Dave.

That’s a phase change triggered by a seed crystal (generated from a physical shock from the ‘clicker’) where the transition from liquid to solid phases returns the latent heat that was previously added to turn it from solid to liquid.

There is no phase change in this material, it remains a solid and changes temperature depending on how much pressure is applied to it.

Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It’s a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you’re a few years old - it’s completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious “monkey-click-button” process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn’t be required to look at and then parse a ‘flat’ UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You’re burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that’s why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.

Have you seen some of the stuff at Adafruit?

A lot more DIY but a wide variety of stuff. I had a MagTag unit from them that ran for a few months at a time off a 1000mAh battery with hourly display updates over wifi.

“If these trends continue… Eyyyyy!”

BYD vehicles all rate 5 stars in the Australian ANCAP ratings as well.

The “Chinese vehicles aren’t safe” thing is just fear mongering these days or, more generously, a misapplication of their micro vehicle standards for low speed urban use to ordinary passenger vehicles.

How

the FUCK

can a single datacentre cost

TWENTY SEVEN BILLION

dollars?

The nighttime sky is not the same. You see different constellations in summer than you do in winter.

The stars appear above the horizon about 4 minutes later each day. There are stars at your particular latitude that are always visible (they never set), and they appear to rotate around the celestial pole. If you took note of their positions carefully at a particular time of night, you would see that they end up being 180 degrees opposite where they were 6 months previous.

If you’re talking about the pattern of stars shifting against the more distant background of stars (star parallax), when the earth is at opposite sides of the sun, this is measurable by observatories for stars within a hundred light years or so but the angular change quickly becomes very small and the universe is very big.

Robo Story

“Always remember that you are the lowest of the low”

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996250/

The Trap Door

“Don’t you open that trap door! You’re a fool if you dare!”

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395413/

In litres and MJ because SI units make it easy:

Approximately 34 megajoules per litre for petrol/gasoline.

50 litres filling up in 4 minutes = 1.25 litres/second pumping rate. lol don’t do calculations before coffee, let’s just say you’ve got a hi-flow pump doing 1l/sec.

1 litre/second x 34MJ per litre = 34 MJ/second.

1 watt = 1 joule per second, so:

An average fill up runs at about 34 megawatts.

I suddenly feel rather old. 😑🙁

I’d not recommend it to anyone who can’t tell the difference between “wifi” and “internet”.

You won’t get far with that kind of thing in Australia. We have no land borders with other countries so the “natural” blending of currencies with nearby countries at border cities doesn’t happen. Nobody has a good idea of what a euro or US dollar looks like, and you’ll likely just get told to go get it exchanged for AUD.

You still get all the same free stuff.
They’re charging for some new additional features.

This is standard enshittification.

1. Introduce a new premium tier, with “cool shit”, whatever that might be. Free tier still allows you to do all the stuff you did before.

2. Wait a period of time, about 6 to 12 months usually, to get the users used to the fact that the free tier is still the same as usual. Tinker with the premium tier a little to make it sound like awesome shit is happening there and everyone should get on it.

3. Degrade the free tier, usually by adding “sponsored content” i.e. ads, or dropping features so that genuinely useful stuff only becomes available in premium tier. Pitch this as “maintaining quality for our increasing user base” or some bullshit.

4. Ratchet up pricing for the premium tier, reduce/enshittify features in the free tier.

5. Repeat from step 3 until your userbase migrates to the Next Hot Thing and your product sinks into irrelevancy.

need to run every inch in conduit is goofy.

It’s to limit the risk of mechanical damage. As an auto electrician, no way would I accept runs of unprotected battery cables (that is, only with their PVC insulation) in a fixed install. Too much shit can go wrong over the 10 year lifespan of these setups.

On a big battery system you need 150+ amps of fault current before the DC breakers even think about tripping. At 48 volts that’s burn-your-garage-down territory if you get a nail or a shovel edge or a rat nibble across your cables that “only” pulls a hundred amps.

I grew up in a mining town where there were just 5 or 6 different core designs for three and four bedroom houses, and a street was made up of those designs with minor variations like rotating it 90 degrees on the lot or mirroring the design.

If you weren’t looking for it, that lack of variety was completely unnoticeable as you drove down the street.

Title case capitalization.

Perhaps they’re talking about junction temperatures, but even then specialist components can only do 175 degrees C briefly.

Pretty much like that everywhere at the moment mate.

~2.25 for unleaded and ~3.20 for diesel in Brisbane.

Yeah , 10 amp outlets aren’t really good for 10 amps for 10 hours. Especially as they age.

I charged my EV for a few months with its trickle charger and it drew 10 amps. I just made sure to plug/unplug the charger from the outlet every day to ensure the contacts were wiped clean, and I checked the plug a few times after 4 hours or so to make sure it wasn’t getting hot (it wasn’t).

But yeah, home charging overnight is fine for city use. Most EVs use about 170Wh per kilometer driven, so 2400 watts per hour from your charger gives you about 12-15km of range every hour. If your daily commute is under 100km it’s fine.

I’ve got a 7kW single phase charger now, it charges my EV from dead flat to 100 percent in less than 10 hours.

The other parts are fixing up our rail networks for long distance freight transport, and general electricification of heavy industry.

Biggest downside is we’d have to go change out all those “without trucks Australia stops” slogans with something new.