quixoticgeek

quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

Oh fuck it, thread time.

Inspired in a way by a certain long discussion by a well known Sci-fi author about the announcement of a Nuclear powered container ship from China. I wanna talk about "technology won't save us" When it comes to climate change.

"Technology won't save us" is the usual refrain when someone mentions Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS is often touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way of us being able to keep burning dinosaurs. Continue our lives unchanged...

1/n

quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

We have an utterly fucked up idea of what counts as technology. Something that projects many of our biases including gender, and race.

To many these days it's only technology if it's electronic, and used by western men. But to take such a narrow definition is to ignore the amazing technology that surrounds us, and upon which our society is built. As such. It's time for a thread. I'm gonna talk about two different items you use every day, and the technology that goes into them.

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quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

Wow. According to the hydrogen industry lobbyist in my mentions I've gaslit you all by suggesting that heat pumps are great.

Which is weird. Cos heat pumps are an amazing technology. There's even moves to develop air/air heat pumps they use propane as the refrigerant, so DIY installers can easily install them. But what's truly amazing about heat pumps is how they can scale. In the city of London they've installed a big ground source heat pump to drive district heating. It's awesome.

quixoticgeek, 8 months ago to random

Once again for the people at the back. The purpose of public transport is to transport the public. Making money from doing so is a secondary purpose at best.

Noone talks about the profitability of the motorway network. So why do we do the same for public transport?

quixoticgeek, 2 months ago to random

We need to talk about data centres.

For the 2nd or 3rd time this week I've seen someone comment on a new data centre build with a stat about how 80% of data is never accessed. Then they talk about the energy and cooling used in modern DCs.

The reality is that data storage is actually incredibly efficient, and uses fuck all power. A hard disk is less than 10w and stores multiple users data.

Storing data, our photos, our memories, our history. Is not the problem.

What is? 1/n

quixoticgeek, 11 months ago to random

When it rains after a prolonged period of dry weather, there is a smell created. It's called Petrichor. A wonderful word, and utterly useless trivia item. The smell is caused by something call Geosmin, which is produced by bacteria in the soil. Humans can smell it at 5 parts per TRILLION. In contrast Sharks can detect blood at concentrations of 1 part per million. On this one substance, we have a better sense of smell than sharks do for blood. Humans are amazing!

quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

I wonder if the when the US stops burning dinosaurs in it's cars, and is fully electric, if the electric car chargers are going to work in the metric kilowatt hours, or if they are going to have them calibrated in Horsepower per fortnights or something...

quixoticgeek, 9 months ago to random

I want a small laptop. Something that will easily fit in my camera bag. It doesn't need to be anything high performance. Just enough to run vi and ssh. And a physical keyboard

Can anyone recommend such a device ?

quixoticgeek, 7 months ago to random

Shipping is 1.8% of global emissions. That's less than air travel. Reducing that by a third is a 0.6% drop. Noise compared to many other areas.

50% of shipping is moving fossil fuels. If we stop extraction of fossil fuels. Then we can halve our emissions from shipping overnight.

But we really need to focus on other areas, the gains here are tiny. Fix surface transport (hint, build more trains). Or steel production.

https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/111202787310601729

quixoticgeek, 3 months ago to random

The postoffice horizon scandal in the UK has put the spotlight on the coding practices of Fujitsu.

With the publishing of some code snippets, several people who have looked at it have replied "Wow, are they paid by the line of code?"

Which, while often meant as a joke, has some basis in history, and it opens up the discussion, of how do you incentivise programmers and how do you judge their achievements for the basis of bonues?

It's thread time.

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quixoticgeek, 8 months ago to random

Kill it!!! Kill it with fire...

https://ubuntu.com/blog/tpm-backed-full-disk-encryption-is-coming-to-ubuntu

quixoticgeek, 3 months ago to random

Well fuck.

Just did a Google image search as part of some research into something in the medieval era. Well over half of the results are from some kind of ai image generation site. Argh. Totally useless for research purposes.

Search engines need an "exclude AI content" option.

quixoticgeek, 1 month ago to random

Oh. And before any of you lay any blame on the maintainers of these open source project.

How many of you have blindly installed stuff by running curl | sudo bash ?

Did you verify the binaries and the code the bash script ran/installed? How did you confirm trust on those binaries?

Xz is the oss supply chain attack we know about. You can guarantee there are many many more. How we manage installation, and dependency's should perhaps have a little more thought...

quixoticgeek, 9 months ago to random

A task for this weekend is to learn how to sharpen my tools. I have some diamond plates and jigs, and the cheapest chisels I could find to practice with.

quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

Where can I buy 4140 steel in the Netherlands without having to buy 5 tons of it?

quixoticgeek, 6 months ago to random

In .NL going out for dinner late in the evening, esp on a Sunday is not the norm. Many places stop serving by 2000. I found an Indian place I wanted to try and it's open until 2300. Arriving at 2030, and there's only one other table of people. Soooo quiet.

quixoticgeek, 9 months ago to random

Please make this happen. I think it should be done based on road wear. Which goes up by the fourth power. A 2ton car should be 16x more expensive to park than a 1ton car!

Oh. And can we reclassify speed limits as inertia limits? So a 2t car has a much lower limit than a 1t car. Maybe use the money raised by these things to invest in public transport and active travel.

https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/13/amsterdam-considering-charging-higher-parking-rates-larger-cars

quixoticgeek, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

Do you ever sign up for the newsletter when a popup appears on a website ?

quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

Brain is still broken that I, and several of my followers could be accused of climate change denial for not thinking hydrogen is the solution to all the problems we have.

quixoticgeek, 3 months ago to random

Adam Savage has released a video with a tour of his workshop following a recent reorg. His workshop is the sort of place most makers can only ever dream of. From the variety of tools available, to just the amount of space he has available. But as I watched the video about his recent acquisition of "the hardware store", I had two thoughts. The first was that those drawers are not going to be fun in the event of an earthquake... and

1/n

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8LqMv416mw

quixoticgeek, 6 months ago to woodworking

It feels like I've spent the whole week trying to fix a mistake I made when sharpening this plane iron. I got the angle wrong, and trying to grind it out is taking an age :(

#woodworking

quixoticgeek, 4 months ago to random

My notifications have gone kinda nuts the last couple of days. If you've sent me a toot and I've not replied. Feel free to resend. Turns out when you write a 40 post thread. There's a lot of people who hit like 40 times... Triggering 40 notifications... The mastodon app on android (or the web interface). Don't handle this well.

quixoticgeek, 5 months ago to random

You know it's big. The numbers say it's big. But it's only as you sail past and look up at it. A 399m long Neo Panamax container ship capable of carrying >24000 containers. Holy crap thats a big ship!!!

quixoticgeek, 3 months ago to random

Researching how to make my own tool holder (having seen the price of them). The mill I have access to uses an ISO40 taper. ISO. Excellent that's gonna be metric and sensible and... no wait... Wtf. ISO taper angle is 8.2971° (relative to the centre line of the piece).

What uncultured barbarian idiot came up with such a number...

Oh right, it's grandfathered from imperial 3.5" in a foot, or a 7:24 ratio. Sigh

Technical debt... Machine shop edition.

quixoticgeek, 3 months ago to random

Related to that thread. If you're curious about what I'm talking about with the tobacco tins. Here's part of my storage setup. I need to make some more of the wooden shelf unit. This was the prototype to prove the concept.