Use power tool batteries. The bigger ones have plenty of energy (18V 5Ah). For many people it's perfectly fine to share a battery between the UPS and an infrequently used drill, which amortizes costs. Ideally one of the tool companies would even pick up manufacturing. There are some multi-battery tools already if you want to really have fun.
Cordless power tools typically use interchangeable lithium ion battery packs. There's a few different systems out there from Ryobi, Ridgid, Milwaukee, Makita, etc. It's not just impact hammers and drills; there are fans, radios, lights, hedge trimmers, garage door openers. Some of these companies support dozens of tools. Many of these tools see daily use by professionals, but a lot are sold to home owners and hobbyists where most of their time is spent sitting on a shelf. The battery packs are reasonably big, 70 watt-hours are not uncommon.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't offer a combination charger + uninterruptible power supply as part of their pantheon of tools. That way these battery packs could be doing something useful by providing emergency backup power to an electrical device, when they aren't being actively used in another tool.
Residential heliostats. We have two. Natural light is awesome. . Multisplit air heat pumps. After adding insulation and reducing air leaks, the new heating system as 4 zones. We can heat the whole place on the coldest day with about 48 kilowatts of heat, which is less than the flue loss on our old propane furnace.
Attic trapdoor tent, to reduce one source of air leaks. I feel like camping any time I have to unzip and enter the attic.
Serious gutters. I really wish we had aluminum instead of the rusty steel, but more importantly for us are the hardcore micromesh guards that finally, finally, finally will keep out the needles.
I'm also loving the new 10 year battery only smoke detectors. Anything that cuts down maintenance is a win.
I've found these tools useful, with an honorable mention to gnupdf. I've never used it personally, but the code looks pretty solid. That said, when I really needed to produce great multilingual PDF I pulled out the PDF spec, gritted my teeth, and generated it directly.
leptonica - turn images into PDF tesseract - turn images into searchable PDF qpdf - linearize PDF for random access over HTTP jhove - basic validation jhove-pdf-a - validation with better compatibility guarantees pdftk - command line tool for splicing pages together or apart ttx/FontTools - tool for modifying custom fonts reportlab - python library, easy to use but works best with Latin scripts
Serious answer. An optical fiber is only transparent for a limited range of colors. As soon as you modulate a single color (monochromatic laser beam) the resulting light beam is by definition no longer monochromatic. Here's a fun, beginner oriented book on the topic.
You have chosen to measure life in terms of personal dollars; nothing I write is going to change that. But I have a different perspective. A revolutionary jet engine would be fantastic. It goes way beyond corporate profit. A better engine contributes to air travel; making it faster or safer or more accessible. Something to be very proud of.
This is an age old issue. For example during the Dutch Tulip Bubble in the 1600's people were pissed off that too much energy and wealth was wasted in the hands of (parastic / useless / unproductive) tulip speculators. I'm also an MIT engineering graduate, around the time of the first dotcom bubble. Some of my talented technical friends spent their precious time chasing dollars, which at the time meant selling knicknacks over the internet. Others stuck with engineering and did just fine, including the aero-astro folks. If you are facing this decision, think long and hard what is really important. We are only on this planet for a short number of years, spend it wisely.
Use Advanced Search and restrict to Full view only. Here is a scan from the New York Public Library. Speaking of popular fads, there's also a version for people with 3D glasses
I've raced for about 20 years in cross country skiing (starting with high school, then at the NCAA level in college, and now in citizen races) and have probably entered well over 100 events. More importantly I've known a lot of racers over the years. I've never, ever heard of knee damage being a common problem for cross country skiers. In fact, cross country skiing is one of the more gentle sports on joints, especially compared to long distance running which has a lot of pounding. There are tons of old people (70+) competing in citizen races, and they are often quite fast. Even the skating technique is not so troublesome, although it is a little more wearing than diagonal stride over very long distances. Are you thinking of something in particular that causes knee damage?
If Google wants to be really clever, they could make sure there is support for scanning in the exact same specification. Historically there has been a huge imbalance between paper sources (printers) and paper sinks (scanners), so it's no surprise that ideas like the paperless office never took off. However, in the last five years, fantastic scanning equipment has reached consumer availability; for example the Fujitsu Scanscap S1500 has an automated document feeder and has dual sensor bars, which allows duplex scanning without weird paper paths and associated jams. It works great for evaporating large piles of random paper from financial documents to old notes from school to obscure manuals for equipment. Hopefully Google will step up to the plate, make Scanning a first class citizen of this initiative, and finally fix the historical imbalance. This will - quite literally - have tons of impact on people's lives. I care enough that I'm willing to help make it happen.
