I agree on modern Mac's being difficult to repair. I also will say that back a decade or two ago, it was likely you'd need to repair your computer after four years. Now, a four year old Macbook Air still feels brand new to me.
Any more context on this? We've got copper AT&T DSL as our only option, besides Starlink. Have been trying to work with the county, look for grants, etc to present to a local ISP who's mentioned interest.
So I know part of the money was through the state. It was matching funds for federal dollars. I think it was through rural development, which is closed, but I'm not absolutely sure. I'll check with my neighbor (works for ISP) tomorrow to see if he knows.
To be honest, we approached the ISP, who was offering fiber in a town 45 minutes away. They said if we could get sign ups at least every half mile, on average, they would make it happen. We had the signatures when they got the grant, so it was sort of a wasted effort on our part.
I'll message here tomorrow if I figure it out though.
Thanks! Yeah, we have a local ISP that has laid fiber in other communities where they could get grants (namely native communities), but they are only doing WISP in our community right now, and it won't service about half the homes here.
I confirmed that the majority of the funding was through federal rural development grants that aren't open anymore. Sorry about that! Now it's just low interest loans that are available to isp's.
What state are you in? There are quite a number of state grants, depending on where you are.
For real though. Talk to one of their planners and see if they have a number of necessary sign-ups. We did a signature campaign and had what we needed before the grant existed. They had committed to our stretch of fiber before they had the grant, we just had to all sign contacts for services. It took a year or so of knocking on doors. And that was to run the line about 40 miles.
I would love a semi-automated way to generate a power-profile for ESP-Home. Find a smart room heater with 3 levels perhaps, and use home assistant to gather values at "Off", "1/3", "2/3", "3/3", with a downstream power plug as reference (and a known consumption of the downstream plug as well).
So I can just take my EspHome plug and very quickly generate a standard set of mapping values for voltage and wattage.
The easy way is with a resistive space heater and a multimeter. I keep a big, dumb, thrifted "oil-filled radiator" space heater around just to use as a big, safe 3-speed dummy load with reasonably OK repeatability (nichrome heaters do not have perfect temperature coefficients, but they're stable-enough that using them to measure temperature quickly begins to be a non-starter).
The level of integration you choose is entirely up to you. I don't do this kind of thing much, so I'm OK with kludging together a test rig as-needed with a handheld meter and tearing it apart when I'm done. This makes good use of my own time and tools, according to my personal proclivities.
But if I were doing it often, then I might buy the equivalent of the HOPI meter that Big Clive uses in many of his videos. It displays current and voltage, multiplies them to get power, and also displays power factor -- concurrently, on separate digital displays, in real time.
Or I might build something: A box with a current shunt with some panel-mount meters and appropriate connectors would not be too challenging to put together in an afternoon with parts from Amazon and Lowes, depending on one's ability and desire to deal with sheet metal at home. (I use galvanized steel handy boxes and cover plates from Lowes for all kinds of small-ish stuff. They're cheap, common, and durable-enough.)
Whatever the approach, a simple space heater with multiple literal-speeds seems like a cheap and useful way to make it happen unless you're trying to automate every part of it.
(But by then, making a dumb multi-speed space heater into a "smart" multi-speed space heater that can be activated programmatically with software like ESPHome and some relays is probably pretty much a no-brainer, isn't it?)
Not across the states. Across the border. What stops people in US to buy and drive car from Mexico?
Huh, you can't even buy in US a decent new European car if someone decided not to sell the model through the dealership. Wait 25 years and only then you can import and register it.
According to the fitment page, the 4-across model fits in a Corolla. I think it's unfair to call a Corolla "huge" in the context of the U.S. market, and it's certainly a lot smaller than a minivan.
Yeah, I think they’ve mixed up linear regulators and buck converters. Buck converters are often more efficient with a larger voltage drop because the switch can run with a lower duty cycle.
Thanks, I never knew why. All I knew is whenever I need a buck converter in my DIY, novice PCBs, I just toss in an off-the-shelf preassembled one, with a small LDO on my actual PCB to drop the last bit and smooth it out.
The problem is the voltage drop. The bigger voltage difference it has to handle, the hotter it gets as its the loss from "internal loss current x voltage drop" is converted into hat.
The heat has to come from the input power though. If I'm pumping 5W at 12V, or 5W at 20V into the device, with it idling, presumably the output from the devices voltage regulator circuit is the same voltage, and the downstream components are consuming the same wattage (let's call it 1A at 3.3V downstream, so 3.3W), the both the 12V and the 20V input would have 1.7W of heat-loss. The article shows that as voltage goes up, power actually drops, which would imply that it is producing less heat.
I grew up in California, where rain was less of an issue and most landscapers I saw used open-bed pickups with all their tools. I'm currently in Oregon, most landscapers use box trailers to house everything here, which I think might be key to this.
I saw an entertaining Youtuber with a "Solar powered" landscaping business in Florida, using a box truck with a hybrid inverter/solar charge controller/battery system, to recharge his lawn powertools while driving between jobs. I see this as a much more practical solution that just having enough of "proprietary company X" battery. Keep your batteries charging 24/7 while working, essentially. Toss some solar if the climate affords it on top to charge the larger batteries used for your inverter up. Plug in the entire trailer when you get home.
