While I appreciate the fact that you have attempted to consider some of my stated needs, I do note that you've managed to forget one: I'm not plugging my car in. It's too much of a pain in the ass.
As I've already stated, the best solution would be to plug the car into a trickle charger when parked, but I'm not going to do that.
I've thought about it. I've even considered such esoteria as a proper block heater, and a battery warmer. None of this is going to happen, no matter how much sense they might make, just because I cannot be bothered with plugging the car in. I don't want to run the snowblower over the cord, I don't want to snag it with a shovel (or worse, my boot), I don't want to trench a line in to eliminate those issues, and I don't want to forget to plug it in, and I don't want to forget that it's plugged in, and I don't fucking want to plug it in to begin with.
FFS, I spent 6 hours standing on my head on the driver's side floor, in the winter, in the driveway, putting the remote start in, when I could have more easily spent a couple of hours replacing a freeze plug with a block heater that would be better overall for everything and never drain the battery. Why? Because with remote start, I don't have to plug the car in!
Right? Right.
So, solar it is. It won't absolutely eliminate all issues from here to kingdom come -- that is obvious. But it will help some. The question, then, is this: Will it help sufficiently that I shall never suffer with a weak battery come next January? Your maths fail at adequately predicting this, so all I can say is: We'll see.
It's an experiment, and it's an inexpensive one. And if it doesn't work out, at least I've still got a nifty solar panel to play with. For the price, I might even add a second one in parallel if the first seems to almost get the job done (my meter tells no lies), and carry the experiment forward -- there's enough room back there for at least two of them.
Alternator is good. It produces rated minimum current at idle speed, and rated maximum current at higher speed, within reasonable tolerances.
It provides proper charging voltage. I check it check it now and then when the car is running using the car's OBC, which has a 4-digit VOM built-in, and which I've sanity-checked against a proper meter.
Perhaps you're from somewhere warmer -- it gets rather cold here, and it only misbehaves when it is cold. When warm, things operate properly all of the time, no matter what manner of crap I leave switched on.
Given these symptoms, it's not an alternator problem: If it were, it would misbehave at all times of the year instead of only when it's been sitting for a day or two (or more) in very cold conditions.
I'd sooner suspect a weak starter that has a hard time making it past the first compression stroke when very cold. Hell, I'd also sooner suspect an oil viscosity problem or a combination of both, since I run 10W-40 in the car.
(But I can't find 5W-40 at all locally, or at a palatable price if I were to order some, and 5W-30 is simply too thin (according to both my observations, and the manufacturer's recommendations) once the oil temperature gets up to nominal for the engine to run properly and smoothly.
And then, even if I did run 5W40, there's the fact that it doesn't last as long due to the way the molecules are chained: The wider the viscosity range, the faster they break down... so even if viscosity were the problem (and I don't think it is), switching to a different grade of oil wouldn't save me any money. And that's the whole point of this little solar project: To save money.)
You know, it might (maybe, just MAYBE) be simple: It might just be because I leave too much shit turned on in the car, and (as stated) am completely unwilling to deviate from that habit. The original battery in the car (of unknown vintage) worked for 4 or 5 years until it presented any difficulties, which is a point in time coinciding with the addition of the aforementioned electronic gadgetry. Subsequent batteries have behaved poorly, while the gadgetry remains the same.
Thanks for chiming in. But next time, please either keep your ill-informed advice to yourself, or at least ask for more details first before insisting on being both matter-of-fact about things and wrong at the same time.
The "traditional" timber, paper, and shingle roof is a total idiot boondoggle. Trusses, plywood, tar paper, tar shingles... all bullshit guaranteed to fail. Or you could have a steel roof which costs the same or less, lasts twice as long, and which can have thin-film solar panels applied to it with adhesive. If it's struck by hail it will dent but still function properly.
Agreed, absolutely. But it's funny you mention this: My house has recent steel standing seam roof, and I'm currently waiting for a nice enough day to recruit some help to get a ladder up there and figure out why in the fuck it was leaking some during the most recent torrential downpour.:)
If you want to not kill your car battery with that charger you're going to need a charge controller. A diode will help you not murder it immediately, if your panel doesn't have one integrated.
Agreed, mostly. I plan on monitoring the voltage periodically, to see that it is sane. I expect that the parasitic load of the car+accessories will balance things out by itself, but if not, then charge controller it is.
My main reservation is cost: This panel produces about half an amp of current, on a clear day with full sun, in the open, at high noon, angled properly, and only then if the wind is from the south and the tide is out.
Shaded by the modest factory tint on the rear window and angled so as to not obscure visibility, it really won't produce much power at all. But every charge controller I've run across, no matter how ratty or cheap, is geared toward many-amps of current, and that's just not a scenario that is going to be happening, and is not one that I'm inclined to pay for.
