• 3 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible



  • Hozelock adjustable long spray lance, absolutely unfit for purpose, disposable garbage that broke after 3 months.

    Last refund was a nightmare as it was a purchase from Amazon and outside their 30 day window, so initially they did not want to accept the return and directed me to the manufacturer. Hozelock just refused to engage, and directed me back to Amazon, endless loop. After going round this loop I then complaining to Amazon for a solid 10 minutes and they eventually agreed to pay for pick up of the item then refund when it was picked up.

    Replaced it with a more expensive Dramm lance that every part is user replaceable with available spare parts, and much less plastic components.


  • Super rich all have crewed boats, so its mostly to do with living space per foot of boat length or them as they just pay their way around the skill issue. Those who do like to occasionally pilot or race their own boat tend to have sailing boats as they are much more rewarding to sail.

    The bits that are different between a motor and sail yacht is really just the sails, that part is actually pretty simple to learn (mastering is something else). In mast/boom mains, electric furling head sails, hydraulic or electric winches, all make operating the sails push button.

    The navigation and marina skills are the same, if you have bow thrusters. As everything else is at a slower pace, sail boats are easier to get to grips with when under way and new to sailing.

    I completely get that not everybody wants to tack their way upwind, but its the pleasure in actually sailing in silence rather than a noisy and smelly motor that is the reward here. That, and the cost saving. I can do two weeks sailing covering hundreds of nautical miles for £50 in fuel for a 40 foot sail boat and that’s with having to run the motor as a generator to charge the batteries (charter boats suck for house electrics and solar), vs. £500 ish for a motor yacht.


  • Big part of this would be that its a foiling boat and that massively reduces drag from the water. Keeping weight and drag down are the secret to improving efficiency for EVs be they boats or cars. Any decent marina its easy to get multiple 22kw shore supply as well, it can be expensive and metered but you aren’t going to be waiting that long to recharge your boat.

    Electric makes the most sense on sail boats as they already have a green source of energy, and thanks to hydro they can convert some of that motion generated by the wind into charge for the batteries. Couple with solar and you start to look at a decent amount of energy generation.

    Sail boats also tend to have far less powerful ICE than your average motor yacht, so you need less powerful EV motors to achieve the same speed, and in the right conditions you only really need the motor getting in and out of the harbor so your battery bank is smaller and lighter. Plus you could make the batteries do double duty as the house batteries as well.

    The trick will be to get the super rich out of their shitty super yachts that burn a couple of thousand dollars of fuel per hour, they could already have sail boats but choose not to for the increased living space that they can get out of the same length of boat due to being able to build much higher due to no masts.


  • The problem is that they did not build battery factories quick enough, they sat on their hands waiting for massive hand outs to pay for the factories rather than investing. All while profiting off existing investment in ICE that is high return at this point in its life cycle. So they ended up making more profitable per unit halo models like the F150 that they do not need to sell in high volumes to get a return on.

    Batteries are about half the raw cost of an EV, if you paying somebody else to make it for you its going to be more expensive as they will want to make a profit and you are stuck being able to buy ever how many they want to sell you. In practice they have ended up funding a competitor to develop battery tech as well.

    Lowering battery cost is the secret to cheap prices, you cannot truly compete until you make your own batteries in high volumes.



  • I’m only ever logging on because there’s a problem, so i login infrequently, like may be every few months.

    So i want want to see the os version as I have some downgraded on purpose, and that’s helpful to see. I also want to see uptime, disk space, ip address, ram, and kernel version. These all help me understand basic issues if the box is rebooting or needs a reboot or it out of disk space very quickly.

    Obviously, there are a million and one other ways to get this information, I could even stick them in my .zshrc to auto start on login as I’ve done with fastfetch, but why on earth would I do that when fastfetch works, takes less than a second to run on sign in, and looks pretty?

    It’s not like I am not launching a connection to them 100s of times a day.






  • I have a few that will be very close as I decided a bit over a decade ago to limit myself to one rewatch a year of each to stop myself sucking all the joy out of them:

    • Alien - my favorite survival horror

    • Aliens - my favorite Nam movie

    • Jaws - my favorite version of Moby Dick, although I really like Godzilla Minus One take on Jaws

    • Jurassic Park - best big stompy monster film for me

    • Lord of the Rings - this is always over Christmas. Its not faithful enough for me to the books but it still manages to be an outstanding Trilogy.

    • Emperors New Groove - favorite body swap film


  • Most days it’s two 18g of espresso, one 25g made into a pour over. I go through about 2kg a month (about 4.5lbs) with dialling in and some shots for other people.

    I spend anywhere from £60 per kilo down to about £30, depending on where and from whom I am buying. My local roasters (Outpost.coffee) tend to be more expensive than some of the other big names in the UK.

    Depending on what’s available, I either get a single bag for espresso and a bag for pour over or a bunch of different bags, anything up to 8 typically.


  • What you are describing, for it to be of actual benefit, is at its minimum a perpetual motion device, as that’s what a zero loss system would be. Only people working on that also sell snake oil.

    Anything less than 100% is a loss, which is going to be larger the heavier the car is due to friction (aero, drive train, and rolling) and extra energy to accelerate, that’s basic physics.

    Very large batteries, 100kwh or over, solve what should be a medium term problem, they are an expensive dead end as they are often around half the cost of the car’s production cost and add . What I really don’t like is stupidly large bricks of cars that struggle to even do 3 miles per kwh and then use a massive battery to get around their comically small range, which further lowers their efficency.



  • No, hire car, not a taxi. You really don’t need to book months in advance to get one, unless you live somewhere with unusually high demand for them. Most places you van get same day.

    PHEV emissions are only lower if you use the battery, majority of phev owners don’t even charge regularly. With the majority of miles on the ice ruins any gains on emissions. Emissions are only one part of the impact to the environment, brand new cars even evs have a higher initial impact that reusing an old car, especially one no-one will want in a few years.

    Car weight is also a factor due to brake and tyre wear, and guess what, a phev is carrying around all the components of an ice and all the components of an small ev, way heavier than the old car, even ignoring that modern cars weigh more anyway…

    It’s just such an unlikely set of requirements the number of people that actually meet it is pathetically small.

    All of these have to be true for your example to make any sense: Commute distance less than the battery range, typically just under 30 miles

    Able and prepared to charge every night as that commute has just drained the tiny battery, another poster has already pointed out that the majority of PHEV owners don’t actually charge

    Cannot plan any long trips greater than 400 miles

    Lives with no reliable hire car service

    Lives more than 400 miles from a public ev charger

    Somehow can do more miles a year to save money over buying an older, cheaper car that’s about £15k cheaper to buy

    It’s just comes across as a bad faith argument, sorry.



  • How long is a piece of string? So many variables with that you’d have to do your own numbers for your own situation and if you really can’t charge a long range ev for your trip.

    However, most people who say they do big trips (more than 400 round trip) do so a handful of times a year where there is zero ability to recharge the car. That’s where I’d be looking at a hire car, and it’s going to be cheaper to do so.

    A long-range EV works for me. About a third of my annual miles are towing on long trips (1000 mile round trips) with it, and it’s fine with planning.

    Completely get why some people don’t want to do that, and for that, a suitable diesel is far better for them as its 10ks cheaper to buy in the first place.

    PHEV makes fuck all sense for that sort of trip as it runs out of battery 30 miles or so into a 1000 mile trip. You paid for to buy it than a diesel, you get worse economy than a like to like diesel, just not good.