Came here to mention this. I've had a lot of fun putting up stealth repeaters in trees to build out the Meshcore network. One or two nodes in critical places can light up dozens of square miles for the mesh.
Find your local Discord and get rolling. In the Bay Area it's baymc.org.
I'm not making any representation of how common this is - just saying that unless all those conditions apply to you, you will eventually have cause to care about the quality, availability, and reliability of public DC charging infrastructure.
Anecdotally, I have 5+ friends with EVs, and every single one of them charges theirs from a standard 15A wall outlet. (I have an EV, but I also have a real charger.) Sure, most of the time it's fine - but when it's not, then you have to really care about whether that nearby EVgo pedestal is working today.
But furthermore: most apartment dwellers, many renters, people in multifamily homes/complexes where their parking spaces are not near their personally-metered power, those who have to street park - many more people than you may think have difficulty charging at home. I wish it weren't the case, and I'd love to see better solutions here.
The vast majority of what you're running from RV DC are things like lights, fans, phone chargers, and other cigarette-plug-adapter type devices. My RV has a 12V DC fridge. For anything more - particularly air conditioning - you need AC for sure.
My inverter-charger is connected to my batteries with 4/0 cable. That wasn't fun to run.
> This method achieved an energy conversion efficiency of about 130%, exceeding the traditional 100% limit
I am extraordinarily confident that it did not.
> In practical terms, this means about 1.3 molybdenum-based metal complexes were activated for every photon absorbed, surpassing the conventional limit and demonstrating that more energy carriers were generated than incoming photons.
... Which is not the same thing as a >100% energy conversion efficiency (which would imply an infinite-energy-generating pump)
The infrastructure in question is DC fast chargers. Yes, you can charge at home if you have a house, with a parking space reachable with an EVSE, and your commute is short enough that you can fully recharge by the next commute, and nobody needs the car after hours when you'd otherwise be charging it, and you never take road trips or longer-than-usual drives.
Everyone else is, to a greater or lesser extent, at the mercy of the DCFC infrastructure, and it is sorely lacking in many places - even ones you'd expect it to be pretty good.
The lesser-known instance of this is RV power. When you're running off small batteries and solar, you want to make the best use of the watt-hours you have, and that means avoiding the DC-to-AC-to-DC loop wherever possible. So you run 12V (or in newer models, higher voltage) versions of everything, upconverting as necessary.
You might be surprised. Various games have come with both. One iteration (the 3DS remake of Gold/Silver) even came with a pedometer that allowed you to level up by walking around: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9walker
Philips Hue, and Zigbee direct-binding in general, can achieve this if you're willing to use their wall switches. Still works if the hub is offline.
Depends on your definition of "regular switches," I suppose -- but anyone with 3-way wiring (i.e. multiple light switches for a single socket) has given up on "up=on" for their switch.
I have almost everything in my house HA-automated, but anything touching the water supply is all on dumb physical valves and electrical timers. If my light switches don't work, that's annoying. If a robot vacuum doesn't run, that's frustrating. If a water valve is stuck open, that's catastrophic.
A RAM chip takes several months to make, starting from an empty silicon wafer. Each chip takes 8-10 weeks to go through the process of lithography, deposition, etching, cleaning, etc. It then must be tested, which can take another couple of weeks, then packaged, before it can be sold to manufacturers. Thus, even if fab capacity were available today (it isn't), you'd still see a multi-month lag before new supply hit the market.
(This is an extraordinarily sensitive process, and disrupting it can cause you to lose the entire batch. You might have heard of cases where "wafer starts" had to be discarded due to a tsunami or power disruption - this is why.)
They have something like 2 stars on Goodreads. Imagine that as a fairly accurate product review score - if they were Amazon products, they'd be somewhere between "obviously counterfeit" and "burned my house down."
One of the few cases where they actively ruin the first book, to the extent you take them as true sequels. Clarke basically licensed his name and plot to Gentry Lee, who proceeded to ruin the sense of wonder by explaining everything, often in deeply unsatisfactory ways. They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.
"Wonder" might be the wrong way to describe it, but Blindsight by Peter Watts gave me the same feeling of "this is incredibly alien and I have no idea what will happen next".
Other books with a similar plot structure and deeply alien vibe:
- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
BC (and PST) is actually quite reasonable in this regard, with Vancouver and LA being fairly close to "on the money." Contrast that with China and Russia, where clock time can be 2h+ off from solar time.
As a further note, this is one reason it's miserable to be in Boston/Maine during the winter if you're an SAD sufferer: sunset times of 4pm or sooner feel like "insult to injury."
Find your local Discord and get rolling. In the Bay Area it's baymc.org.