The panel does have a diode built-in. It's a unitized thing, packaged up by an American company and actually (even at $17) sold at a small premium -- they've thought of at least that much. Hell, for the price, they even include enough wire to be useful, along with a cig plug and a set of battery clamps.
I'll bypass the diode if/when a charge controller happens, just to get another potential 0.7V out of it. But for now, I'm just going to wire it up and see how it behaves... and if I ever see it even think about going above 14.4V, which I don't believe is possible in my scenario, then charge controller it is.
According to my router, I've used a total of about 268GB in the last 30 days on my 12/1.5 Uverse pipe. 226.36 gigs down, 41.68 gigs up.
Much of this is Netflix traffic -- we'll sometimes have 4 or 5 Netflix streams going here at once. A small portion, as indicated by the disparity between down and up, is torrents.
I'm pretty sure I can live within 250GB, but I don't particularly care to try. I don't think my usage is unreasonable for the size of my household (which usually consists of 7 people).
I'll see if I can skate past this cap on the basis that I've been a Uverse subscriber since the week it became available in my neighborhood (I've always had very good luck with AT&T's customer retention folks), 2 or 3 years ago.
But if push comes to shove, I guess I'll just be shoved: I've still got a coax drop into my wiring closet, so I'll just hop over to Roadrunner (possibly with a business account) and carry on. I was reasonably happy with Roadrunner before, and I suspect I will be again (though I'll miss having the direct access to tier-3 technical support that I get from AT&T).
I'm not philosophically opposed to government intervention and even I think that's a bad idea. The U.S. government has a horrible technology track record. Just see how smooth our roads are and imagine the internet connections like that..
In my section of Ohio, the roads are generally quite good -- particularly those that are federally-funded.
But Michigan is another story, and the West Virginia Turnpike was the lousiest road of that type that I have ever traversed when I drove it a couple of years ago, so perhaps roads aren't the best analogy.
But the water here generally always works (except when it was down for a bit locally to replace a hydrant a year or two ago), and that's a municipal operation.
And the power stays on, which is a rather heavily regulated industry.
I guess my point is this:
Governments can do some stuff, it seems, at least some of the time. I don't know if I want them diddling with my bandwidth, but if my existing U-Verse 12/1.5 service actually ends up being capped, then I think that I would be more swayed toward favoring regulation.
Agreed. I've looked into solar, and even in the best case, it's expensive enough on a household scale that getting off-grid and having it pay for itself is a very far-away proposition: FFS, the roof under the panels is likely to need repaired before the panels themselves have returned their investment... And nevermind ice damage (sure the homeowner's insurance will cover it, but at what cost?) or other acts of God: In Ohio, we gets every sort of weather there is except for hurricanes.
And so, such is the payback period on a big solar array that I often refer to the calculations espoused by solar proponents as being "new math."
That said, solar isn't always big and difficult-to-justify. There are other applications which are far more useful, and some of them are rather small:
I (just the other day) bought a solar panel from Lowe's, for the paltry sum of about $17, despite having shunned solar power for every purpose except for electronic calculators and other toys since I was a kid.
I'm not going to use it to help bring my house off the grid. And I'm not going to use it to solve world hunger.
Instead, I'm going to use it to try to spend less money on car batteries: My daily driver has been consuming batteries about once every 12 months ever since I put a Garmin GPS and keyless entry/remote start into it, and has subsequently twice left me to jump-start the car on very cold winter mornings. (And no, I can't be bothered with turning the GPS off: The time-to-first-fix is sufficiently annoying that such a simple solution isn't really useful to me.)
Sure, I could buy a battery with a longer replacement warranty, but it's a real hassle to get them swapped out, and screwing The Man in this way is (at best) dishonest. I could also get a fancy-pants battery like an Ultima, but that doesn't fit easily into my car, and it's not a solution that is likely to actually save me any money.
For $17, the miniscule several Watts of power produced on the brightest of days should serve well to keep things charged. This will reduce wear on the battery (fewer, or less-intense discharge/charge cycles), and will in turn improve longevity. (I live in the north, and generally park with the rear window facing the south: Rear-deck solar panel == Win.)
I expect to be monetarily paid back within the next year or two, or way more if it means that my existing battery never needs jumpstarted again once it turns cold out and the solar charger prevents me from being late for a job.
I'll likely also take it hiking, if I ever find the time to do any of that again: Keeping a phone charged for the price of a few ounces of photovoltaic strapped to my backpack sounds a whole lot more useful than keeping a bunch of alkalines on hand, and periodic radar maps from the Droid sound like they'd be a really awesome thing in the mountains (along with its battery-powered offerings of proper GPS and a backup magnetic compass in the odd event that I get lost and lose my other compass).
