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Cake day: August 24th, 2024

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  • qupada@fedia.iotoScience Memes@mander.xyz[Thread] Mental Math
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    6 days ago

    I got into an argument with someone once about this, when they told me (paraphrasing) “it’s safe to drive listening to music through headphones, because they let outside sound in”.

    Yes they indeed might, but - even ignoring delay introduced from digital electronics - you’ve now lost all sense of where that sound is coming from, because you’re listening to the sound of one microphone being played through one speaker.

    The human ear really is an incredible thing.







  • While I have a personal general rule against backing electronics on Kickstarter and would likely wait for it to be available at retail, I wouldn’t necessarily immediately discount this one.

    It’s probably worth noting - mentioned in Jeff Geerling’s video - they had a MOQ of 1500 on the metal case, which likely forced them to be significantly further through the process than a lot of Kickstarters are at launch.





  • Surprisingly, no.

    I’ve got both the first-gen Palma, and a Kindle Oasis (2017).

    Ignoring anything that’s purely a function of the Palma being significantly newer - has a cool-warm light while that model of Kindle is one colour temperature only, and that it has a faster-refreshing e-ink display, etc - it’s still often a more pleasant experience.

    The Palma is a little heavier (especially vs the Kindle without its case, which is typically how I use it), but because it’s narrower much easier to hold. The Oasis does have the physical page turn buttons, but I never found them to be particularly well placed, always required holding it a bit awkwardly.

    It’s mildly painful for content that doesn’t reflow (like PDFs) due to the phone-like 16:9 aspect, but imho for e-books is the superior experience.


  • Putting a solar roofs over any open-air carpark you happen to own is just a hilariously easier option. Hell, you could erect these OVER the train tracks.

    https://greenox-group.de/photovoltaik-carport/ (Article is in German, but it’s really more around the picture)

    According to a completely un-sourced picture I found online, one carpark (in the USA) is typically around 5.5 x 2.6m, so if you had even 50 carparks on your site you could have ~715 square metres of panels. More, if you figure a way to cover the aisles between the rows of carparks too.

    At the top end of all applicable figures (panel efficiency, solar irradiance, inverter efficiency), that could net you ~160kW at solar midday.

    Now on the other side, standard-gauge railway is around 1.4m wide, and maybe you could cram a 1m width of panels between the rails.

    That sounds like a lot - 1000 square metres per kilometre, and there are thousands of kilometres of railway lines out there - but it’s harder to install, harder to service, gets dirty faster, is liable to get damaged, and now you have to figure out how to extract power from somehing a kilometre long, instead of an area that could be a square only around 35m (~115’) on a side (for the above 50 carparks).

    I know which one of those I’d want to run the cables for.

    As has been pointed out many times when this dumb-ass idea comes up, only once you’ve exhausted every other possibility (carparks, rooftops, putting panels ABOVE roads/rivers/canals/cycleways/railways) and have literally no other viable installation locations, then we can talk.






  • it’s essentially 2 PCI Express x1 lanes and USB 2.0

    Sometimes there’s only a single PCIe lane though. And as you say, that’s not a x2 but explicitly two x1s.

    No WiFi card needs the bandwidth (yet), at PCIe 3 speeds you’ve got around 7.8Gbps for a x1, and PCIe 4 double that.

    The Coral comes in a “dual” version for exactly this reason (https://coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-dual-edgetpu/) you just have to be very sure the slot you’re putting it in is actually delivering two PCIe connections.

    Also for bonus fun, most WiFi/BT cards use the PCIe interface for the WiFi and USB for the Bluetooth.