Somewhere, a grizzled old sub-editor's eye is twitching over that title.
dgriffith
joined 2 years ago
The gains compound a bit too, 20 percent less weight equals proportionally less battery capacity required to shift the now-lighter vehicle from point A to point B.
So then you can cut the size of the battery while maintaining the same range, and that's where you start to get significant overall weight and cost savings.
The only extra moon I'm willing to accommodate is a blue moon. All the rest are just social media wankery, especially "supermoons" that are merely a few percent larger than usual due to the minor eccentricity of the moon's orbit.
Everyone ^bet^ should get ^bet now!^ onboard with ^$5 free punt with SportsBet™^ online ^bet now!^ gambling ^bet!^ services, there's ^bet^ nothing ^bet^ wrong ^betbetbet^ with a ^bet^ cheeky punt ^bet^ while ^betbetbet^ out with ^bet^ the missus ^betbet^, or ^bet^ when you're ^bet^ looking after ^bet^ the kids, or ^bet^ whenever, ^bet^ really. And ^bet^ their advertising ^betbetbet^ isn't really ^bet now!^ THAT ^bet!^ intrusive.
Hey can you spare $20 for petrol? I'm a bit skint this week.
Personally, I'm holding out for the Electric Twizzler Platinum Edition Supermoon Series 9000, I hear it's going to be the best one yet.
It's all fun and games until your (insert vehicle here) crashes , or has a fire, or suffers a mishap, or reaches its destination and explodes as designed, and apart from all the normal problems you have with that, you also now have to contend with a few kilos of fizzed up nuclear fuel and some hot reaction by-products spread all over the place. You also have to contend with the neutron activation of the air passing through your nuclear ramjet, which makes it briefly radioactive, which is fine for a cruise missile that you intend to blow up in a few hours anyway, not so fine for regular transport routes.
Nuclear powered vehicles have some inherent risks with pain-in-the-ass consequences, and if we scale those small per-vehicle risks up across a worldwide fleet we'd see accidents involving them as often as we are aircraft crashes, and that's not great.
This is entirely the wrong community for this answer, but I've used the pro version of Textra for 10 years now. One time payment (10 years ago), updates every few months, lots of features, but they don't get in your way if you don't need them.
The main feature I use is "delay send for 5 seconds" to allow me to catch all my spelling and grammatical errors after I hit send , but the rest of the UI is pretty well thought out.
One of the very few commercial Android apps that I'd recommend to someone.
Fossify Messages is your trusted messaging companion
I hate this kind of advertising language.
Don't sell this as some fait accompli , done deal thing. It's not anything to me at the moment. It doesn't need to be my "messaging companion". It needs to be a program, that I use to send and receive SMS/MMS messages. That's it.
And "trusted"? I'll be the judge of that.
Firstly, figure out the fixed cost per day of owning your car for a year if it was parked all the time (including the cost of getting a replacement in X years time when this one is worn out), and a cost per mile/km of using it.
And then the biggest cost saving is basically use your bicycle or public transport whenever you can, assuming that you can't just get rid of the car and it's daily fixed cost.
You might also find that it's cheaper to just drive your car than use carpool apps with their internal overheads once you figure out the daily and per km costs. (Edit: especially for short trips)
The cost of servicing your car (minor stuff like oil/filters/plugs) generally is lost in the noise of everyday use, that is, fuel and tyres are the biggest cost.
Finally , don't forget that your time and labour is also a cost. Unless you really enjoy working on cars, "rent yourself out" at whatever your country's minimum wage is and factor that in when costing up doing servicing and repairs on your car yourself. This is basically an intangible number (it doesn't affect your bank balance, unless you service your car yourself and break it and then can't get to work!), but it's important to factor it in.
Can it be disabled?
Sure! There'll be a dialog box that comes up every single time that you wake your PC saying:
"Do you want to activate AwesomeAI™ now? 98 percent of the functions of this OS are crippled or unusable until you activate AwesomeAI™ so Microsoft recommends doing so immediately."
And the two options will be "OMG Yes!" , or "Maybe Later".
It straight made up a powershell module, and method call. Completely made up, non existent.
Counterpoint 1:
I gave Copilot a couple of XML files that described a map and a route, and told it to make a program in C# that could create artificial maps and routes using those as a guideline.
After about 20 minutes of back and forth, mainly me describing what I wanted in the map (eg walls that were +/- 3m from the routes, points in the routes should be 1m apart, etc) it spat out a program that could successfully build xml files that worked in the real-world device that needed them.
Counterpoint 2: I gave Copilot a python program that I'd written about 8 years ago that connected to a Mikrotik router using its vendor specific API and compiled some data to push out to websocket clients that connected. I told it to make a C# equivalent that could be installed and run as a windows service, and it created something that worked on the very first pass using third party .NET libraries for Mikrotik API access.