And depending on how my measurements in the car work out, I'll be buying another one for the battery in the lawn mower, since at this price even such a small and cheap battery would be well-served to have a bit of help over the winter and during the days when the grass is growing but isn't ready to cut.
I might even buy one for the 32-year-old Firebird, even though it has no history of battery issues (when I turn it off, it's off), just because it spends most of its days sitting in the driveway and it often goes several weeks (or months, if it's wet/cold out) between runs.
Now, of course: All of these vehicular charging applications would be more-effectively served by just plugging in a small trickle charger whenever they're not in use, but that's a pain in the ass involving extension cords and nonexistent outside outlets, any of which would cost more than this little solar widget did -- and I can't take it with me, plus the installation is would be more difficult and time-consuming than this simpl
Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to stay away from such devices in the future.
I've got a Droid 1, all modded and fucked with and well-understood, but I do not pay attention much to what the rest of the market looks like since this "old" dog still does everything I tell it to do and I'm not in a hurry to buy another $500 toy.:)
Seriously, how much "design" goes into a technology that has been around for 30+ years. You take a platter, mount it on a spindle, spin it, send the data through the same IO standard that has been around for 10 years. What f*cking design is involved? Hard drives ARE obsolete, they do not become obsolete after 3 - 6 months of design. If I open a hard drive in 2011, it looks exactly the same as one in 1990.
Obviously.
We've had quiet, fast 2+ terabyte drives that are light enough to be moved with a single hand, while small enough to fit into a pocket for well over 30 years. Folks need to get with the times, and realize that the design phase of magnetic recording ended decades ago.
On my Uverse connection in Ohio, a traceroute to 192.88.99.1 is only 8 low-latency hops long (including my own router(s)). For me, it ends up in Chicago, and traverses only AT&T pipes.
If I understand the concept correctly, it should operate similarly anywhere on AT&T's network. (I haven't tried, though, and likely won't until one of the Tomato firmwares grows GUI support for IPV6.)
- As part of war reparations specified in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles following Germany's surrender after World War I, Aspirin (along with heroin) lost its status as a registered trademark in France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where it became a generic name. Today, "aspirin" is a generic word in Australia, France, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Jamaica, the Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States. Aspirin, with a capital "A", remains a registered trademark of Bayer in Germany, Canada, Mexico, and in over 80 other countries, where the trademark is owned by Bayer, using acetylsalicylic acid in all markets, but using different packaging and physical aspects for each. -
That's certainly not the usual mechanism for marks to become generic, but it's still the way it is. I've never seen "asaphen" for sale here in the States.
Zipper was once a trademark of BF Goodrich. I don't know why you've clouded things with a mention of Velcro -- it's not clear at all what your verbiage about that is intended to mean.
And I don't know that I've ever ridden on a set of "moving stairs", though I've certainly been ferried up and down by my share of "escalators". If I told someone to "take the moving stairs up to the third floor," I'd expect them to be confused. Perhaps this nomenclature is regional.
Wow. That's a nasty cut. Do you need a Band-Aid? Would a Coke make you feel better?
As you say, genericized trademarks are somewhat common.
The question is: Should we treat the very modern (and probably short-lived in the grand scheme of themes) marks of Google or Facebook any differently than we treat the time-tested genericized trademarks of "aspirin," "escalator," or "zipper?"
No, I don't think it's a difference in bulbs, at least in my case. And I just counted: The 4 bulbs in the kitchen are plain-old 60W incandescents. The living room has 5 regular 60W incandescents. The dining room has six 60W candelabra bulbs, and these are the only ones that are slightly special (being both candelabra, and being sold under the GE Reveal line).
(I purposefully neglected to mention the twelve dimmer-equipped 50W 120V halogens spots that I use in my home office, which also seem to last forever, just to try to keep the playing field level.)
Another anecdote: I lived at my previous house for about five years. I only had three dimmers there: The office had a manual Lutron dimmer after the X10 dimmer I was using melted down inside the wall (!). The living room had a plug in X10 dimmer on a small lamp with a halogen flood, and the ceiling fixture had a hard-wired X10 dimmer switch. All of these, except for the single halogen, were using whatever sort of 60-Watt bulbs -- nothing special.
So, there, it was four bulbs in the office plus three in the living room, minus one halogen, for a total of 6 regular not-special incandescents.
I never changed the bulbs. (Well, I did once for a halloween party, but then I put the same ones back afterward.)
It can be chance, I suppose.
In terms of "seal", I don't think that's it: Either the bulb has a vacuum, or it does not have a vacuum and burns out quickly. A failure or fault in the glass ("seal") would allow the bulb to fill with air long before I would ever get my hands on it, probably even before makes it off the boat from China.
