-
Posts
2,437 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
214
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Status Updates posted by efaardvark
-
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
@deaaath yes I’m in California so by law I have to have insurance to drive legally on public roads. I’ve got comp and collision so it will be covered by insurance - or at least what’s left after a $500 deductible. The impact speed was very low and I don’t see any visible deformation of the metal. Hopefully that means no metal/body work. The cruise control still works too, so the radar emitter/sensor is working as well. I’m hoping it is just the broken plastic around the radar. Probably have to special order replacement parts from the manufacturer however so that might still get expensive. I’ll have to see what the shop says. The Toyota emblem that covers the radar is about $150 all by itself!
Too bad I don’t have a 3D printer or I might just print my own replacements.
-
working.. not from home.
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
@leinwandname state-of-the-art vintage equipment!
@Illusion of Terra .. for some stuff we can do the VPN thing. Actually, for most of it ssh’s DISPLAY redirection (and a local x-server) is all that is needed for our monitoring tools. An RSA token and a web browser can be used for email access. The voice nets and some of the C&C links can’t be accessed from outside the critical/flight LAN however.
-
Just yesterday I was reading that the drought in the southwestern US, to include the Colorodo river basin and the central California valley, has reached such a severe stage that soon many gigawatts of hydro power will be lost due to no water behind the dams. Going to be interesting to see if we can run the air conditioner here in the desert in a few months. Now I read that a recent heat wave in Greenland has melted enough of the glaciers there to cover Florida in two inches of water.
Glad climate change isn't a thing or else we might all be in deep trouble.
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
@RZ. melting tundra is problematic. Buildings built on supposedly solid "perma"frost are falling over and/or sinking as the ground thaws. Then there's those craters. A lot of Alaskan islands and coastal areas are also in trouble as the ice that used to protect them from the sea disappears. Gotta pic my new homestead site carefully!
-
So Tesla announced they're getting into making 'bots. I just want to know, does it do laundry and wash dishes?
-
Between Elon's "Private beta begins in ~3 months, public beta in ~6 months, starting with high latitudes"
https://twitter.com/i/status/1253113227095007233
and the FCC's ratification of WIFI6 ..
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-fcc-ratified-wi-fi-6e-this-morning/
.. the nerd is me is kind of getting excited.
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
Yes. Rural areas is his stated primary target audience since they're under-served by the AT&Ts and Comcasts and TimeWrners out there. But any one who is disenchanted with the current monopolies is welcome as well.
And yes, pretty much everything he does is directly or indirectly related to setting up a permanent Mars colony. Starlink was started because he needed something big to justify all the launches he's been doing, and putting up 12,000 satellites is a good way to guarantee a steady supply of paying customers for Falcon, Falcon Heavy, and Starship. Of course the money has to come from somewhere, so "hey, how about we sell universal broadband while we're at it?". While putting up Starlink he'll be getting experience to do the same thing at Mars, where there's virtually no global communications infrastructure. Same reason he's taking people to the space station. He'll probably also be the commercial carrier for NASA when they go to the Moon. (He's already tried to get a NASA contract for a lunar landing, but Boeing and LockMart successfully lobbied against it on the grounds that they don't believe it can be done. Whereupon Musk said, "It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.") Again, more Mars practice. Solar panels and batteries for houses and power grids. Tunnel diggers. Internal combustion engines don't work on Mars, but electric cars would. It all fits together if you assume Mars as a background context.The man may be crazy, but he's crazy like a fox.
-
Nothing like a little earthquake in the middle of a launch countdown.
-
When you put it like that I must admit there's a certain attraction to the situation.
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
Not a problem. My crunchy backlog alone would take several months to work through. Then there’s all the books in my ”to read” stack. I still haven’t finished my last/latest “career” game of KSP either, and there’s a couple games in the queue after that.
As long as the toilet paper doesn’t run out and my glasses don’t break I’ll be good.
<queue Twilight Zone reference>
-
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
@RyePotatoes I’m 5mumble7 so if the day (mentioned at bottom of pic) hasn’t happened yet then chances are it won’t ever. I might just be stuck with the sense of humor of a teenager for the rest of my life.
Is that a good thing or a bad?
