I vaguely recall a (probably apocryphal) story of an early washing machine-sized hard drive that lurched its way across the floor during a customer demo, eventually falling over once the connecting cables pulled taught.
That said, those hard drives did indeed move themselves: http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html
It’s for this reason I sometimes spell out the Bytes or bits. Eg: 88 Gbits/s or 1.44 MBytes
It’s also especially useful for endianness and bit ordering: MSByte vs MSbit
The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian
I do admire the nautical mile for being based on something which has proven to be continually relevant (maritime navigation) as well as being brought forward to new, related fields (aeronautical navigation). And I am aware that it was redefined in SI units, so there’s no incompatibility. I’m mostly poking fun at the kN abbreviation; I agree that no one is confusing kilonewtons with knots, not unless there’s a hurricane putting a torque on a broadcasting tower…
No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles
We can invent one: kn-h. It’s knot-hours, which is technically correct but horrific to look at. It’s like the time I came across hp-h (horsepower-hour) to measure gasoline energy. :(
if you take all those colonial unit
In defense of the American national pride, I have to point out that many of these came from the Brits. Though we’re guilty of perpetuating them, even after the British have given up on them haha
An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.
I’m a dual-capable American that can use either SI or US Customary – it’s the occupational hazard of being an engineer lol – but I went into a cold sweat thinking about all the awful things that would happen with a 25 mm inch, and even worse things with 3 ft to the meter. Like, that’s not even a multiple of 2, 5, or 10! At least let it be 40 inches to the meter. /s
There’s also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare
I like to explain to other Americans that metric is easy, using the hectare as an example. What’s a hectare? It’s about 2.47 acre. Or more relatable, it’s the average size of a Walmart supercenter, at about 107,000 sq ft.
1 hectare == 1 Walmart
I’m surprised there aren’t more suggestions which use intentionally-similar abbreviations. The American customary system is rich with abbreviations which are deceptively similar, and I think the American computer memory units should match; confusion is the name of the game. Some examples from existing units:
FYI, the Intel code used to be here (https://github.com/intel/thunderbolt-utils) but apparently was archived a week ago. So instead, the video creator posted the fork here: https://github.com/rxrbln/thunderbolt-utils
Thank you for reminding me of this: https://youtube.com/shorts/XqNrO33bxmw
Do you recommend dns.sb?
Oh wow, that might be the shortest-representation IPv6 DNS server I’ve seen to date: 2620:fe::9
It is quite the mouthful, but I really hope people aren’t – whether v4 or v6 – having to manually type in DNS servers regularly. Whatever your choice of DNS server, it should be a set-it-and-forget-it affair, so the one-off lookup time becomes negligible.
For the modern IP (aka IPv6) folks: 2606:4700:4700::1111
Other brands of IPv6 DNS servers are available.
OSM can definitely find you a bank near a freeway ramp, but it can also find you a bank near a creek to make an inflatable boat getaway. What it can’t do is arrange for decoys to confuse the police while you eacape.
The inflatable boat robber was ultimately caught and sentenced a year later.
At least on my machine, that link doesn’t work unless I explicitly change it to HTTP (no S).