As a driver of vehicles that are 31, 16, and 9 years of age (with 112k, 178k, and 122k miles each, respectively), I must disagree.
Let's take the case of the middle-aged vehicle, with 178,000 miles. It's a fairly modest BMW 325i, though the original owner did load it up pretty good with options. I bought it used for $6,500 about 7 years ago, and in that time I've put about 65,000 miles on it. It's been paid off for awhile.
It costs some money now and then: I estimated that in the 7 years I've driven that car, it's cost me about $3,000 in repairs and maintenance, including consumables like brakes, tires, spark plugs, ignition coils, suspension bits, a different transmission (that was a big one). This number even includes preventative maintenance on some things which are known to be prone to failure on this model, like replacing every single plastic part of the cooling system with updated parts.
Which, you know, is $10,500, for 7 years worth of a very fun, comfortable, and reasonably efficient car. The body is still in decent shape, the paint is pretty good, and the leather is all very nice. It has yet to suffer any of the wiring problems that seem to plague American cars from that time. It costs me an average of $1,500 a year (not counting interest), or about $4 per day.
It's cheaper than buying lunch, and I really enjoy driving the car -- it's worth $4/day just in fun, to me. If I were looking for a vehicle to just get from A to B without excessive joy, I'm reasonably certain that I could cut these numbers in half.
Like you, I've got time and motivation to work on it myself. I have most of the tools on-hand anyway for my day job, and I enjoy turning wrenches from time to time.
In terms of overall reliability, the car has only left me stuck one time in those 7 years (the expansion tank exploded; guess I should've seen that coming as I replaced the rest of the cooling system). I've seen worse reliability out of new cars than this.
Meanwhile, I pity the schlep who paid the $41,000 sticker price for this thing in 1995. I'm sure they had fun with it, too, but they sure did pay for it.
I only bothered upgrading my PowerBook to 10.5 when VLC dropped support for 10.4.
Wait...what?
Why did you have to do that? I'm genuinely curious, as I don't know much about it. (I can document my Mac experience as follows: Boot up free G3 iMac, realize that recent Firefox won't run on the thing and that the included browser was terrible, and then install Ubuntu along with more RAM.)
In the world of Windows, most things work fine whether running Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7. How is 10.4 so different from 10.5 that it would behoove the folks behind VLC (which I believe to be one of the most well-ported players, ever) to make changes?
Thanks for the photos, and a description of your photographic technique (they'd be useless without it).
Based on them, and your knowledgeable persistence, I think I'll pick up a handful of various (good) white LEDs to play with, and maybe do some general lighting with some if I find a combination that I like. (I still have a chunk of the cable that the cat ate, with the white and yellow wires, so I can use that as an acid test.)
For bicycle lighting, I don't really care what color it is: I just need it to be bright enough to be useful, narrow enough to see down the road, and have enough scatter that I can see things beside me as they roll past.
For this, I use a dealextreme 3 Watt flashlight, which comes with a handlebar mount of adequate durability. When improperly adjusted, it's perfectly sufficient to have oncoming cars flash their high beams at me, and seems useful enough when aimed a few degrees lower. (Alternatively, it's also bright enough to navigate even if the HID-equipped behemoth approaching in the distance refuses to dim their lights.)
The thing is very well-constructed: All machined and anodized aluminum, proper gasketing, etc. It was also very, very inexpensive. The only improvement I could see to make on it would be to flatten out the beam a bit, and maybe add an electronic dimmer to slow things down some of the time (like riding in town). It's got a serious-enough LED that the whole thing starts getting warm after a few minutes, and a set of 4 AAA batteries is only good for a few well-lit rides.
At the end of the day, we've still got phospher excitation making most of the light.
With a CFL, it's UV light exciting phosphors for the rest of the spectrum.
With a white LED, it's typically blue light plus red and green phosphors.
A high-temperature LED that can't allow me to easily distinguish between yellow and white wires does not inspire me believe that a lower-temperature LED will somehow make that particular scenario any better: More red and less blue does not magically mean that the LED will produce a particular wavelength of yellow properly.
This is not to say that an LED cannot ever illuminate things properly. It is merely to say that they do not, as it stands.
This is not new science. These issues have been under discussion since phosphorescent fluorescence was first used for general-purpose lighting.
I'd chop an onion under LED lights, mix a drink, or mop the floor. But I'm not wiring color-coded things under LEDs again unless under duress, and even then it will be under protest, or unless the spectrum produced flattens out.
Your anecdotes are interesting, but don't really doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that the lower the voltage feeding a given bulb, the lower the temperature of the filament will be. And the lower the temperature of the filament, the slower the tungsten evaporates. And the slower the tungsten evaporates, the longer the bulb lasts.
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Dear AC,
While I appreciate the fact that you have attempted to consider some of my stated needs, I do note that you've managed to forget one: I'm not plugging my car in. It's too much of a pain in the ass.
