As if the software was as permanent as the hardware lol
There's no guarantee that the software will ever be updated to something that the user finds usable though.
Google could just one day go "meh, we don't think folding displays are where we want to be right now", and - ta-da! - you're left with a folding doorstop and Google's got yet another entry on the "killed by Google" list.
As another poster has mentioned, M-Discs are written using a Blu-ray writer and are good for a few hundred years, in theory.
Blu-Ray USB drive and M-Discs is about the best you can get at present. Keep the drive unplugged when not in use, it'll probably last 10-20 years in storage.
Seeing as there hasn't been much advance past Blu-ray, keep an eye out for something useful to replace it in the future, or at least get another drive when you notice them becoming scarce.
90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:
"Yes yes whateverrr" <click>
Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.
Because they have to compete with 50k lux outside and then scale to 600 lux indoors, then down to just to a few lux in a darkened room.
Perhaps the brightness slider needs to be more logarithmic so you can slide from 0.001 percent to 100 percent more easily.
I've got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.
But they are my "other backup" for Google photos so I don't mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.
That's about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it's probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.
I've commented on this previously, but this is essentially either a hit piece, or very poor reporting on Reuters' part.
Basically nobody looks at raw numbers for injury statistics. It's normalised to injures per million man hours worked, and when you take some conservative estimates on the size of SpaceX's workforce and the time periods involved, you find that they land pretty much in the middle of current "heavy industry" injury rates.
But it surrrre does look bad if you look at the raw numbers, just like if you looked at the combined raw numbers of, say, 10 steel mills across the country.
Permalink to my previous, much longer, comment
Blocking children from online communities
These are adult online communities. They are not communities for children. My Facebook feed is not something I would like a child to see or interact with, and I would consider it pretty tame. Algorithmic feeds that amplify minor / random views into a torrent of reinforcement is not what kids - or adults, actually - need.
I don't think there's anything commercially available that can do it.
However, as an experiment, you could:
- Get a group of photos from a burst shot
- Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
- See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
- See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.
You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.
Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.
They need to learn how to use their tools better. Winscp does all that transparently for you if you press F4 on a file on a remote system. Or maybe they did and you just didn't see it.....
It's quite a handy function when you're diving through endless layers of directories on a remote box looking for one config file amongst many.
Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.
Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, "You're right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here's the updated code that fixes it".
It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there's any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it's full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.
For some things it will offer solutions that don't solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can't, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don't really achieve anything.
Sometimes when it hits that point I can say "start again, and use (this methodology)" and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that's workable.
So basically, right now it's good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.
Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you're working in fairly well already otherwise you're shit out of luck.
If library devs do versioning correctly, and you pin to major versions like "1.*" instead of just the "anything goes" of "*", this should not happen.
Your unit tests should catch regressions, if you have enough unit tests. And of course you do, because we're all operating in the dream world of, "I am great and everyone else is shit".
The problem with stack overflow is that you need to know enough about the domain you're working in to describe it accurately enough to search and find that previous great answer.
If you have no clue, and then naively ask the no-clue kinds of questions, because you have no clue, then you get beaten over the head about not searching for the existing answer that you don't know how to search for.
If you're interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read "Digital Apollo".
It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to "manually fly the lander", the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.
It's a great read if you have a technical mindset.
Horn switches switch to ground. Power for your original horn relay is supplied from a fused battery source, passes through the horn relay, and when you press the horn button the button completes the circuit to earth, triggering the relay.
So, you need to wire your relay coil like this -
12 volts from a fused battery source to:
Your relay coil, to:
The horn switch, which then switches to:
Ground.
Just like how your current horn relay works.
This also works for older cars that do not have the really. They supply power to the horn, and then a single wire runs from the horn back to the horn button, which then completes the circuit to ground when pressed.
They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps while in use and much more on spin-up. There was a good reason why SCSI drive arrays used to spin each disk up one-by-one.
Molex connectors are good for 10 amps or so, SATA connectors couldn't have handled that amount of current.
Excuse me, "UXers" is not the preferred term any more. You should be using "HXers", as per the article.
In my opinion, replacing "users" with "humans" feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace "women" with "females".
They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.
"Have you tried formatting your PC and completely reinstalling Windows? That often fixes icon misalignment on the desktop. Please upvote if this helps you!" - every "volunteer Microsoft Support Forum" representative ever.
Usually iterations of:
"Closed and locked due to duplicate of: (question asked 9 years ago about Visual Studio 2011 and Visual Basic, when you're using VS code '22 and C#)"
"This seems like an XY problem, what are you really trying to accomplish?", after a one thousand word post describing in detail exactly what you are trying to accomplish and the many different reasons why you can't just use #GENERIC_EVERYDAY_METHOD.
Either that or the quick and dirty method that I want for a one off data conversion that uses standard libraries is heavily down voted and lost while the elaborate, all-cases-considered, 7-third-party-library-using answer becomes the top result.
I subscribe to a bunch of communities and often there is a cross post with the same title and the same URL link across four or five of them at once. This usually results in a screen or two of the same post repeating for me, and I usually just find the one with the most commentary to check out.
It would be nice just to do that automatically, and shrink to a single line or otherwise "fold in" the other cross posts to the highest commentary post so they don't clog my feed. Maybe a few "related" lines under the body of the post when you go into it, similar to the indication that it's been cross posted.
Thoughts?
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: !
