Replacing a TCP socket with a UNIX socket doesn’t affect the amount of headers you have to parse.

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KmXPcSxz2g

And they claim cheap SMRs don’t exist yet xD

Here they are in an MSY (Australia) catalog from 2012:

Ritmo == SHAW == A-Power, all were in-house brands at MSY. I suspect the 1500W and 1200W might have been the same thing with varying amounts of lying, but perhaps they did also size the components slightly differently.

You have nothing on the Tri-Fan 1200W https://www.crazysales.com.au/online-ritmo-force-1200-tri-fan-gaming-power-supply-2-3v-8373.html

Dear Take Two,

If you want to port GTA3 and VC to mobile then I would recommend looking at the re3/revc project. Fans have already put lots of effort into making the games work on modern systems, patching many bugs and making things more portable. Last I checked there already was a Nintendo Switch port.

Oh wait.

File I’m printing: A4 PDF
Default printer setting in Windows: A4
Default setting on printer itself: A4
Setting that gets chosen automatically in the print dialog: Letter

I think it will take insane amounts of effort to wrangle the model into not doing its own thing. Possibly more than the amount of effort it takes to animate manually.

“Yes this is brilliant, now generate just a few more se… why have you added a clone of my character? What? And why have the emotions on the faces of the other two swapped again? Arghh it’s confusing the subjects again! Now the room has started strobing too, goddammit this is a bathtub not a disco!”

Anopheles nonaleggius s.s.

Yes it’s possible to run them without resistors if you put them all in series and use a current limited power supply. That’s how some LED lighting products do it, just not common LED strips.

Common LED strips are designed for convenience over efficiency. You feed them 12V and you can cut them to any shorter length without worry. You can’t do that as easily with series configurations.

and a constant current supply will suffice for several strips of series LEDs in parallel.

Yes and no. I’ve seen lots of series-parallel products fail with blown LEDs.

For parallel LEDs to work you need three things:

1. Very well matched LEDs.
2. Shared heatsinking, so one LED getting hot shares some of its heat with its neighbours.
3. Reasonable driving level. The more power you put into the LEDs the worse it gets.

These 3 things cost money so they often get skimped.

The LEDs will end up in an autonomous greenhouse where power efficiency is important.

Removing the resistors of a white 12V LED strip will (at best, in theory) increase your efficiency by 25%.

Choosing to use more LEDs and driving them at lower power levels might increase your efficiency even more than this. In 2024 you should be able to get well over 100 lumens per watt, but many LED strips overdrive the LEDs, dramatically lowering their efficiency. LED light output versus power input curves are very nonlinear, you get decreasing returns of light the more power you put in.

autonomous greenhouse

What are you growing? Sounds suspicious. Please don’t do anything illegal.

If your greenhouse is anything larger than a small test then please instead proper fire detection and suppression systems. Don’t get people hurt.

Lethal company, I’ve been joining random people online and seeing how it goes. I got some good tea advice from a random New Zealand tweenager, that has turned out to be worth the price of the game alone (continues sipping rooibos).

I was playing SWAT 4 until recently, but I don’t feel a need to finish it as the gameplay didn’t seem evolve or change much after about halfway through. Voice acting is great, team AI is great, but once you discover non-lethal weapons the challenge disappears (and higher difficulties are impossible if you give your teammates lethal weapons). The popular Elite Force mod makes some nice changes, but sadly everyone overall now feels even easier and more repetitive.

Todo:

• Cruelty squad because it was on discount.
• Anthology of a Killer. Autofishs’ game opinions tend to be good.
• Bitfighter, I think I recall a friend playing this once.

Brilliant book.

I like the bit about how proud the author was to develop a purple liquid rocket fuel, but then discover it wasn’t useful :(

Generally not, no. Most manufacturers would rather turn it off as needed rather than turn it on as needed. Unpredictable outputs require unpredictable staffing rosters, introduce more risk into plant operations and does not give confidence to customers (“we need to delay your shipment”).

Desal would need very big reservoirs to be able to erratically run, but perhaps that is done off peak in some places? Aluminium is complex, you can’t let it cool too much otherwise you risk the whole process solidying (no recovery, requires rebuilding entire smeltery).

Somethings from further afield to consider: maybe hoisting tanks up onto the circular solar concentrators is a bad idea.