As I've already stated, the best solution would be to plug the car into a trickle charger when parked, but I'm not going to do that.
I've thought about it. I've even considered such esoteria as a proper block heater, and a battery warmer. None of this is going to happen, no matter how much sense they might make, just because I cannot be bothered with plugging the car in. I don't want to run the snowblower over the cord, I don't want to snag it with a shovel (or worse, my boot), I don't want to trench a line in to eliminate those issues, and I don't want to forget to plug it in, and I don't want to forget that it's plugged in, and I don't fucking want to plug it in to begin with.
FFS, I spent 6 hours standing on my head on the driver's side floor, in the winter, in the driveway, putting the remote start in, when I could have more easily spent a couple of hours replacing a freeze plug with a block heater that would be better overall for everything and never drain the battery. Why? Because with remote start, I don't have to plug the car in!
Right? Right.
So, solar it is. It won't absolutely eliminate all issues from here to kingdom come -- that is obvious. But it will help some. The question, then, is this: Will it help sufficiently that I shall never suffer with a weak battery come next January? Your maths fail at adequately predicting this, so all I can say is: We'll see.
It's an experiment, and it's an inexpensive one. And if it doesn't work out, at least I've still got a nifty solar panel to play with. For the price, I might even add a second one in parallel if the first seems to almost get the job done (my meter tells no lies), and carry the experiment forward -- there's enough room back there for at least two of them.
Best wishes,
adolf
Alternator is good. It produces rated minimum current at idle speed, and rated maximum current at higher speed, within reasonable tolerances.
It provides proper charging voltage. I check it check it now and then when the car is running using the car's OBC, which has a 4-digit VOM built-in, and which I've sanity-checked against a proper meter.
Perhaps you're from somewhere warmer -- it gets rather cold here, and it only misbehaves when it is cold. When warm, things operate properly all of the time, no matter what manner of crap I leave switched on.
Given these symptoms, it's not an alternator problem: If it were, it would misbehave at all times of the year instead of only when it's been sitting for a day or two (or more) in very cold conditions.
I'd sooner suspect a weak starter that has a hard time making it past the first compression stroke when very cold. Hell, I'd also sooner suspect an oil viscosity problem or a combination of both, since I run 10W-40 in the car.
(But I can't find 5W-40 at all locally, or at a palatable price if I were to order some, and 5W-30 is simply too thin (according to both my observations, and the manufacturer's recommendations) once the oil temperature gets up to nominal for the engine to run properly and smoothly.
And then, even if I did run 5W40, there's the fact that it doesn't last as long due to the way the molecules are chained: The wider the viscosity range, the faster they break down... so even if viscosity were the problem (and I don't think it is), switching to a different grade of oil wouldn't save me any money. And that's the whole point of this little solar project: To save money.)
You know, it might (maybe, just MAYBE) be simple: It might just be because I leave too much shit turned on in the car, and (as stated) am completely unwilling to deviate from that habit. The original battery in the car (of unknown vintage) worked for 4 or 5 years until it presented any difficulties, which is a point in time coinciding with the addition of the aforementioned electronic gadgetry. Subsequent batteries have behaved poorly, while the gadgetry remains the same.
Thanks for chiming in. But next time, please either keep your ill-informed advice to yourself, or at least ask for more details first before insisting on being both matter-of-fact about things and wrong at the same time.
Agreed, absolutely. But it's funny you mention this: My house has recent steel standing seam roof, and I'm currently waiting for a nice enough day to recruit some help to get a ladder up there and figure out why in the fuck it was leaking some during the most recent torrential downpour. :)
Agreed, mostly. I plan on monitoring the voltage periodically, to see that it is sane. I expect that the parasitic load of the car+accessories will balance things out by itself, but if not, then charge controller it is.
My main reservation is cost: This panel produces about half an amp of current, on a clear day with full sun, in the open, at high noon, angled properly, and only then if the wind is from the south and the tide is out.
Shaded by the modest factory tint on the rear window and angled so as to not obscure visibility, it really won't produce much power at all. But every charge controller I've run across, no matter how ratty or cheap, is geared toward many-amps of current, and that's just not a scenario that is going to be happening, and is not one that I'm inclined to pay for.
The panel does have a diode built-in. It's a unitized thing, packaged up by an American company and actually (even at $17) sold at a small premium -- they've thought of at least that much. Hell, for the price, they even include enough wire to be useful, along with a cig plug and a set of battery clamps.
I'll bypass the diode if/when a charge controller happens, just to get another potential 0.7V out of it. But for now, I'm just going to wire it up and see how it behaves... and if I ever see it even think about going above 14.4V, which I don't believe is possible in my scenario, then charge controller it is.
