Computer memory #pricing now shows that DDR4-3200 2x8GB has gone from US$62 a year ago to US$150 today, while DDR5-4800 2x16GB has gone from about US$90 to about US$420
Crucial 128GB DDR5 5600 MHz SO-DIMM Memory Kit (2 x 64GB) #pricing of “$1,111.99”. Also apparently PayPal offers “4 interest-free payments of $278.00”, even though B & H Photo is not in Argentina.
22-page #Stroke-Styles #paper #PDF on #skeletonization of #fonts
#faircompanies #video #toread on a solo budget off-grid homestead #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on Nordic prefab homes from a factory ruin #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on moving into a backyard cottage #dwelling
#faircompanies #video on a French (?) couple living in an unusual #dwelling in the village of Maina in Greece, which is almost abandoned (two inhabitants); the café closed in the 01950s as most people moved to Athens. They’ve built wooden “bedroom box” housing inside the old stone buildings that can be easily disassembled and moved elsewhere. “It’s between [a piece of] furniture and [a] mobile structure.” A flat roof gathers drinking water; rocks in one corner hold down metal screening to keep leaves out of the water tank, which seems to be a new plastic tank. They converted the old egg-shaped cistern into a (nonportable) house, building a metal structure inside its waterproof plaster to hold the floor, shelves, etc. Condensation has created rust spots on some of the internal metal structure where it wasn’t painted. Inspirational!
#faircompanies #video #toread on Thomas Dambo’s abandoned troll homestead #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on a military couple’s self-sufficient homestead inside a greenhouse #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on a Spanish couple’s “hermit homestead” for US$25K #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on a self-built fully #underground #dome #dwelling
#faircompanies #video on Zach and Allison Anderson’s “#underground maze of light-filled earth homes” #dwelling, which is mostly not really underground. The above-ground part looks magical, #building with twisted #ferrocement trees for pillars and a central tower, with curved raised-bed gardens on some of the roof. Totally based on ferrocement. Most beds are inside apses behind archways in the walls of bedrooms, sleeping niches with a bed-height floor. Footage is included of spraying the “falseworks” of ½" rebar and slab mesh and expanded metal lath with shotcrete after plastering one side with fiber-enriched plaster. Rainfall from the top is collected through a 3 “inch” pipe into a huge donut-shaped underground cistern (60000 “gallons”). For tax purposes most of the house is categorized as “landscaping” because it’s not climate-controlled. Largely inspired by Forestiere’s underground gardens. The bookshelves on the spiral staircase up to the vault house contain Robert Ludlum, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Jo Nesbø, Andy Weir, James Patterson, and Kate Atkinson. His main bed is on a balcony near the top of the tower, “high enough off the ground that there are no mosquitoes”. For outer walls with sandstone-like veins through them, with the appearance of wind-eroded strata, they built custom trowels to plaster it on there, then used an “organic patina acid” to darken some of the strata after it cured. Elsewhere he “pivoted” his ferrocement around an existing oak grove in order to incorporate it into the living space. There are lots of bookshelves that are actually doors. Also there is a chicken coop. His term for the standard superadobe geometry is “lancet dome”, like a lancet arch.
#faircompanies #video #toread on a “Lego-style” apartment #dwelling in Barcelona
#faircompanies #video #toread on Felice Cohen’s 90-square-foot “micro studio” in NYC #dwelling
#faircompanies 10-minute #video on “Lulu’s” shipping container tiny home and cargo trailer bedroom. #dwelling She cut holes for the windows with a “jigsaw”, consuming “a bunch of blades per opening”. She framed the inside with 2×4s and what she says is “denim insulation” under the drywall, plus bubble wrap around the edges to cut down on “a condensation issue”. The tongue-and-groove floor (wide pine boards with tatami on top) is sitting on styrofoam insulation. The ceiling is plywood she wants to replace. Later she added bedrooms outside on a flatbed trailer, in the form of basically a wooden shed. She’s from #Argentina and lived for a year on a boat.
