#video on sensible-heat thermal #energy storage in a 200-liter drum of sand for heating a greenhouse. The design seems badly botched to me in several different ways: silicone-insulated wires leading into the sand, trying to suck air out of the sand instead of blowing air in, using a plastic sewer pipe to try to get air into the sand, running the heating element off an inverter, using 73 volts dc, no data logging, etc. They never made a followup video in 8 months. #energy-storage
#Xyla-Foxlin #video #toread about #dwelling in a #DIY camper
#Video #toread about backpacking with “the most futuristic” gear
#News #video from today (from #MS-NOW, a “Versant Media LLC” brand, which turns out to be MSNBC renamed) about how #Iran left one of the #USA’s destroyers without power for four days, and the carrier #USS-Lincoln has run out of supplies, because Pete Hegseth hid (?!) the fact that Iran destroyed the US’s main resupply base “in the Gulf” (Persian, I suppose?).
#News about conditions on the #USA’s #USS-Lincoln in the #Iran war: “Conditions on US aircraft carrier at sea for more than 250 days raise alarms: Thousands of US military members who have lived aboard an aircraft carrier for more than 250 days are reportedly contending with food shortages, broken plumbing and exhaustion, leading lawmakers to demand answers from the Pentagon and pressure the #Trump administration over the Iran war.” The BBC quotes a letter from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal to Secretary of Defense Hegseth: “Shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.” And California Congressman Mike Levin: “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”
#MSNBC is now "MS NOW"
Somewhat debatable #Google acquisition #history focused on companies whose product Google canceled. It lists #Angstro, “Gecko Design, Rangespan, Jetpac, Angstro, SocialDeck, Katango, and Meebo were also classic acqui-hires,” but Angstro didn’t really have a product at that point; we had a very impressive demo but I doubt we had a whole dozen of users.
FingerWorks was the #multitouch startup that was going bankrupt selling a multitouch keyboard in 02005 when #Apple bought them in order to bring out a multitouch screen on the #iPhone. #history
#Mastodon post by Damien Miller showing his radioactivity counter consisting of “a BC-412 plastic scintillator and an imperfectly-matched PMT pulled from some eBay scrap,” tested with a thoriated TIG rod. #scouting #bootstrapping
#MJD’s seven favorite books: Roget’s Thesaurus, Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Boccaccio’s Decameron, From Frege to Gödel, Orbis Sensualium Pictis (or Pictus?), the NIV of the Bible, the Duc de Berry’s The Belles Heures
Tyler Vigen’s list of spurious correlations, such as the very tight correlation between bachelor’s degrees awarded in psychology and the number of groundskeepers in Utah (R² = 0.980). #humor #statistics #epistemology
#news #video of Gandalfs protesting outside Peter #Thiel’s house in Palermo in #Argentina #humor
#news #video of Gandalfs protesting outside Peter #Thiel’s house in Palermo in #Argentina, with more context. It was yesterday. They were protesting that Thiel bought 1% of Vista Energy, the Vaca Muerta oil company. #humor
#Harrison-Low’s Zulip site for his #robotics work #toread
#video by #Harrison-Low on his jugglebot triumph. He finally switched from kevlar kite string to #UHMWPE for the linear actuators. Also he switched to #ODrive Pro electronics to control the motors. Featuring a #JLCPCB #3D-printing ad, sigh. Oh, also he burned out the hand motor because a sensor cable came unplugged. #robotics
#video #toread about #Ukraine Special Operations Center OMEGA’s non-flying #weaponry and logistics #drones in #Ukraine, and OMEGA’s leader Oksana “Oksi” Volodymyrivna.
#Firefox still supports #uBlock Origin, but #Microsoft Edge is dropping support for it, by following #Google in dropping support for Manifest V2.
Matthew Green on how #security is changing dramatically because of #AI, which might mean the #USA stops being able to spy on everybody: “Over the next two years, major pieces of software are likely to run out of remotely-exploitable bugs.” This seems dubious to me.
#PHK says we’re about to get “surveillance too cheap to meter”, specifically because of how telcos work and how #Apple and #Google work. “Either we slap a stiff tax on surveillance data, or we learn to love the panopticon.” #human-rights
"LuaCAD" is like #OpenSCAD but using #Lua instead of the OpenSCAD language. #3D #toread
#Video #toread about building with "lavacrete", which I guess is crushed scoria and quicklime?
#Video #toread of #Trybals watching Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” video
#Video #toread of #Xiaoma taking a Waorani tribesman to Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Disneyland (HK has a 90-day visa waiver for Ecuadoreans)