It includes a diode.
Thank you for your concern.
According to my router, I've used a total of about 268GB in the last 30 days on my 12/1.5 Uverse pipe. 226.36 gigs down, 41.68 gigs up.
Much of this is Netflix traffic -- we'll sometimes have 4 or 5 Netflix streams going here at once. A small portion, as indicated by the disparity between down and up, is torrents.
I'm pretty sure I can live within 250GB, but I don't particularly care to try. I don't think my usage is unreasonable for the size of my household (which usually consists of 7 people).
I'll see if I can skate past this cap on the basis that I've been a Uverse subscriber since the week it became available in my neighborhood (I've always had very good luck with AT&T's customer retention folks), 2 or 3 years ago.
But if push comes to shove, I guess I'll just be shoved: I've still got a coax drop into my wiring closet, so I'll just hop over to Roadrunner (possibly with a business account) and carry on. I was reasonably happy with Roadrunner before, and I suspect I will be again (though I'll miss having the direct access to tier-3 technical support that I get from AT&T).
I'm not philosophically opposed to government intervention and even I think that's a bad idea. The U.S. government has a horrible technology track record. Just see how smooth our roads are and imagine the internet connections like that..
In my section of Ohio, the roads are generally quite good -- particularly those that are federally-funded.
But Michigan is another story, and the West Virginia Turnpike was the lousiest road of that type that I have ever traversed when I drove it a couple of years ago, so perhaps roads aren't the best analogy.
But the water here generally always works (except when it was down for a bit locally to replace a hydrant a year or two ago), and that's a municipal operation.
And the power stays on, which is a rather heavily regulated industry.
I guess my point is this:
Governments can do some stuff, it seems, at least some of the time. I don't know if I want them diddling with my bandwidth, but if my existing U-Verse 12/1.5 service actually ends up being capped, then I think that I would be more swayed toward favoring regulation.
Agreed. I've looked into solar, and even in the best case, it's expensive enough on a household scale that getting off-grid and having it pay for itself is a very far-away proposition: FFS, the roof under the panels is likely to need repaired before the panels themselves have returned their investment... And nevermind ice damage (sure the homeowner's insurance will cover it, but at what cost?) or other acts of God: In Ohio, we gets every sort of weather there is except for hurricanes.
And so, such is the payback period on a big solar array that I often refer to the calculations espoused by solar proponents as being "new math."
That said, solar isn't always big and difficult-to-justify. There are other applications which are far more useful, and some of them are rather small:
I (just the other day) bought a solar panel from Lowe's, for the paltry sum of about $17, despite having shunned solar power for every purpose except for electronic calculators and other toys since I was a kid.
I'm not going to use it to help bring my house off the grid. And I'm not going to use it to solve world hunger.
Instead, I'm going to use it to try to spend less money on car batteries: My daily driver has been consuming batteries about once every 12 months ever since I put a Garmin GPS and keyless entry/remote start into it, and has subsequently twice left me to jump-start the car on very cold winter mornings. (And no, I can't be bothered with turning the GPS off: The time-to-first-fix is sufficiently annoying that such a simple solution isn't really useful to me.)
Sure, I could buy a battery with a longer replacement warranty, but it's a real hassle to get them swapped out, and screwing The Man in this way is (at best) dishonest. I could also get a fancy-pants battery like an Ultima, but that doesn't fit easily into my car, and it's not a solution that is likely to actually save me any money.
For $17, the miniscule several Watts of power produced on the brightest of days should serve well to keep things charged. This will reduce wear on the battery (fewer, or less-intense discharge/charge cycles), and will in turn improve longevity. (I live in the north, and generally park with the rear window facing the south: Rear-deck solar panel == Win.)
I expect to be monetarily paid back within the next year or two, or way more if it means that my existing battery never needs jumpstarted again once it turns cold out and the solar charger prevents me from being late for a job.
I'll likely also take it hiking, if I ever find the time to do any of that again: Keeping a phone charged for the price of a few ounces of photovoltaic strapped to my backpack sounds a whole lot more useful than keeping a bunch of alkalines on hand, and periodic radar maps from the Droid sound like they'd be a really awesome thing in the mountains (along with its battery-powered offerings of proper GPS and a backup magnetic compass in the odd event that I get lost and lose my other compass).
And depending on how my measurements in the car work out, I'll be buying another one for the battery in the lawn mower, since at this price even such a small and cheap battery would be well-served to have a bit of help over the winter and during the days when the grass is growing but isn't ready to cut.
I might even buy one for the 32-year-old Firebird, even though it has no history of battery issues (when I turn it off, it's off), just because it spends most of its days sitting in the driveway and it often goes several weeks (or months, if it's wet/cold out) between runs.
