-year old checking account that receives consistent direct deposits every other week. This sort of relationship-centric model is something the big-name banks have all but abdicated.

The best time to open a credit union account was years ago. The next best time is Right Now.

I'm not sure if there's some detail I'm missing, but dealerships here in California and elsewhere that have in-house finance staff execute their work as loan agents for an affiliated-but-external lender (often a big-name bank). That is, the dealership themselves do not issue loans but if someone comes in without financing, the finance person can process a loan application with the dealership's affiliated lender on-the-spot to complete the car deal.

Thus, the dealership is primarily concerned with selling cars and shouldn't really care how they're paid for, whether fully in cash, financed through the affiliated lender, or financed through your own lender (eg already getting pre-approval through your credit union). Any marketing promise by the dealership of "no application refused" is likely hollow, since it's the lender that decides (with the rare exception of a dealership that genuinely lends on business credit).

Do people use outside financing for used cars? Absolutely! It's almost the bread-and-butter for credit unions to extend credit to their members specifically to buy used cars, because used car financing at dealerships is notoriously predatorial, due to being unable to "shop around" for a better rate. And credit unions have few qualms with offering loans to long-time checking customers that don't have a credit history. Credit unions in the USA are the closest thing we have today -- despite the word "credit" in the name -- to community banking, where "credit reports" are simply unnecessary and the needs of the members are paramount, tied together by preexisting, long-term social connections.

Co-signer? Not allowed.

This is the part which confuses me the most. My personal experience has never come across any sort of lender which wouldn't allow cosigners. Sure, some means-tested home loans won't allow cosigners that don't meet the same means-test as the primary borrower, but they still permit and actively want qualified cosigners. As a matter of underwriting, adding a cosigner always increases the likelihood of collecting on a defaulted note, reducing risk for the lender. There's zero financial sense for a lender to not allow a cosigner.

I hope you found a different used car lender, ideally one which offers something more reasonable than a 72 month (!) term.

I went on holiday and am only now getting back into my routine. This sucks atm lol.

But it sucks less than delaying even longer and ruining my gains.