#faircompanies #video #toread on Kristie Wolfe’s Washington #underground home. #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on a #dwelling in the California redwoods that’s been #off-grid for 50 years
#faircompanies #video on Paul Elkins #dwelling in a US$150 bike camper. It weighs 60 “pounds”, made out of Coroplast recycled from political campaign signs, sort of Airstream-shaped but only as tall as his recumbent bike. Aluminized bubble insulation is duct-taped to the inside to keep it warm in the winter. A frame made of 1" × 2" wood under the floor connects to the wheels. He sewed the Coroplast panels together at the edges with zip ties, then duct-taped over them. He got the (two) wheels from a US$20 garage-sale bike. He has a tiny single-burner propane camp stove and kitchen sink inside; the sink is a bread-loaf pan, with a glass water jug above it for water. He hasn’t really taken it on the road yet, just near where he lives.
#faircompanies #video #toread on Graham Hill’s “morphing” micro-apartment #dwelling
#faircompanies #video #toread on a 24m² “mini-piso transformable” #dwelling in Barcelona
#faircompanies #video #toread on a 12m² micro-apartment #dwelling in Paris
#Farage is trying to revoke #Alaa’s British citizenship and get him deported back to #Egypt. #UK #politics
#news about #immigration: many O-1 visa applications from “influencers”, esports players, and #OnlyFans models, presumably in many cases because they want to take a trip to the #USA to shoot a video. Canadian Julia Ain, Frenchman Luca Mornet, Russian Israeli chess player Dina Belenkaya, Indian Darshan Magdum, etc.
#USA #immigration discrimination #Trump #news
#USA #immigration #human-rights #news: “Atlanta journalist says he ‘won’t be the only’ one deported by #Trump officials: Emmy award-winner Mario Guevara warns administration ‘has the power’ after he was arrested and sent to El Salvador. (...) three days after Guevara’s interview, the British journalist Sami Hamdi was detained by federal immigration authorities.” #censorship
#news about how maybe people maybe aren’t full of #microplastics and the dozens of studies saying so were just bad lab technique
#Scott-Helme computes that his #UK #solar #energy setup (three #Tesla Powerwalls for £25420 and a £13940 Perlight #Enphase #photovoltaic array of 4.2kWp, which is US$18753 or US$4.46/Wp, roughly 45 times current wholesale solar module #pricing) saved him £3078 in 02025, which at £39360 would be a 7.8% return on investment during that year. But he only had “export capabilities” for 7 months, and he anticipates that the ROI would have been 9.2% if he’d had it all year. No thoughts on what the ROI will be when utility-scale solar drops the cost of grid power and eliminates his export capabilities.
#HN comments on #solar #energy #pricing pointing out that #Scott-Helme’s setup is amazingly overpriced, in part because of #Tesla and predicting a “bloodbath in that market in the next years”. Also £25420 for three 13.5kWh Powerwalls is £628/kWh or US$840/kWh (my calculations) while actual #pricing of #batteries are US$60/kWh and UL-listed 16kWh prebuilt battery packs are US$3300 (US$210/kWh). “scarecrowbob” reports, “I am writing this off grid, using about 15kwh of #batteries and a $1200 (6kw) inverter. My entire system puls [plus] panels and racking those panels, plus wiring some un-powered shacks was about $10k.” “jstsch” reports, “Just received a 15kWh battery from China. A ‘Humsienk’. Combined it with a GroWatt SPA3000TL-BL inverter. Total price, 1600 euros. So close to the magical 100 euros per kWh. Driving it with some interesting combinations of Raspberry PI’s and serial interfaces and custom written Go code, but it works... :)” “Dylan1312” confirms. 1600€ is US$1900, so that’s US$125/kWh, less than a sixth of the Powerwall price. Meanwhile, “bob1029” says, “The rooftop solar game in Texas is strongly into scam territory.”
RUiXU (“pronounced /rʊk su/”) #pricing of #batteries is US$3299 for a “51.2V 314Ah 16kWh Battery” rated “UL1973,9540A,9540,CEC,SGIP,” “IP65 waterproof,” and 9500 cycles. On casters. 280mm × 924mm × 594mm. 137kg. That’s US$206/kWh, US$57/MJ, and 420kJ/kg. Inverter not included.