Now, of course: All of these vehicular charging applications would be more-effectively served by just plugging in a small trickle charger whenever they're not in use, but that's a pain in the ass involving extension cords and nonexistent outside outlets, any of which would cost more than this little solar widget did -- and I can't take it with me, plus the installation is would be more difficult and time-consuming than this simpl
Ah.
Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to stay away from such devices in the future.
I've got a Droid 1, all modded and fucked with and well-understood, but I do not pay attention much to what the rest of the market looks like since this "old" dog still does everything I tell it to do and I'm not in a hurry to buy another $500 toy. :)
Obviously.
We've had quiet, fast 2+ terabyte drives that are light enough to be moved with a single hand, while small enough to fit into a pocket for well over 30 years. Folks need to get with the times, and realize that the design phase of magnetic recording ended decades ago.
That's weird. My Android phone doesn't even seem to know that Motorola exists, even though they made the handset.
What is this "Motorola account" that you speak of?
Why should someone feel guilty about profit?
Do you feel guilty when you cash your paycheck?
I know it's a kludge, but:
What about 6to4 with anycast?
On my Uverse connection in Ohio, a traceroute to 192.88.99.1 is only 8 low-latency hops long (including my own router(s)). For me, it ends up in Chicago, and traverses only AT&T pipes.
If I understand the concept correctly, it should operate similarly anywhere on AT&T's network. (I haven't tried, though, and likely won't until one of the Tomato firmwares grows GUI support for IPV6.)
Quoth Wikipedia:
-
As part of war reparations specified in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles following Germany's surrender after World War I, Aspirin (along with heroin) lost its status as a registered trademark in France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where it became a generic name. Today, "aspirin" is a generic word in Australia, France, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Jamaica, the Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States. Aspirin, with a capital "A", remains a registered trademark of Bayer in Germany, Canada, Mexico, and in over 80 other countries, where the trademark is owned by Bayer, using acetylsalicylic acid in all markets, but using different packaging and physical aspects for each.
-
That's certainly not the usual mechanism for marks to become generic, but it's still the way it is. I've never seen "asaphen" for sale here in the States.
Zipper was once a trademark of BF Goodrich. I don't know why you've clouded things with a mention of Velcro -- it's not clear at all what your verbiage about that is intended to mean.
And I don't know that I've ever ridden on a set of "moving stairs", though I've certainly been ferried up and down by my share of "escalators". If I told someone to "take the moving stairs up to the third floor," I'd expect them to be confused. Perhaps this nomenclature is regional.
Every legitimate trademark started out as something new. So what?
Do you have point to raise, or are you simply too focused on ad hominem character assassination to bother?
Wow. That's a nasty cut. Do you need a Band-Aid? Would a Coke make you feel better?
As you say, genericized trademarks are somewhat common.
The question is: Should we treat the very modern (and probably short-lived in the grand scheme of themes) marks of Google or Facebook any differently than we treat the time-tested genericized trademarks of "aspirin," "escalator," or "zipper?"
It's not futile. My comment lost two points!
For all you know, this was precisely my goal. ;)
No, I don't think it's a difference in bulbs, at least in my case. And I just counted: The 4 bulbs in the kitchen are plain-old 60W incandescents. The living room has 5 regular 60W incandescents. The dining room has six 60W candelabra bulbs, and these are the only ones that are slightly special (being both candelabra, and being sold under the GE Reveal line).
(I purposefully neglected to mention the twelve dimmer-equipped 50W 120V halogens spots that I use in my home office, which also seem to last forever, just to try to keep the playing field level.)
Another anecdote: I lived at my previous house for about five years. I only had three dimmers there: The office had a manual Lutron dimmer after the X10 dimmer I was using melted down inside the wall (!). The living room had a plug in X10 dimmer on a small lamp with a halogen flood, and the ceiling fixture had a hard-wired X10 dimmer switch. All of these, except for the single halogen, were using whatever sort of 60-Watt bulbs -- nothing special.
So, there, it was four bulbs in the office plus three in the living room, minus one halogen, for a total of 6 regular not-special incandescents.
I never changed the bulbs. (Well, I did once for a halloween party, but then I put the same ones back afterward.)
It can be chance, I suppose.
In terms of "seal", I don't think that's it: Either the bulb has a vacuum, or it does not have a vacuum and burns out quickly. A failure or fault in the glass ("seal") would allow the bulb to fill with air long before I would ever get my hands on it, probably even before makes it off the boat from China.
Better filaments? Maybe... but why?
*shrug*
As a driver of vehicles that are 31, 16, and 9 years of age (with 112k, 178k, and 122k miles each, respectively), I must disagree.
Let's take the case of the middle-aged vehicle, with 178,000 miles. It's a fairly modest BMW 325i, though the original owner did load it up pretty good with options. I bought it used for $6,500 about 7 years ago, and in that time I've put about 65,000 miles on it. It's been paid off for awhile.