Thumbs up from this electrical engineer. Here's a portion of the Amazon description:
It may be the only "introduction to electronics books" with back cover comments by Dave Barry, Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, and George Garrett, as well as recomendations from Robert Hazen, Bob Mostafapour, Dr. Roger Young, Dr. Wayne Green, Scott Rundle, Brian Battles, Michelle Guido, Herb Reichert and Emil Venere. As Monitoring Times said, "Perhaps the best electronics book ever. If you'd like to learn about basic electronics but haven't been able to pull it off, get There Are No Electrons. Just trust us. Get the book."
At the very least, the standards body should require HD Photo to fall under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. I'm also not thrilled about the anti-GPL clause in the devkit; it will cause interoperability problems with Open Source or Free Software and ISO should get that clause removed before approving.
My personal favorite is to swap a pair of disks in and out of a super-redundant RAID every week. Simple, predictable, and works fine in the face of lots of small files.
Thanks for all the sanity checks! The very simple lex program I whipped up to extract reserved words was way too simple. First, a variable like "automobile" was causing a false positive for "auto". Second, I had only run on.c files, and not.h files which explains the lack of typedefs. Finally, while I remembered to strip the comments, I'd forgotten to take care of quotations thus getting false positives from things like char *foo = "By default run on auto pilot"; Fixing all this gives much saner results.
950 if 626 return 482 static 331 for 272 const 269 void 213 else 132 char 113 case 112 break 89 typedef 82 extern 44 int 43 sizeof 41 enum 39 struct 35 switch 31 default 23 while 11 unsigned 5 float 3 signed 2 short 1 long 1 double 1 do
Get a computer with Debian attached to a network
and projector. Then take software installation requests from the crowd. For example, when some says "computational linguistics" hunt through the package listings and apt-get install the closest program - probably mmorph in this example. Encourage bizarre requests and surprise yourself at how much wild and crazy open source software is at your fingertips.
PS. If anyone asks how it works, say the computer is downloading knowledge from 'The Matrix' and refer to the helicopter scene in the movie.
Because heaven forbids mailing list archive software offers standardized navigation...
I help run The Mail Archive which is one of the larger mailing list archive sites, covering several thousand lists. What specifically would you like to see improved about navigation?
Perhaps I wasn't clear. Linux works on all sorts of hardware, and a huge part of the development effort for Linux has been writing and testing thousands of device drivers. Solaris doesn't have nearly as much support, especially for oddball devices. If the Solaris license was GPL compatible, I think there would be quite a bit of activity porting Linux drivers over to Solaris. Without a GPL compatible license, I think Solaris will have significantly less hardware support in the long term, especially for the random hardware a developer might have sitting around at home. Resulting in a smaller userbase, smaller developer base, and less developer mindshare than Solaris might otherwise have enjoyed.
I personally feel the benefits GPL compatibility (including not irritating people about license fragmentation) outweighs the risk that Linux might pick up a few tricks from Solaris during cross pollination. It's kind of like a swimming pool - diving into the deep end may be scary, but it is actually a lot safer than diving into the shallow end.
How can developers embrace Solaris if they can't run it? Without a GPL compatible license, Solaris can't cross pollinate with Linux for device drivers.
# du -s kernel-source-2.6.11/drivers kernel-source-2.6.11 92300 kernel-source-2.6.11/drivers 223937 kernel-source-2.6.11
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. The DeWalt Portable Power Station is really, really close. I have no idea why they don't allow it to run like a UPS.
Use power tool batteries. The bigger ones have plenty of energy (18V 5Ah). For many people it's perfectly fine to share a battery between the UPS and an infrequently used drill, which amortizes costs. Ideally one of the tool companies would even pick up manufacturing. There are some multi-battery tools already if you want to really have fun.
https://www.ryobitools.com/pow...
https://www.ryobitools.com/out...