#news from #Dilbert creator Scott Adams in February 02023: “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f*** away. Wherever you have to go, just get away because there’s no fixing this [26% of black people in Rasmussen Reports’s poll disagreeing with the phrase ‘it’s okay to be white’]. You just have to escape, so that’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood where, you know, I have a very low Black population.” #history #racism
From September: “Rooftop #solar is a fixed-income alternative yielding ~10% ... A solar installation with a six-year payback period generates returns comparable to high-yield corporate bonds. Better yet, these returns come with unique tax advantages and inflation protection. For investors seeking fixed-income, solar deserves serious consideration as part of a diversified portfolio.” #energy #photovoltaic #finance
#NREL’s “PVWatts” #calculator for #solar #energy investment returns
#NREL #news release from 02017: “Researchers at NREL Find Fewer Failures of PV Panels and Different Degradation Modes in Systems Installed after 2000 (...) Installations between 2000 and 2015 exhibited a median failure rate of 5 panels out of 10,000 annually, while for those panels installed between 1980 and 2000 the rate was twice as high. (...) An article detailing the findings of the research, Photovoltaic Failure and Degradation Modes, appears in the journal Progress in Photovoltaics. The authors are Dirk C. Jordan, Timothy J. Silverman, John H. Wohlgemuth, and Sarah R. Kurtz from NREL and Kaitlyn T. VanSant from the Colorado School of Mines.” #solar #photovoltaic #energy
how Assistant Professor Kangjie Lu and his grad students Aditya Pakki and Qiushi Wu got the University of Minnesota banned from contributing to #Linux in 02021. #history
#video about a school bus converted into a mobile #dwelling with a crane and a shop which “may survive the end times” #clickbait #toread
#Bezier curves with de Casteljau’s #algorithms by #Wildberger. #video #toread
#Ferrocement #video on “free-forming” a 20-“foot” “bond-beam” for a castle #dwelling. He’s backing his ferrocement with plywood forms while it cures I guess? With just a single layer of expanded sheet metal “lath” to hold the mortar together, with rebar (sometimes “remesh”) to give it more shape. He’s trying to make the bond beam by using one side of an existing wooden/OSB I-beam (pre-consumer architectural salvage) as a form, which he eventually removes once the cement has set. It seems like he’s using plywood/OSB “forms” for one to three days to hold a first coat of mortar together, and then removing them to apply a coat from the opposite side. Also he’s eating green plums off his plum tree.
#Ferrocement tunnels #video #toread
how file #locking is broken in #POSIX
#video on “can I make a #precision component from scrap metal?” by #not-an-engineer. #hoarding #toread
#video #toread by #Coding-Adventure about analyzing #audio with #DSP
#video on making #precision #actuators from cheap stepper #motors instead of US$1 hobby servos to position an array of mirrors to paint light on a wall. Actually he just bought 40¢ stepper-based linear actuators off AliExpress, apparently leftover parts from obsolete cellphones, which turned out to move about 3.2μm per step; he reflow-soldered their flat-flex cables onto custom breakout boards with solder paste and a heat gun. Lacking closed-loop control, he homes the actuators by overdriving them in one direction plus about 200 steps, which stalls the motor but not for long enough to damage it. #hardware #electronics
#Tsoding #screencast #video about #Sean-Barrett’s single-file header-only #C libraries like stb_image_write. Mostly remedial C.
#Geopolymers #video featuring Davidovits himself, from “2024 Geopolymer Camp”. He presents a lot of scanning electron #microscopy to support his claims about the chemical structures of geopolymers, but the flexural strength is still very low (apparently a new metakaolin boosts it from 10 MPa to 30 MPa) and I would have liked to see something like NMR spectroscopy or Raman spectroscopy or FT-IR spectroscopy to support his claims that the geopolymer structure is covalent rather than ionic (which he never really comes out and says explicitly). He goes on to try to sell his new book about ancient Bolivian and Easter Island geopolymers.
#Geopolymers #paper #PDF #toread citing NMR spectroscopy results