We've all been there, back in the day haha
dgriffith
joined 2 years ago
Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening
Also fuck that private section of the track, that’s horrible.
The rest of the train and bus network for a hundred kilometre radius is 50 cents.
Previous state government in the late 90s "did a deal" with a private corporation to construct the line out the to airport and allow control for 35 years.
10 more years of this shit and then it gets handed over to state government.
It's mainly because there are 15 stops along the way a couple of kilometres apart through the CBD, plus a 7 minute wait in the middle to change trains to another line.
The trains are capable of 100 km/hr but basically through that area they get up to 40-60km/hr before having to slow for bends/switching tracks/the next stop.
It’s super hard to resist public transit at higher prices
It was 65 dollarydoos for a projected 25 minute uber home from Brisbane airport on Friday night.
I took the train for 55 minutes instead. $22.30 of my train fare was for the 10 kilometre section that is privately owned by "Airtrain CityLink Limited", the public owned section that took me the remaining 10km cost 50 cents.
Fuck the corporations that want to try to replace public transport.
Saturn V was done with the resources of a nation behind it, because they had to beat the Soviets. That rocket also only went up, and was not reusable, with a tiny fraction of the Apollo mission hardware returning to Earth.
All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.
There was considerable computing power on the ground supporting the missions.
showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.
This is ENTIRELY because of Meta's content algorithms that buried the content from everyone's friends under a torrent of shit. It's pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.
But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend's posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.
Australian here.
Step 1: design your damn toilets so they do not clog.
Step 2: there is no step 2.
Seriously, half a century of toilet use here in Aus and I've never caused - or discovered even - a blocked toilet at home.
Clearly the fact that I can buy a toilet plunger from the local hardware store indicates that this can happen here. But it seems that every American household has a toilet plunger and poop knife on standby and many articles are devoted to what clogs, and how to unclog, American toilets.
There are better designs for both toilets and plumbing out there guys, maybe you should look into using them.
A year later, Apple Vision Pro owners say they regret buying the $3,500 headset - "It's just collecting dust"
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 ›
The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially "free" to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it's awesome.
Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.