Cordless power tools typically use interchangeable lithium ion battery packs. There's a few different systems out there from Ryobi, Ridgid, Milwaukee, Makita, etc. It's not just impact hammers and drills; there are fans, radios, lights, hedge trimmers, garage door openers. Some of these companies support dozens of tools. Many of these tools see daily use by professionals, but a lot are sold to home owners and hobbyists where most of their time is spent sitting on a shelf. The battery packs are reasonably big, 70 watt-hours are not uncommon.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't offer a combination charger + uninterruptible power supply as part of their pantheon of tools. That way these battery packs could be doing something useful by providing emergency backup power to an electrical device, when they aren't being actively used in another tool.
Residential heliostats. We have two. Natural light is awesome.
.
Multisplit air heat pumps. After adding insulation and reducing air leaks, the new
heating system as 4 zones. We can heat the whole place on the coldest day
with about 48 kilowatts of heat, which is less than the flue loss on our old
propane furnace.
Attic trapdoor tent, to reduce one source of air leaks. I feel like camping any
time I have to unzip and enter the attic.
Serious gutters. I really wish we had aluminum instead of the rusty steel, but
more importantly for us are the hardcore micromesh guards that finally, finally,
finally will keep out the needles.
I'm also loving the new 10 year battery only smoke detectors. Anything that cuts
down maintenance is a win.
I forgot to mention PDF rendering engines. Neither support the entire spec, nor do I blame them.
poppler - widely used
pdfium - high performance, recently open sourced
I've found these tools useful, with an honorable mention to gnupdf. I've never used it personally, but the code looks pretty solid. That said, when I really needed to produce great multilingual PDF I pulled out the PDF spec, gritted my teeth, and generated it directly.
leptonica - turn images into PDF
tesseract - turn images into searchable PDF
qpdf - linearize PDF for random access over HTTP
jhove - basic validation
jhove-pdf-a - validation with better compatibility guarantees
pdftk - command line tool for splicing pages together or apart
ttx/FontTools - tool for modifying custom fonts
reportlab - python library, easy to use but works best with Latin scripts
Clock speed can be quadrupled by switching to a pipeline architecture. See 24:28 of the video.
Serious answer. An optical fiber is only transparent for a limited range of colors. As soon as you modulate a single color (monochromatic laser beam) the resulting light beam is by definition no longer monochromatic. Here's a fun, beginner oriented book on the topic.
You have chosen to measure life in terms of personal dollars; nothing I write is going to change that. But I have a different perspective. A revolutionary jet engine would be fantastic. It goes way beyond corporate profit. A better engine contributes to air travel; making it faster or safer or more accessible. Something to be very proud of.
This is an age old issue. For example during the Dutch Tulip Bubble in the 1600's people were pissed off that too much energy and wealth was wasted in the hands of (parastic / useless / unproductive) tulip speculators. I'm also an MIT engineering graduate, around the time of the first dotcom bubble. Some of my talented technical friends spent their precious time chasing dollars, which at the time meant selling knicknacks over the internet. Others stuck with engineering and did just fine, including the aero-astro folks. If you are facing this decision, think long and hard what is really important. We are only on this planet for a short number of years, spend it wisely.
Use Advanced Search and restrict to Full view only. Here is a scan from the New York Public Library. Speaking of popular fads, there's also a version for people with 3D glasses
I've raced for about 20 years in cross country skiing (starting with high school, then at the NCAA level in college, and now in citizen races) and have probably entered well over 100 events. More importantly I've known a lot of racers over the years. I've never, ever heard of knee damage being a common problem for cross country skiers. In fact, cross country skiing is one of the more gentle sports on joints, especially compared to long distance running which has a lot of pounding. There are tons of old people (70+) competing in citizen races, and they are often quite fast. Even the skating technique is not so troublesome, although it is a little more wearing than diagonal stride over very long distances. Are you thinking of something in particular that causes knee damage?
If Google wants to be really clever, they could make sure there is support for scanning in the exact same specification. Historically there has been a huge imbalance between paper sources (printers) and paper sinks (scanners), so it's no surprise that ideas like the paperless office never took off. However, in the last five years, fantastic scanning equipment has reached consumer availability; for example the Fujitsu Scanscap S1500 has an automated document feeder and has dual sensor bars, which allows duplex scanning without weird paper paths and associated jams. It works great for evaporating large piles of random paper from financial documents to old notes from school to obscure manuals for equipment. Hopefully Google will step up to the plate, make Scanning a first class citizen of this initiative, and finally fix the historical imbalance. This will - quite literally - have tons of impact on people's lives. I care enough that I'm willing to help make it happen.