It costs some money now and then: I estimated that in the 7 years I've driven that car, it's cost me about $3,000 in repairs and maintenance, including consumables like brakes, tires, spark plugs, ignition coils, suspension bits, a different transmission (that was a big one). This number even includes preventative maintenance on some things which are known to be prone to failure on this model, like replacing every single plastic part of the cooling system with updated parts.
Which, you know, is $10,500, for 7 years worth of a very fun, comfortable, and reasonably efficient car. The body is still in decent shape, the paint is pretty good, and the leather is all very nice. It has yet to suffer any of the wiring problems that seem to plague American cars from that time. It costs me an average of $1,500 a year (not counting interest), or about $4 per day.
It's cheaper than buying lunch, and I really enjoy driving the car -- it's worth $4/day just in fun, to me. If I were looking for a vehicle to just get from A to B without excessive joy, I'm reasonably certain that I could cut these numbers in half.
Like you, I've got time and motivation to work on it myself. I have most of the tools on-hand anyway for my day job, and I enjoy turning wrenches from time to time.
In terms of overall reliability, the car has only left me stuck one time in those 7 years (the expansion tank exploded; guess I should've seen that coming as I replaced the rest of the cooling system). I've seen worse reliability out of new cars than this.
Meanwhile, I pity the schlep who paid the $41,000 sticker price for this thing in 1995. I'm sure they had fun with it, too, but they sure did pay for it.
Wait...what?
Why did you have to do that? I'm genuinely curious, as I don't know much about it. (I can document my Mac experience as follows: Boot up free G3 iMac, realize that recent Firefox won't run on the thing and that the included browser was terrible, and then install Ubuntu along with more RAM.)
In the world of Windows, most things work fine whether running Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7. How is 10.4 so different from 10.5 that it would behoove the folks behind VLC (which I believe to be one of the most well-ported players, ever) to make changes?
Thanks for the photos, and a description of your photographic technique (they'd be useless without it).
Based on them, and your knowledgeable persistence, I think I'll pick up a handful of various (good) white LEDs to play with, and maybe do some general lighting with some if I find a combination that I like. (I still have a chunk of the cable that the cat ate, with the white and yellow wires, so I can use that as an acid test.)
For bicycle lighting, I don't really care what color it is: I just need it to be bright enough to be useful, narrow enough to see down the road, and have enough scatter that I can see things beside me as they roll past.
For this, I use a dealextreme 3 Watt flashlight, which comes with a handlebar mount of adequate durability. When improperly adjusted, it's perfectly sufficient to have oncoming cars flash their high beams at me, and seems useful enough when aimed a few degrees lower. (Alternatively, it's also bright enough to navigate even if the HID-equipped behemoth approaching in the distance refuses to dim their lights.)
The thing is very well-constructed: All machined and anodized aluminum, proper gasketing, etc. It was also very, very inexpensive. The only improvement I could see to make on it would be to flatten out the beam a bit, and maybe add an electronic dimmer to slow things down some of the time (like riding in town). It's got a serious-enough LED that the whole thing starts getting warm after a few minutes, and a set of 4 AAA batteries is only good for a few well-lit rides.
Aw, shucks. You caught us.
Now what?
It's in the usual place with cygwin on my Windows 7 machine:
Adolf@tungsten ~ /dev/null /dev/null
# ls -l
crw-rw-rw- 1 Adolf root 1, 3 2011-02-26 17:00
Sans cygwin, the null device is also usable as nul: .
Many shrugs,
Adolf
Please don't post as AC. Nobody will listen to you.
At the end of the day, we've still got phospher excitation making most of the light.
With a CFL, it's UV light exciting phosphors for the rest of the spectrum.
With a white LED, it's typically blue light plus red and green phosphors.
A high-temperature LED that can't allow me to easily distinguish between yellow and white wires does not inspire me believe that a lower-temperature LED will somehow make that particular scenario any better: More red and less blue does not magically mean that the LED will produce a particular wavelength of yellow properly.
This is not to say that an LED cannot ever illuminate things properly. It is merely to say that they do not, as it stands.
This is not new science. These issues have been under discussion since phosphorescent fluorescence was first used for general-purpose lighting.
I'd chop an onion under LED lights, mix a drink, or mop the floor. But I'm not wiring color-coded things under LEDs again unless under duress, and even then it will be under protest, or unless the spectrum produced flattens out.
[citation needed]
Your anecdotes are interesting, but don't really doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that the lower the voltage feeding a given bulb, the lower the temperature of the filament will be. And the lower the temperature of the filament, the slower the tungsten evaporates. And the slower the tungsten evaporates, the longer the bulb lasts.