One thing that annoys me about am/pm is that the clocks have a 12 at the top and not a 0. So it goes 11:59 am to 12:00 pm and not 11:59 am to 00:00 pm. Even as a kid I was confused as to why 12 belonged to PM but 11 was still AM, but I never thought about it much until recently, decades after I had learned and was using the system. Which I guess is why it is still like this.
Look up Carnot efficiency. The maximum amount of work you can theoretically extract depends only on a temperature difference. For a datacenter running chips at 100C into ambient air at 60F, it's about 25%. So even with perfect capture, you are guaranteed to lose 3/4 of your input energy to the datacenter as heat anyway.
For comparison, an IC engine has a Carnot efficiency of something like 80% on paper, but the reality you get is only 20-30%
The Aliexpress of 10 years ago was just ridiculous. One time I ordered something (a USB adapter) for literally a total price of 40¢, and it was delivered. It cost about 35¢ to send a regular US postcard domestically at the time, not counting the price of the postcard.
Now all the 40 cent items cost $2, and have $3 shipping. Or you can buy the same thing on Amazon for $6. Their search also used to be a lot better, today it's worse than Youtube search.
Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but the print heads are a very specialized silicon chip with internal microfluidic passages, microscopic heaters, etc. Who else would even make them? The kind of thing you would need millions of dollars to reverse engineer and replicate just to enter the lucrative market of... making inkjet cartridges.
I would be shocked to discover that there are counterfeit print heads out there the same way there are counterfeit STM32 microcontrollers.
Unless the patents have something to do with the shape of the cartridge or they somehow have a patent on "technique to fill printer cartridge with ink" which would not be so surprising.
I mean, in 1978 Tandy used standard drives and a disk controller IC, and still managed to sell a whole 16K TRS-80 system with disk drive for the same price (TRS-80 Level II 16K + Expansion Interface + disk drive = $1786 [0]) as Apple (Apple II + Disk II + drive = $1790 [1]). Plus, the TRS-80 came with a video monitor wheras Apple did not. But the Disk II could hold more data per disk, and I'm sure Apple's margins were better.
I remember visiting a science museum as a kid which had a couple of CRTs like that set up where you could pull a rope to smash a hammer into it and try to break it. With the same result; never leaving a mark.
CRTs are built like that because otherwise they would implode from the slightest bump and send thousands of tiny glass fragments flying in all directions.
Panel displays of today have their glass pieces glued together into one solid lump, and there is no pressure, so when they break the broken pieces stay where they are for the most part.
If you like things like this I can recommend you check out the Chris Staecker youtube channel. He covers all sorts of tools people used to use to do math before computers and calculators, and there are a lot of them. Some of the things people came up with to do what today would be considered relatively simple math are pretty clever, pretty complex, or both.
Buried the lede by calling this a "usb wifi adapter" and not "magic Ethernet adapter that you don't have to plug a cable into". This will come in handy for my systems that are normally air gapped or currently connected to something else, but sometimes I need to get another network connection on there for a few minutes. I don't always have a USB ethernet adapter on hand or enough cable, but I almost always have a Pico around.
Also I posted this comment using one. Speedtest says about 4 Mbps. Surprisingly usable for web browsing though. Very nice tool! I'll be keeping the .uf2 file around for sure.
And they were quick about it too [0]. I mean, not that quick, much slower than today's printers, but much faster than nearly all of the 3D printer conversions or pen plotter kits you can get now.
My HP-7470A is from 1982 and does not have stepper motors, but DC motors and rotary encoders doing closed loop servo control. They move the lightweight paper itself instead of a heavy gantry.
Worth noting that this HP sold printers and atomic clocks, unlike today's HP which sells cheaper printers and subscriptions to them.
Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather.
Robots can certainly do things more repeatably, if not more precisely.
I've had a phone with a swollen battery that I swear was not swollen when I chucked it in the drawer a year or two earlier. Apparently it's the battery itself breaking down that causes this, so I don't think any electrical protection scheme would necessarily help you.
I guess my advice is "don't use a really old and worn out battery for this". Otherwise it's probably fine? People walk around all day with one in their pocket and sometimes their ear after all.
The most difficult thing about these projects is for me to consider why anyone would want to use words to describe a 3D object. How do you reference objects? Saying "Make the hole at the end of the bracket 3 mm and move it up" isn't going to cut it. How do you know which end of the bracket I mean, and which direction does up refer to? So then I'd have to be more precise in what I'm asking for, and structure my words carefully in order to....
In 3D CAD, you click on it. It's completely unambiguous and it also doesn't take 10 seconds to interpret your prompt (because I saw this tool can also read images, but takes time to do so).