Thumbs up from this electrical engineer. Here's a portion of the Amazon description:
It may be the only "introduction to electronics books" with back cover comments by Dave Barry, Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, and George Garrett, as well as recomendations from Robert Hazen, Bob Mostafapour, Dr. Roger Young, Dr. Wayne Green, Scott Rundle, Brian Battles, Michelle Guido, Herb Reichert and Emil Venere. As Monitoring Times said, "Perhaps the best electronics book ever. If you'd like to learn about basic electronics but haven't been able to pull it off, get There Are No Electrons. Just trust us. Get the book."
Use your favorite text editor (like vi or emacs) and share a terminal using GNU screen in multi-user mode.
It's called HotCaptcha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Photo#Licensing
At the very least, the standards body should require HD Photo
to fall under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. I'm also
not thrilled about the anti-GPL clause in the devkit; it will cause
interoperability problems with Open Source or Free Software and ISO
should get that clause removed before approving.
DataGlyph is specifically designed to be both machine readable and look good to people.
My personal favorite is to swap a pair of disks in and out of a super-redundant RAID
/proc/mdstat
/dev/sdg1 on /backup type reiserfs (ro)
every week. Simple, predictable, and works fine in the face of lots of small files.
# cat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sdf1[6] sdb1[4] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sde1[1]
488383936 blocks [6/4] [_UUUU_]
[============>........] recovery = 61.6% (301244544/488383936) finish=231.7min speed=13455K/sec
# mount | grep backup
Thanks for all the sanity checks! The very simple lex program I whipped .c files, and not .h files which explains the lack of
up to extract reserved words was way too simple. First, a variable like
"automobile" was causing a false positive for "auto". Second, I had
only run on
typedefs. Finally, while I remembered to strip the comments, I'd forgotten
to take care of quotations thus getting false positives from things like
char *foo = "By default run on auto pilot"; Fixing all this gives much
saner results.
950 if
626 return
482 static
331 for
272 const
269 void
213 else
132 char
113 case
112 break
89 typedef
82 extern
44 int
43 sizeof
41 enum
39 struct
35 switch
31 default
23 while
11 unsigned
5 float
3 signed
2 short
1 long
1 double
1 do
I'd love to see how one of my programs (stats below) compares
to the, uh, national average.
1222 if
638 return
482 static
413 for
399 int
217 const
201 else
194 void
128 char
115 case
112 break
55 default
43 sizeof
37 do
35 switch
27 enum
24 struct
23 while
15 float
14 typedef
10 auto
7 unsigned
6 extern
1 long
Here's a list of book scanning equipment. I've seen the one from Kirtas in action, it's fun to watch.
Get a computer with Debian attached to a network and projector. Then take software installation requests from the crowd. For example, when some says "computational linguistics" hunt through the package listings and apt-get install the closest program - probably mmorph in this example. Encourage bizarre requests and surprise yourself at how much wild and crazy open source software is at your fingertips.
PS. If anyone asks how it works, say the computer is downloading knowledge from 'The Matrix' and refer to the helicopter scene in the movie.
I help run The Mail Archive which is one of the larger mailing list archive sites, covering several thousand lists. What specifically would you like to see improved about navigation?
Perhaps I wasn't clear. Linux works on all sorts of hardware, and a huge part of the development effort for Linux has been writing and testing thousands of device drivers. Solaris doesn't have nearly as much support, especially for oddball devices. If the Solaris license was GPL compatible, I think there would be quite a bit of activity porting Linux drivers over to Solaris. Without a GPL compatible license, I think Solaris will have significantly less hardware support in the long term, especially for the random hardware a developer might have sitting around at home. Resulting in a smaller userbase, smaller developer base, and less developer mindshare than Solaris might otherwise have enjoyed.
I personally feel the benefits GPL compatibility (including not irritating people about license fragmentation) outweighs the risk that Linux might pick up a few tricks from Solaris during cross pollination. It's kind of like a swimming pool - diving into the deep end may be scary, but it is actually a lot safer than diving into the shallow end.