• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Summertime is terrible, especially in summer. You have one less usable hour in the evening.

    During the summer you cannot really go outside until the sun goes down. It’s simply too hot in direct sunlight. Summer evenings are nice, after the sun goes down and the world starts to cool down a little. By moving the clock forwards we have an hour less of usable outdoor-time. It also means you have less time for things to cool down before going to sleep.

    DST makes it so you have to go bed too early, being unable to enjoy the evening, and when you go to bed it’s too hot to sleep, but you have to because you have to get up at a ridiculous time the next morning.

    Instead of DST we should introduce MST (Moonlight Saving TIme) and move the clock an hour backwards in summer. Then we can actually enjoy our summer evenings and go to bed once things have cooled down a little more. The earlier sunrise doesn’t matter since there is such a thing as blackout curtains.


  • Cycling through fresh snow is fine, it’s the snow that has been driven over and compacted that’s really slippery.

    When you ride over the slippery icy stuff, don’t brake hard, don’t make any sudden turns. Better to just stop pedaling and let your bike roll. Watch out for hard frozen ridges of snow.

    Usually the cycle paths are salted early, it’s the part from the busy cycle paths to your front door and the last bit to your destination where you have to watch out.

    Snow dampens sound so be careful around cars, you might not hear them coming. If you wear a coat with a hood it might be more difficult and annoying turn your head, resist urge to not look when crossing roads.







  • Lights using a 18650 seem to be the rage these days, at crazy cheap prices, but they all use some UI with clicks, holds, etc.

    I have an Olight Seeker Pro 4 and it’s pretty simple to use. The on/off button rotates and controls the intensity. You do have to either hold it for a few seconds to turn it on or rotate the button 90º and then click but that’s unavoidable with these kinds of flashlights.

    These lights are very small and yet very powerful. That means you can easily pocket them, but because they are so powerful they also get very hot. You don’t want a flashlight like this to accidentally turn on while in your pocket. If you look at these lights, the head is almost always ribbed, it’s basically a heatsink. Even then when you run them at full strength they usually throttle themselves down after a few minutes to prevent overheating.


  • They are also very different organizations with very different goals.

    NASA is focussed on science, they are trying to learn as much as possible about our solar system and the universe.

    SpaceX by contrast is focussed on engineering. They aren’t trying to find life on Mars, they are trying to build the ferry service to it.

    When NASA built rockets back in the 60’s, space flight was a science problem. We needed to figure out if it was even possible to do so. Can we even get a capsule into space? Can humans survive in zero gravity? Nowadays space flight is an engineering problem. We know it’s possible, we know the math, but can we actually build those things?