-
I dooded the deed. Kind of pointless since I know either Biden or Trump will win but if I don't vote then I can't complain, right? Pitiful selection this time, as usual. I almost wrote-in the name of the guy with a boot on his head but since he didn't get the nomination I instead went for the guy whose running mate was initially the running mate of the guy with the boot on his head. I'd have voted Green again but I wrote to them last time about their stupid anti-nuclear stance and got back a nonsense reply so I went back to the other guys for this cycle.
All I can say is I hope SpaceX's Starship testing goes well. I need a few AU of hard vacuum and lethal radiation between me and D.C. ASAP.
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
So totally with you one this. I blame mass media and whatever else. Like people don't realize that you don't have to vote for the two major parties and at the same I feel it's pointless but this is what I don't get if it really didn't matter why put the other parties on the ballot. I think if enough people actually voted for someone other than dem or rep maybe just maybe someone else could win. Idk really for sure but I feel everyone is so locked in on these two parties.
-
People vote the way they're supposed to. For some it takes reverse psychology or other tricks. "Don't waste your vote" is just another one of the viral memes they use. If people thought about it for a couple seconds they'd realize it is BS, but they don't. In the end it amounts to most people voting the way they're told to vote.
-
So now we have a new chiweenie "dog" - aka Mexican hotdog, aka German taco - in our household. (Chihuahua/Dachshund mix.) Cute as heck, and good lap dog for my 80yo mom, but I'd have liked a real dog. Preferably a pit (like our last), or at least a beagle or boxer. Something I could take hiking anyway. This would just be bait for the coyotes and mountain lions, even the hawks. 4 billion years to create wolves, and then humans came along and did this. smh
- Show previous comments 1 more
-
Our last dog never really got the hang of swimming either. She liked getting wet, and she would do a sort of log-ride splash thing where she'd run full-tilt into the water and splash everything/everyone nearby, but she didn't like paddling around at all. If her feet couldn't touch the bottom she'd freak and try to get out of the water.
This is what a chiweenie looks like:
8 weeks old so still a bit of growing to do, but not going to get too much bigger.
-
I took the offer so next week it’s goodbye Peraton and real-time operations, hello JPL/Caltech and integration/test.
-
100F temps lately means replacing the A/C air filter in the car gets top priority on today's todo list. Having to choose between breathing oven-temperature air or air that smells like moldy socks is not a choice one should have to make.
-
@Bulleje76 Sunny Southern California. Only it wasn't so sunny today.
-
Today is xmas shopping. Especially for my brother and his family in WIsconsin I need to get something shipped today or tomorrow!
-
Finally starting my vacation! Theoretically anyway. Gotta work at 12:10-9AM (pacific time) Christmas day for JWST, then sometime over the weekend move furniture so I can move Mom out of her nursing home and into an assisted-living arrangement next week. Hopefully the new year will be.. less eventful.
-
So far I’m good here. A bit of rain started in the wee hours this morning but that’s fine. We need the water. We’re supposed to get a series of fronts coming through but not much intensity. Other than idiots on the freeways not paying attention to the laws of physics it seems like we’ll just have to deal with several days of rainy weather down here in SoCal. Up north there might be issues. They’re talking up to 10 feet of snow in the Sierras. Again, we need the water, but these days the snow doesn’t stick around and people are worried about it melting and causing flooding once the storm is over.
Actually, my brother in Wisconsin seems to be having more “fun” with the weather. He’s reporting that there’s a 100-car pileup on the interstate due to ice and snow.
-
-
Coffee is life.
-
tbh I actually I prefer tea. I've gone back and forth over the years.. sometimes drinking almost exclusively tea. I tend to like the smell of coffee more than the taste. Lately though I have been addicted to coffee. Maybe it is the season.
re: sweet... I often put sugar in my coffee too. But I don't stir it to mix it well, just slosh it around a little so there's coffee syrup at the bottom and normal coffee at the top. For some reason I like the bitterness to start, but there's that yummy super sweet mouthful at the bottom to finish it off.
-
-
Anyone going to the JPL open house this weekend? If so, it looks like it is going to be a sunny day! Good weather is nice, but it also means it'll likely be hot as well. There will be water and shade, but also queues outside the popular venues, so bring your patience as well as your ticket. Hope you have fun!
