In grad school I picked up a an old free HP LaserJet, with an Ethernet NIC card (it was an upgradable printer, maybe from the mid 2000s?).
It was great! Only complaint was no duplexer, but the thing printed great from Linux and the generic toner was cheap.
Today though…the experience is a bit different.
Yes. But why is there an absence of light?
If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)
So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.
This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers's_paradox
Olbers’s paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux’s paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.
The night sky being dark has some profound cosmological implications.
Widely regarded as the best Seinfeld episode is The Contest. It’s about who can go the longest without masturbating, but what makes it great is that they never say that explicitly — it’s just euphemisms and insinuation. And it’s hilarious IMHO.
I believe they initially wanted to spell it out, but the networks wouldn’t let them (I could be wrong). Definitely for the better that they danced around the topic the way they did.
(Yes I know, Jerry Seinfeld is a problematic person, I’m just trying to answer the question…)
Here’s January of this year. San Francisco, so pretty moderate weather — typically don’t run heat during the day, and low 60s at night (if at all) during the winter. Large temperature gradient throughout house, typically.
South facing windows gives kitchen and living room a greenhouse effect, particularly in the winter, hence the large daily temperature swings:
Good point — it is “incrementally free,” although I guess if you count tire wear and tear that’s not even true.
You’re just gatekeeping.
ThinkPad with a generator? Nothing wrong with that — maybe add LoRa, get a ham license and add some packet radio or digital modes and you have a neat disaster setup.
MacBook that you don’t want to scuff? Well, I’m not that precious with my gear, but you do you. Many Mac laptops last a very long time, and the performance of modern Apple silicon is really, really impressive — and you have UNIX out of the box. Plenty for a tech enthusiast to like.
A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.
I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.
Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).
Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).
“First X of the month” at the zoo/a museum/whatever — lots of venues have free events.
A jog, bike ride, hike — lots of great stuff outside!
Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).
I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.
Wait til you see fetal MRIs…
I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.
The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).
My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.
I’m curious how the battery percentage went up
Physicists hate this one weird trick…
Is that true though? As in, is it really that dangerous? It seems that you’ll dissipate power equal to the inefficiency times the nominal charging power, so something like 5V x 2A x inefficiency (inefficiency being 1-efficiency), which will probably be of order a watt.
I can use my car battery to charge itself without any issues — I just plug the red terminal to itself, and same with the black, which is to say, a battery is always connected in a way that “charges itself.”
I think the key is that the battery probably isn’t really playing a big role in OOP’s setup — electricity doesn’t “go through the battery,” it just goes from the charging input to the power output circuits, with the additional power (due to inefficiency) being provided by the battery.
I’m not sure though — the power output and the charging input are both regulated and (almost certainly) current limited. So I think (not positive…) that you’re basically dissipating your power in the inefficiency the charging and output circuits, with this power coming from the battery.
The inefficiency should (I think…) just be the round-trip inefficiency of the charging/discharging of your power bank — this should be way, way less than the short-circuit power dissipation.
The simplest toy model is to take a battery and try to charge itself. So you put jumpers on the + terminal and you connect those to the + terminal, and same for - (charging is + to +, NOT + to -). But this is silly because you’ve just attached a loop of wire to your terminals, which is equivalent to doing nothing. With charging circuits in between things get much more complicated, but I’m not sure if it goes full catastrophic short…
For 75kg (roughly average South Korean male weight) and 7" step height (standard in the US I think, not sure about Korea), this is about 0.13kJ/step.
By coincidence, the human metabolic efficiency is (roughly) the same as the conversion between kJ and food (kilo)calories, meaning this would be (very roughly) 0.1 calories/step.
Not much, given a single French fry is maybe 5-10 calories. But it’s better than nothing!
Many, many (most?) commercial ham radios are powered by ~12VDC, and can be run directly off of a car battery in many cases (always use a fuse, kids!).
Hmmm, I’m not sure I understand…
A large explosion every second has units of power, not energy. So to me this is suggesting that the train is putting out power equal to its kinetic energy per second. That’s certainly not the case — it implies that the train is powerful enough to accelerate to the speed in 1s, which is definitely not true.
But that’s just my interpretation.
I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.