(1) Store and use the NaOH in long, skinny pipes (instead of big tank modules). Then mount them on linear solar concentrators.

(2) Keep the modules, but crane them onto the ground near the solar concentrators and use superheated steam from the concentrators to dry the modules. Less hoisting. The modules already have a piping system in them (isolated from the NaOH) for generating steam, just use it in reverse and open the NaOH chamber so water can escape to the atmosphere as it dries.

(Or, I suppose, a modern diesel with the cab in front, though that might make lifting the boiler more finicky.)

I’m not sure about the process of lifting them and attaching them, but this is a great start. Maybe they’d use one of those cranes that hangs from the ceiling on rails.

Good catch. Having the boiler in front would make some lifting logistics easier, because you could swing it off in a circular arc rather than needing a crane that can move linearly.

That simple difference might allow smaller, simpler cranes at the various outposts (reserving a full gantry ceiling crane for the workshops or more major stops).

Hey Jacob,

Lovely subtle background with soft edges and technical side profile :) This is way beyond what I was expecting. My only artistic complaints would be the odd reflection on the round tank.

Where is the water stored? The engine will need a tank of its own to hold this. The modular units would only hold water temporarily, you would probably want to drain them before lifting them off. Water would also be consumed during the trip from leaks and from adding it to the caustic soda.

How do you imagine your tank being lifted? It looks like it’s currently setup for a shipping-container style ISO twistlock lift (where you hook onto the top 4 corners with some sort of frame hanging from the crane). I was instead imagining a central lifting point and a traditional single-cable crane. Your idea is probably better – the frame is already strongest at the corners and you can potentially couple/uncouple without needing to climb on top.

A really important question would be whether or not we’re using relatively low pressure steam like classical engines (a few atmospheres) or high pressure steam (a few hundred atmospheres). From my vague uneducated understanding of the rankine cycle that steam engines approximately use: higher pressures and temps might allow better efficiency. Your size of tank might only be feasible for lower pressures, at higher pressures you would use multiple tanks with smaller radius (this makes them much stronger, assuming the same wall thickness in both).

I’ll state again that I’m not a train person nor have proper in-depth knowledge of a lot of areas required to properly design such a train, this is all mostly guesswork.

Some random thoughts of my own, much more rushed and poorly drawn than yours:

• Steam-electric turbine rather than steam-piston direct drive. Electric motors hidden in bogeys underneath.
• 2x2x2.5m replaceable modules (arbitrary choice, I think this it really should have been much bigger for a standard gauge rail train)
• All modules secured to bottom frame using shipping-container style ISO twistlock connectors (not shown sorry, out of time and going to be busy tomorrow)
• Three different types of module:
  • Silver stripes: high pressure caustic soda boilers (get removed & solar mounted to regenerate)
  • Yellow stripes: liquid water storage, pumps and valve. Maybe turbines could go here too?
  • Black: Cabin, battery, motor drivers (inverters/choppers/whatever) and controls.
• Bottom frame is four 2x2m frames stuck together. Can be made longer to hold more modules.

EDIT: Woops, should have made the tanks black rather than shiny silver. They’ll need to be craned onto the solar collectors and then dried, so a darker black body would be better.

Glad you liked it :)

I’d meant to add a concrete spill pool thing at least between the locomotive and building but forgot. (Pretty sure that excuse has shown up on at least one environmental disaster report, lol).

You’re hired!

Swappable boilers […] visually distinct

I was thinking something that looks a bit like a steel-framed ISO tank, but smaller and with more connectors. At a minimum you would need:

• Lots of caution stripes on the frames (80’s/90’s retro futuristic)
• Removable insulation panels from the sides. You would want them installed when on the train (to save heat) but removed when the whole unit is hoisted up onto the solar concentrator. The tank itself will be painted black for this purpose, at least on the curved sides.
• Inlet and outlet for steam. Perhaps stainless high pressure pipe flanges complete with their cute tapered nozzly bit. Maybe 10-20cm or more in internal diameter? I’m not familiar with the impedance tradeoffs and pipe sizes normally used for this. I’m also not sure how you’d connect these to the engine (external pipes taken on and off all the time?).
• Electrical connector for measuring the in-built thermistors & thermocouples. Probably an ISO metric series waterproof with lots of pins like an M24 connector just dangling somewhere.
• A drain tap on the bottom of the steam loop side with a very long handle on it (so the operator doesn’t die if they open it at the wrong time). Looks like a standard ball valve like you’d use on a home water or gas line, but with a very long handle that reaches to the edge of the frame.
• A water inlet for the caustic side. Something small like a household water pipe and ball valve.
• An (optional) place to install your own temp probe. Household pipe sticking out of the top.
• A drain tap on the bottom of the caustic side with a padlock installed (to stop people dissolving themselves with high-temp high-pressure sodium hydoxide).
• Redundant pressure gauges near the draining taps, as a last ditch warning to operators.

Installing and removing the steam pipe flanges would not be elegant, requiring a rattle gun (like tire shops use to change your wheels). Maybe there are some more elegant solutions? Especially since it’s so easy to accidentally pressurise a system after only tightening some of the bolts (woops).

I’ve used some of those fungicides but wouldn’t have put that together.

They wouldn’t look like the nice, uniform, dry powdered stuff you’re used to, instead they’d be unevenly coloured slime :)

I might be wrong specifically about the copper carbonate product, but the others are probably right. No brass, no bronze and no copper allowed (sadly).

Thanks Jacob for the illustration, it’s interesting to see your take on this. I approve of the double-decker carriages (hail from Sydney!) and I think the little tunnel under the tracks is a neat detail.

Your infrastructure seems to be a mix of industrial and residential in a very remote location. The workers living here would need to rely on food brought in on the trains, their field would not be enough, let alone materials for repairs and other mechanical supplies. Perhaps this is a “company outpost”? I hope they pay well, it could get quite lonely if the only outsiders you talk to are train drivers. The only way I could think of fixing that would be to turn this into a platform with a cafe (and that creates a myriad of other problems). I hope someone else has a better idea than me.

I have some random practical thoughts that could affect how things look. They’re written off-hand, so don’t assume they’re completely true :)

Spills management:

• NaOH and KOH are not particularly bad pollutants because they eventually break down into mostly harmless things.
• They will still however kill all the grass and plants wherever they spill (and discolour the dirt), both temporarily (hydroxide attacking the organics) and long term (K & Na salts salting the earth).
• When moving 5 tonnes from one container to another it’s likely that small spills will occur all of the time.
• It would be worth putting the solar concentrator on a concrete pad with small (30-50cm, depending on climate peak rainfall) lips/walls all around, to act as a containing bathtub. Otherwise leaked NaOH/KOH will wash off every time it rains. This is known as bunding and looks like this.
• Leaks on the tracks won’t be as obvious (due to the ballast rocks under the traintracks) but it still might be worth expanding this ballast to be wider where you expect the engine to stop.

.

Handling hydroxides is messy, potentially dangerous (“I’m melting! My eyes!”) and annoying:

• It might be better to design a boiler that can be craned off the train and onto the solar concentrator (and visa versa). No chemical handling, if it leaks then you tag it for repair and place it on a bunded pad until it gets picked up.
• You could keep a line of pre-dried boilers handy so that trains don’t need to wait 45 minutes to continue and so that they can keep running on stormy days.
• Standardise boiler units across all trains. Perhaps small modular ones (2x2x2m?) that the engines take multiples of (depending on their size).
• Not sure what the cranes would look like. If you’re clever then you might find a way of laying things out so simple human-powered (long-armed wooden) cranes could do all of the work.

.

Metal corrosion and pollution

• Pure NaOH will be very nasty to metals like copper. No copper and bronze steam locos, even in the boiler, unless you want a pile of verdigris within a trip or two :(
• Some stainless steels fare better
• You don’t want any products of a hydroxide-metal reaction (gooey mushy rusty gungy stuff) leaking, these will be a reasonably persistent pollution. Copper oxides, hydroxides, carbonates and the like are insecticides and fungicides often used on citrus trees so perhaps it’s not too bad, plus it would be economically infeasible to let your boilers dissolve away to nothing all of the time, so maybe this won’t be an issue in practice. Alas I’m not sure if the chromium from stainless steel might get pulled out, that’s a whole other can of worms.

Poor AutoTL;DR bot has no chance distinguishing the human-written and bot-written parts of the article