-
This is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's open house in Pasadena, California that we do every year. It is a local thing for the most part, though we do get a few people coming in from out of state as well. It is extremely popular, especially with the kids, so crowd control is an issue. A few years ago attendance got up to over 40,000 for the weekend. It was hot that year too, with temperatures over 100F. We had to start issuing tickets to the event to limit the number of visitors as a safety measure. (Tickets are free, but limited in number.)
-
How many planets are there in the solar system? 8, right? Used to be 9, but Pluto got demoted to "dwarf".
Ok, so if you add Pluto and all the other "dwarf" planets back - Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Orcus, Salacia, Haumea, etc - how many known planets are there in our solar system? A couple dozen? A hundred? A couple hundred? There's an astronomer at CalTech who's been looking into the matter & he's been keeping a "little" list...http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/dps.html#table
For what it's worth, a (dwarf) planet only 470km in diameter has a surface area the size of the (US) state of Texas. Something the size of the entire country of Japan would be about 350km in diameter.
That's a lot of real estate.
And that's just what we know about.
-
The text just above the table defines how the terms are applied. The problem is that it is REALLY hard to even see these things, never mind determine their size. There is so little light that even Hubble has trouble seeing them. Basically you have to be looking at a star and notice that it disappears for a while. That tells you that /something/ was there, and gives you a lower limit on the size. (If you know approximately how far away it is then that gives you a read on the speed that it is travelling in orbit around the sun. Based on that speed and the duration of the occultation you can determine that it has to be a certain size or larger.) To be a "dwarf" planet, it has to be round. Unfortunately, the composition determines how big a body can be before it becomes round. How do you determine the composition of a particular body when you can't go there and can't even SEE it properly? How do you know the size when the occultation time might be through the thickest part of an irregular object or might barely nick the edge of a larger round body? Some of these things, like Haumea (spins so fast it is oblong, has two moons and a ring orbiting it), are really strange and hard to get a handle on.
You can figure things based on what you know, and you can put limits on what might be, what can't be, etc., but the error bars are pretty large.
QuoteHow many dwarf planets are there? Ceres is the only asteroid that is known to be round. After that it gets complicated. All of the rest of the new dwarf planets are in the distant region of the Kuiper belt, where we can't actually see them well enough to know for sure if they are round or not.
While we can't see most of the objects in the Kuiper belt well enough to determine whether they are round or not, we can estimate how big an object has to be before it becomes round and therefore how many objects in the Kuiper belt are likely round. In the asteroid belt Ceres, with a diameter of 900 km, is the only object large enough to be round, so somewhere around 900 km is a good cutoff for rocky bodies like asteroids. Most Kuiper belt objects have a lot of ice in their interiors, though. Ice is not as hard as rock, so it less easily withstands the force of gravity, and it takes less force to make an ice ball round. The best estimate for how big an icy body needs to be to become round comes from looking at icy satellites of the giant planets. The smallest body that is generally round is Saturn's satellite Mimas, which has a diameter of about 400 km. Several satellites which have diameters around 200 km are not round. So somewhere between 200 and 400 km an icy body becomes round. Objects with more ice will become round at smaller sizes while those with less rock might be bigger. We will take 400 km as a reasonable lower limit and assume that anything larger than 400 km in the Kuiper belt is round, and thus a dwarf planet.
How many objects do we know in the Kuiper belt that are 400 km or larger? That question is harder to answer, because we don't actually know how big most of the objects in the Kuiper belt are. While we can see how bright there are, we don't know if they are bright because they are larger or are highly reflective. In the past, we had to just throw our hands up in the air and say we don't know enough to even make reasonable guesses. But in the past few years, systematic measurements of the sizes of objects from the Spitzer Space Telescope and now the Herschel Space Telescope have taught us enought that we can make some reasonable estimates of how reflective objects are. (It's complicated: read the details here ) These reasonable estimates, combined with all available actually measurements, give us the list of the largest Kuiper belt objects, sorted by diameter, below. Carefully note the lack of any error bars. Every single measurement or estimate below is uncertain to some extent or another. I don't include the individual uncertainties in the table, but instead use the ensemble uncertainties to inform classification below. In other words: take the sizes of specific objects with bigger or smaller grains of salt.
-
AT&T confirmed the install.. tomorrow is when the fiber comes.
