Conjuring up a frequency graph from 2004-present doesn't help your argument, as the VCR format wars were pretty much over a good 15 years beforehand.
"VCR" could have meant either VHS or Betamax to a consumer in the early '80s.
At least VHS specifies a particular standard, and "player" in that context has a loose connection with record player, or tape player , being the thing you play your purchased records / tapes / videos on.
"How did this happen?"
Well let's see, they were found at a 100 percent FIFO coal mine that ships in ridiculous quantities of equipment, materials, and food from all across Australia and the world on a daily basis, and 600 people are shuffled to and from Brisbane every week via the local airport.
I wonder how those ants ended up there, it's a complete mystery.
I've test driven a few BYD models here in Australia. 50 thousand dollarydoos for an electric car that goes 400+km, can power your house in a blackout, has all the normal electric car performance (6 seconds to 100kmhr) and is chock full of user comforts and safety features.
There are a LOT of these getting around in Brisbane, and for good reason. I didn't get one this time round, but by the time the lease expires on my Volvo EX30 in 4 years, I'll be looking pretty hard at BYD. Especially if they get their new solid state batteries going by then.
Exactly. Every person worries that they are one shaky phone video away from internet mockery.
It worked out ok for this guy but only by a stroke of internet luck.
I test drove the Kona and Ionic models in Australia a couple of months ago. I also drive numerous different hire cars for work and I can say Hyundai has the most intrusive driver alert system out of the lot of them.
Constant and loud pings and bings from the safety system. Infotainment on the Kona was also very slow to respond.
Yes, I am doing 103km/hr in a 100 zone, thank you, Hyundai.
Yes, I am again doing 103km/hr after briefly dipping to 98km/hr thank you, Hyundai.
Yes, I am nearly on the edge of the lane, mainly because a large semi is coming towards me in the opposite direction and they're looking a little loosey-goosey on this two-way highway, thank you Hyundai.
Yes, I am looking at the dash wondering what is causing the noises instead of watching the road, thank you, Hyundai.
Yes, I am now actively poking around in the menus trying to turn this shit off instead of keeping my eyes on the road, thank you, Hyundai.
After those test drives, I bought a Volvo instead. It has very low key warnings (or a buzz from the steering wheel like a mild ripple strip if it thinks you are leaving your lane). Just like Hyundai , you can't permanently turn the speed limit warnings off, but you can adjust them to be up to 20km/hr above or below the speed limit.
Why?
Because people should be looking to expand their knowledge by getting into the details. By handwaving those details away with an AI summary that may or may not actually summarise the article correctly, people lose the opportunity to learn.
If your attention span or cognitive capacity can't get you through a basic Wikipedia article you need to work on that, for your own betterment.
If you're reading an article and you're lost in the weeds you should be taking a step back to simpler concepts in Wikipedia (or elsewhere) first. Don't trust a LLM to make a coherent summary about a topic you can't understand, because you won't be able to tell if it's feeding you bullshit.
That's right - the Australian government has bulk purchasing power and that's a big motivator for pharmaceutical companies. When companies get their medications listed in the PBS, sales in Australia skyrocket.
There are some very expensive drugs on the PBS simply because it makes financial sense from a cost of care perspective for the government to do so.
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:
A guy I used to work with went by the nickname of "Womble", his name was actually Raymond.
One day I was poking through work orders in our system and discovered that it also officially knew him as "Womble <last name>" and there was no sign of Raymond in there.