Apron is a fun one. The Latin word for cloth, banner, tablecloth is mappa. It’s the same word used in “mappa mundi” meaning map of the world (we contract that to just map now). French often changed Latin m to n, so mappa became nappe, then nape.

English borrowed nape directly for cloth and added it’s native diminutive suffix -kin to refer to a small cloth, a napkin.

But there was also a similar diminutive in French - naperon. A cloth to keep your front clean. English borrowed that too, as napron. Then, sometime around the 15th century, “a napron” got mistaken for “an apron” since they sound identical. And that’s what we have today. (Source etymonline and others)

How will the worm in my brain survive without these nutritious bacteria‽

My favorite French borrowings are gentle, genteel and jaunty. All borrowed from gentil (kind, pleasant, nice), but at different times (13th century, late 16th, and 17th, respectively).

The French word is from Latin gentilis, meaning “of the Roman clan.” English borrowed that from Latin as gentile.

So we have 4 English words, all from the same Latin origin. Of them, genteel is probably closest to the Old French pronunciation (but the vowels are still a little bit different).

put the phone to my ear

Clearly you would look more normal if you blast it on the speaker while holding the phone in front of you, like everyone else. /s

It’s funny that there are two unambiguous alternatives to bimonthly, but they both mean 2x/month: fortnightly and semimonthly.

Both German and Dutch distinguish their equivalent words with clear prefixes meaning half- and two-. The English word was unclear after 1066 since the French word bimensuel would have been used by the new bosses. And that means 2x/month. English used bimensual for a while before developing a new, worse word with the Latin origin bi- and the Germanic origin -monthly. And it seems to have been ambiguous from the start. So this has probably been messed up for almost 1050 years.

Maybe we should resurrect the Old English prefix twi- to make a new(old) 1x/2months word twimonthly or more intuitively, twomonthly that we can use in opposition with halfmonthly.

Nice, I’ll check it out! I remember LMS and Squeezebox. Didn’t know it would sync between rooms, and I didn’t know it had been open sourced, that’s excellent.

At the time we started in the Sonos ecosystem we wanted easy, and it provided that. Now I’ve got multiple servers running, self-hosting services for the family, slowly working on removing our cloud service dependencies. So this would fit right in.

Yeah, I get what you’re saying. Definitely. It’s not complicated for one pair of speakers in one room. For one music source. For one person controlling it.

There just haven’t been any better cost-effective solutions with multi-room, control from your any phone convenience. And that’s a big plus for how we listen to music. Today there are a few contenders, but many of them are also cloud dependent. Really the small number of good options in this space is proof of how good Sonos was for a long time. Well and also of Spotify causing people ditch the idea of a offline digital music library.

Edit: And to be clear, aside from the “any computer networks” part, this is what the original Sonos device did. It could work without a home network, but worked best with a shared music library on a PC. Didn’t need cloud anything, internet connection, account, etc. You just hooked your normal speakers to it and it played music.

For flexibility and size I like external m.2 enclosures. I have some from Sabrent, Orico and Rosewill. Of them all the Rosewill is the smallest, has the nicest build quality, and seems to dissipate heat the best.

So I would recommend a Rosewill 9SIA072GJ92919, and add an NVMe SSD of your choice.

I think your MacBook is Thunderbolt 2, so you won’t get full speed but it should still be plenty fast. And this enclosure will give you TB3 speeds if you upgrade your PC later.

No. 1970 is 0 in Unix time. The NTP RFC specifies 1900. I had to look it up!

Better to represent it as a 64-bit unsigned fixed-point number, in seconds relative to 0000 UT on 1 January 1900. It’s how he would have wanted it.

In terms of language you are correct. But in terms of SI usage it seems to me OP is expressing it correctly. The SI unit prefixes have a name, a symbol and a multiplier. The prefix is a concept that encompasses all three of those attributes. So “kilo” is one way of identifying the 10^3 unit prefix, but the name kilo is not the prefix itself. It’s just the name we use to refer to it. And the symbol k in km is certainly the unit prefix portion of that unit of measure.