Still trying to get my head around 300Mb broadband. I mean, I remember 300 baud modems, 2Mbit arcnet, and 10Mbit ethernet. Data from NASA's Mars spacecraft comes down at around 6Mb. My current DSL is about 10 (upgraded from 56kb dialup). 300Mb be like...-
The line I have just recently got upgraded from 4 (yeah I know, who knew something like that still existed) to around 50. To be honest though I didn't notice too much of a difference when it comes to downloads. Naturally I download stuff a lot faster, but I didn't really download much anyway (except for 'streaming' in a way). Biggest change that I personally noticed was in upload speed when uploading stuff for work or as online backups. Something that took hours now takes minutes, which is great
Let us know what you think after you have used it! -
My uplink on the DSL is abysmal, relatively speaking... just 1.2Mb/s. Ok for sending email, but that's about it. Most of the DSL bandwidth is allocated to the downlink.
Update on the fiber install: AT&T missed their installation window. This means no fiber yet. I got a robocall from AT&T informing me of the news and I immediately tried calling back to see if I have to reschedule or what, but all I got was a message saying to call back during business hours. Looks like I'll probably have to wait until Monday at least. Unless the guy just shows up tomorrow. We'll see.
-
-
The product is a real product, though whether it works as advertised is another question. It is possible though. Even Raspberry PIs have enough processing power to do vision work. Certainly the company is real. I bought one of my computer cases from them a few years ago...
(This is my internet<->LAN firewall/gateway system. SuSE linux on a SFF motherboard and an external USB->ethernet adaptor for the second NIC.)
-
-
Getting far too familiar with navigating AT&T's phone hell.
Still no fiber. I think the gods are having fun with me again.
-
Cleaning up some of the leftover debris from last week's plumbing repairs and chopped out a ~3 foot section of pipe around the leaking section just to see how bad looked. I could barely see down the length of the pipe due to all the mineral/rust build up! Surprised that a) there was any flow at all through the ~25 foot stretch that I wound up replacing and b) it hadn't started leaking before this. Well, at least I shouldn't have to worry about this particular stretch for another couple decades.
-
There were a couple of spots that were rusted and leaking in a drip, drip sort of way. This section was the only one that was actually spraying water out a pinhole leak.
This run has been there at least since I moved in in ‘76 and I’d actually been planning to replace it last year but I didn’t get to it before the virus hit. After that I didn’t want contractors coming in unless it were serious. This section is all outside along a cinderblock wall from the house to the pool area in back so a few drips here and there weren’t a problem in and of themselves. The leak in this section was another matter however.
-
-
Just thought I'd poke a bit at an entry-level threadripper system. I know, that's kind of a strange thought when all the gamers are still salivating over a i9-9900k for the single-core performance, but it turns out that a low-end 1900X CPU, 2 sticks of 16GB, 3200MHz DDR4, and a really (like, really really) nice motherboard can be had for less than $1k. The motherboard is totally overkill for the initial RAM and CPU, but with AMD it should be upgradable for many years. Maybe in a year or so - when the bleeding edge has moved on - you replace the 8-core 1900X with a 16-core 2950. At some point you buy another couple sticks of RAM. Did I mention the MB supports quad-channel?
If you already have a decent case, power supply, etc., then swapping out the guts for an 8-core system (that would have been considered a monster just a couple years ago in the old Intel era) might make sense. With that MB you could go all the way up to a 32-core/64-thread CPU and 128GB RAM. It also has *3* nvme m.2 slots, not to mention dual network ports (one of them 10Gb). For games.. ok, maybe not so much. (Yet?) But if your workflow includes things that might benefit from a lot of cores..... maybe. It is also quite possible I'm just a tech geek looking for new toys.-
Sure. I don't mind advising, and I like planning new builds, though do I tend to spend way too much time obsessing over little details. I'm also not a "cheap at any cost" advocate. The systems I build for myself tend to be a bit on the pricey side. (My current system, for example.) Unless I'm building a system for a specific task I like giving myself a bit of elbow room. Consider yourself warned?
-
-
Everybody's working on the weekend.
wait.. what?
-
I could probably work from home. All our monitor and control tools are unix-based, and I'm running Linux at home. It Is a simple matter to log in and redirect the display(s) to my desktop's display server. I've done it before, even over my glacial (1.2Mbps) DSL. The voice nets might be a bit tricky, but everything is VOIP these days. There's probably a software solution out there somewhere for that as well.
However, just because you /can/ do something doesn't mean you should.