Counterpoint 3: I had a SQL query in a PowerShell script that took some reporting data from a database and mangled it heavily to get shift-by-shift reports. Again I asked it to take the query and business logic from the script and create a command line C# application that could populate a new table with the shift report data. It created something that worked immediately and fixed a corner case in the query that was causing me some grumbles as well.
These were things that I've done in the past month. Each one would have taken a week for me to do myself, and with some general discussion with this particular LLM each one took about an hour instead, with it giving me a complete zipped up project folder with multiple source files that I could just open in Visual Studio and press "build" to get what I want.
In all these cases however, I was well versed in the area it was working in, and I knew how to phrase things precisely enough that it could generate something useful. It did try and tack on a lot of not-particularly-useful things, particularly options for the command line reporting program.
And I HATE the oh-so-agreeable tone it takes with everything. I'm not "absolutely right" when I correct it or steer it along a different path. I don't really want all this extra stuff that it's so happy to tack on, "it won't take a minute".
I want the LLM to tell me that's an awful idea, or that it can't do it. A constant yes-man agreeing with everything I say doesn't help me get shit done.
Hi all,
In an effort to liven up this community, I'll post this project I'm working on.
I'm building a solar hot water controller for my house. The collector is on the roof of a three-storey building, it is linked to a storage tank on the ground floor. A circulating pump passes water from the tank to the collectors and back again when a temperature sensor on the outlet of the collector registers a warm enough temperature.
The current controller does not understand that there is 15 metres of copper piping to pump water through and cycles the circulating pump in short bursts, resulting in the hot water at the collector cooling considerably by the time it reaches the tank (even though the pipes are insulated). The goal of my project is to read the sensor and drive the pump in a way to minimise these heat losses. Basically instead of trying to maintain a consistent collector output temp with slow constant pulsed operation of the pump, I'll first try pumping the entire volume of moderately hot water from the top half of the collector in one go back to the tank and then waiting until the temperature rises again.
I am using an Adafruit PyPortal Titano as the controller, running circuitpython. For I/O I am using a generic ebay PCF8591 board, which provides 4 analog input and a single analog output over an I2C bus. This is inserted into a motherboard that provides pullup resistors for the analog inputs and an optocoupled zero crossing SCR driver + SCR to drive the (thankfully low power) circulating pump. Board design is my own, design is rather critical as mains supply in my country is 240V.
The original sensors are simple NTC thermistors, one at the bottom of the tank, and one at the top of the collector. I have also added 4 other Dallas 1-wire sensors to measure temperatures at the top of tank, ambient, tank inlet and collector pump inlet which is 1/3rd of the way up the tank. I have a duplicate of the onewire sensors already on the hot water tank using a different adafruit board and circuitpython. Their readings are currently uploaded to my own IOT server and I can plot the current system's performance, and I intend to do the same thing with this board.
The current performance is fairly dismal, a very small bump of perhaps 0.5 - 1 deg C in the normally 55 degree C tank temperature around 12pm to 1pm, and this is in Australia in hot spring weather of 28-32 degrees C.(There's some inaccuracy of the tank temperatures, the sensors aren't really bonded to the tank in any meaningful way, so tank temp is probably a little warmer than this. But I'm looking for relative temperature increases anyway)
Right now , the hardware is all together and functional, and is driving a 13W LED downlight as a test, and I can read the onewire temp sensors, read an analog voltage on the PCF8591 board (which will go to the NTC sensors), and I'm pulsing the pump output proportionally from 0-100 percent drive on a 30 second duty cycle, so that a pump drive function can simply say "run the pump at 70 percent" and you'll get 21 seconds on, 9 seconds off. Duty cycle time is adjustable, so I might lower it a bit to 15 or 10 seconds.
The next step is to try it on the circulating pump (which is quite an inductive load, even if it is only 20 watts), and start working on an algorithm that reads the sensors and maximises water temperature back to the tank. There are a few safety features that I'll put in there, such as a "fault mode" to drive the pump at a fixed rate if there is a sensor failure, and a "night cool" mode if the hot water tank is severely over temperature to circulate hot water to the collector at night to cool it. There are the usual overtemp/overpressure relief valves in the system already.
All this is going in a case with a clear hinged cover on the front so I can open it and poke the Titano's touchscreen to do some things.
Right now I am away from home from work, so my replies might be a bit sporadic, but I'll try to get back to any questions soon-ish.
A few photos for your viewing pleasure:
The I/O and mainboard plus a 5V power supply mounted up:
The front of the panel, showing the Pyportal:
Thingsboard display showing readings from the current system:
Mainboard PCB design and construction via EasyEDA:
view more: next ›
Lots of options here.
You can use a few strands of clean copper wire to clear the hole. Heat the solder with your soldering iron and poke the wire through.
Alternatively , you can heat the solder and then quickly apply a strong puff of air via a straw or ballpoint pen casing to the hole. That will blow the solder out the other side.
You can ALSO just place the new switch on the hole and heat the solder and push the pins through, as long as there are one or two clear holes to get the alignment right.