Cover a workmans truck roof in solar, and you'll only get 1-2 kWh per day in good weather.
Thats nowhere near enough for a crew of workers using leafblowers - which can be around 1 kw each. Weed wackers and lawnmowers are the same or more.
It is plenty for a crew of builders using impact drivers, drills, screwdrivers, nail guns, etc. though.
However, if the truck is electric, with a 100kWh battery, the 10-20 kWh used by the workers equipment during the day is a pretty small chunk of the total range.
Ford F150 hybrid (or even the full-electric version) can provide all the electricity needed to charge the spare batteries in the trailer while the crew is working with the main batteries.
Sound is barely above truck idle, way way below the gas-powered equipment noise.
The problem in my area is that an F150 is just not manly enough. Gotta have the F250 or F350. Heck, just the other day I saw a landscaper in my neighborhood using an F450 to haul his 1000 pound box trailer around.
Small pickup trucks used to be popular, when I was a kid most pickup trucks weren't much larger than a station wagon, but the government fucked it up by setting MPG requirements lower for larger trucks, incentivizing manufacturers to go big. At this point consumer tastes have adapted to the market and small trucks probably wouldn't sell well even if the regulations were fixed to make them feasible.
For my part, my tastes never changed. Modern pickup trucks are hideous giant blob abominations. But that's not the way most people feel anymore.
People import kei trucks, even though importing is a pain, so there's some demand for small trucks. If the MPG standards were addressed, I think it'd be a hard sell for a real 80s style small truck (although, I'd buy one), but a 1998-2011 style Ranger is still pretty small. Build it with a c-max/ford fusion PHEV power train +/- RWD, stuff the batteries under the bed (like the 1998-2002 Ford Ranger EV, get pretty good gas mileage and decent EV only range. Doesn't need to be huge.
To be fair, do you know what else they are using that truck for when it's not within your eye sight? Maybe they are pulling larger trailers and equipment, but this day it only needed to pull the small trailer.
Also, you act like it is the landscaper's problem for driving the trucks. We haven't even mentioned that fleet deals can be made for the larger trucks so they are actually cheaper than the F150 pricing. That leaves the F150 inventory for the soccer moms.
As if it is a single button that needs to be pushed to "solve"
The landscaper that lives down my street goes up and down the street full throttle without any trailer attached six times per day and several more in the evening. I'm not sure if he believes it contributes to his manliness but the sound of that car is off the scale and should be outlawed.
I have to admit, while the US is technically richer I feel like the country is constantly plumbing the depths of decreasing livability for everyone else by insistence on things like gigantic trucks. The reality is that people usually aren't using them to haul big loads and in fact, due to how heavy the cars are themselves, actually are quite bad at hauling big loads. If challenged on why they need a vehicle of such size, of course suddenly they're hauling multiple tons around every evening.
It doesn't matter what they usually do. It just matters what they occasionally do. For hauling, or range, or number of passengers... people don't buy a vehicle that satisfies their average daily requirements. They buy one that satisfies all the requirements they expect to encounter.
It would make far more sense to spend less and simply rent for the 99th percentile use (which btw most people probably actually never use). The issue with these big trucks is severe negative externalities for other road users and pedestrians - if that didn't exist I would not care at all if people wasted money.
Also these big trucks have really sucky hauling capacity, it's actually a weird part about them that few people seem to note (and confirms my suspicion most people get them for other reasons).
The youtuber got 4-5kWh per day on his trailer. It looked like enough to supply most of his needs (all equipment is electric including a zero turn radius ride-on mower). He's only a one-man crew though. A 3-4 man crew would need a different equipment config.
Yeah - I think that is one of the critical pieces in his setup. He can have a (relatively) modest amount of batteries, and cycle through them as he's using all his tools one by one. In a big crew, where each stop every tool is being used non-stop for 30 minutes, then 10 minutes drive to the next home to repeat, batteries won't be able to charge enough. You'd probably need 3x the batteries in that case (which, per-person, is roughly the same I guess).
They are making a hybrid diesel electric semi that uses the diesel as a generator. They are getting a lot of inquires from the large work truck related industries because of the capabilities to be a large power source without having to constantly run the engine.
Also, contractors can mandate access to an outdoor AC outlet while they work. It’s cleaner power than ICE alternator -> inverter, and also cheaper for the contractors.
Anyway EGo has a whole day backpack battery for this use case. Not sure how heavy/sweaty/uncomfortable it is, but it lets the tools be much, much lighter than ICE versions.
I don't think I've relied on the app store search for anything except exact matches in half a decade. The greatest feature of the app store is that it handles app links. I just use search engines to discover apps then click the links to open in the app store.
I still do wish they weren't quite so abusive in other ways of their monopoly - their pricing, and dev tooling fees, are pretty outrageous.
I'm not sure the average person is going out of their way to look for an app in the app store to solve their problem. I think they are just searching for something on Google, and if an app is recommended they might install it.
Different generation - my first build was an Athlon 64, and my only AMD build to date (of maybe 5 or 6 machines over 20 years). Loved the struggle of being x64 when it was still so new to consumers.
