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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2024

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  • At least here in Australia, 15A circuits are not very common. Only one of the places I’ve ever lived had a 15A outlet in a shed, which was likely installed by the previous owner for running a welder or plasma cutter, or some other high peak power tool like that. 3.6kW is massive overkill for general household use.

    The standard circuit here is 10A, which gives you 2.4kW to play with. It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly that was part of the point Technology Connections was making - that the difference isn’t actually that great between 120 and 240V countries in practice. The change to boiling time from an electric kettle was pretty inconsequential between the two.

    I believe he postulated that the real reason Americans don’t have electric kettles was that they didn’t have much need for them. They mostly don’t drink tea, and their coffee is largely prepared using drip coffee makers that heat their own water.




  • It’s entirely plausible she didn’t, even though she found what she was looking for. You’ve really gotta catch inkcaps early in their life cycle, before they start to deliquesce. Otherwise they’re cool to look at but not really good for eating.

    But also even if she did pick them, it would not have harmed the fungus in any way. Picking a mushroom is no more harmful to the organism than picking a fruit from a tree is. So long as you use a permeable container like a basket or mesh bag to carry them, you’re actually doing the fungus a favour by spreading its spores. It annoys me to no end when uneducated people assume that picking mushrooms is doing damage.




  • Subpar selection? I can count on the fingers of one hand the songs I have found on other sources but not Spotify.

    I don’t even pay for Spotify, but I still use it to find new music because it’s hands down the best way to do so. I create a playlist of all the new songs I want and then purchase them all when Bandcamp Friday rolls around. I’m getting all the benefits of Spotify without paying them a cent (my ad blocker even works on it too), plus being as supportive as possible to the artists themselves.


  • Hydrogen, even with fuel cell/electric, is not suitable for rural car owners. It’s only really suitable for vehicles that are constantly running, like freight trucks. Why? Because hydrogen leaks out of any vessel you try to put it in. It’s the smallest element in the universe so it slips past the molecules of whatever sealing material you are using. It will even permeate through solid metal, making said metal brittle in the process. And this problem of course gets worse at higher pressures, which you have to use to get any energy density.

    So not only do you have to contend with the terrible efficiency loss of using electricity to create hydrogen only to turn it back into electricity again, a whole bunch of your fuel is constantly leaking out during transport and storage. And then if you use cryogenic hydrogen for the best energy density it gets worse again because you can’t keep it cold enough. It’s constantly boiling off and has to be vented to prevent your tank from exploding.

    So even if you solve all the myriad other implementation problems with hydrogen, you’re never escaping the fact that you need to use all your fuel quickly or you’re setting money on fire as it leaks. Not to mention potentially getting stuck because you didn’t drive your car for a few days and now you don’t have the fuel to reach a fill station.

    Hence why, if it ever matures enough to become actually viable, it will almost certainly be limited to freight and courier type vehicles. They run near constantly and so burn through fuel fast enough that the leakage isn’t an issue.