Fondots

Fondots , 11 days ago

Part of the problem is not having the money or space for an extra vehicle.

I drive an SUV, I don't particularly like driving an SUV, I get a lot of use out of having a larger vehicle, I'm an avid DIYer who makes frequent trips to the hardware store to pick up lumber and such, I have a lot of outdoor hobbies and usually end up being the one who drives so I'm carrying gear for several people, I don't exactly go off roading, but those hobbies sometimes take me on some poorly maintained, deeply rutted, muddy roads and 4wd has gotten me out of some jams, I occasionally drive onto the beach to go fishing, usually find myself towing a small trailer a couple times a year, and I'm an essential employee that lives in an area that gets snow with a weird schedule that usually has me commuting before the snow plows have gotten through everywhere.

But even though I probably get more actual use out of an SUV than most people, most often I'm still only driving about 20 miles or less a day, on paved roads, in weather that doesn't require anything more than working headlights, wipers, and tires that aren't totally bald.

If I had the budget and parking space I'd probably have the cheapest base model EV I could find for most of my commuting and small errands and save the SUV for my days off and when it snows. That's not the case though.

Fondots , 10 days ago

I am so ready to hop on the PHEV or even full electric bandwagon.

I do have 2 major hurdles though.

First is there aren't a lot of vehicles out there, at an affordable price point for me that quite fit my needs. I've pretty much dialed in that a midsized SUV or small pickup truck is just right for me. There's some exciting options coming down the pipeline, but none that are out there have quite hit the sweet spot for me yet. (I am champing at the bit for Ford to release a PHEV AWD maverick with a midgate to make up for that short bed. That's basically my ideal vehicle, I'd also be stoked for Toyota to do a plug in 4runner, my current car is a 4runner and I like it a lot, if either of those happen before I'm ready for my next car theres a good chance that's what I'm getting)

Second is charging, I live in a townhome with no garage or driveway, so if I want to charge at home I'm pretty much stuck running about a 30ft extension cord across my front lawn and sidewalk. That's less than ideal, and my HOA hasn't exactly been friendly to others in my neighborhood who have gone electric who have done that. I can probably work around that though, the way my schedule works, unless I go in for overtime I usually don't work more than 3 days in a row, so if battery-only range gets a little better for PHEVs (which hopefully they will by the time I'm able to budget for a new car in a few years) I can probably do most of my commuting on one charge and find an hour or two on my days off to go somewhere with a fast charger.

In the meantime, I just try to get my wife to do as much of the driving as possible when we're both off since she has a prius, our schedules don't always align, but when they do I only drive if we need my bigger car for something.

It's a long way off, but we also fantasize about the possibilities of self-driving cars someday when all of the problems are worked out. Since we have different schedules (she works a regular 9-5, I work 3pm-3am on a 2-2-3 schedule,) we could have one self driving car for most of our commuting and errands, it could take her to work, come home and take me to work, pick her up and take her home, and pick me up at the end of my shift, and go charge itself in-between.

Fondots , 2 months ago

Like others have said, I'd give scraping it off with a razor blade a try, glass is actually significantly harder than the steel of the razor so it's difficult or impossible to scratch your glass with the blade. Razors are cheap and readily available (if you don't already have some kicking around) so you have basically nothing to loose by trying it. Also mentioned we're magic erasers/melamine sponges, also a pretty solid bet, they basically work like micro sandpaper.

Failing that, I'm no chemist, but from googling around a bit for siloxane and solvents, I think your best bet for solvents youre likely to find at most hardware stores are mineral spirits, turpentine, and xylene, which should all be readily available in most hardware stores in the paint section with other paint thinners. From what I could find, it kind of looks like you're going to want a non-polar solvent, not a polar solvent like acetone. They may dissolve it outright, or may at least soften it up enough for you to scrub or scrape it off easier.

Also what I gleaned from Google, is that siloxanes are basically silicone, so you may also have luck with products to remove silicone caulk, I know goo gone makes a product for that purpose (although it looks like the main ingredients in that stuff are acetone and benzyl alcohol, which are both polar solvents, so I have no idea how that jives with what I was getting from my other Google searches that suggested non-polar solvents, so again, I'm not a chemist and I'm out of my element)

Any solvents you end up trying, just make sure you're following proper safety precautions, and be careful about anything else you may spray, drip, splash it on, you might ruin finishes, strip paint, damage plastics, etc.

Fondots , 3 months ago

I don’t *think *it’s actually against code (not an electrician,) just kind of lazy and not really the best practice provided that strain relief and everything else is done properly. Electrically it should be pretty much exactly the same as doing it the normal way.

I encountered it on one light switch in my house when I was replacing it. I really didn’t feel like running out to the hardware store to buy another couple of inches of wire to redo it, so somewhat to my shame I just hooked up the new switch the same way.

Fondots , 6 months ago

Nitrogen is, as far as our biology is concerned, effectively inert, we don’t really do anything with it, it more or less just goes in and out of our lungs. For most practical purposes under normal atmospheric conditions it could pretty much be replaced with just about any nonpoisonous gas. As far as your body is concerned that part of the atmosphere might as well be helium, and in fact for certain deep sea diving applications and such we do replace some or all of the gas mix with things like helium because nitrogen will sort of dissolve into your bleed at high pressure, which causes issues when you start to resurface and it creates nitrogen bubbles in your blood (known as “the bends” or more technically as “decompression sickness”) and those other gasses don’t dissolve into our blood as readily.

Pretty much as long as oxygen is at the right percentage, your body doesn’t care what the rest of the gas mix is as long as it’s not outright poisonous.

Now there could be issues for nitroget-fixing bacteria that do use atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into other nitrogen compounds that are absolutely necessary for plants and such to grow (and by extension for us and everything else that eats those plants, or eats things that eat plants) to live, and I’ll be honest, I have no idea at what level of atmospheric nitrogen that would start to be a problem, and unless we want to start growing crops in underwater domes it’s probably not something we ever really need to worry about on earth, nitrogen is very plentiful in our atmosphere. It could possibly be something worth investing for long-term space exploration and such, but we’re not quite there yet.

Fondots , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Overall you’re not on a bad track with thinking that other elements in the same column could substitute for nitrogen, often those elements will have similar properties.

However it doesn’t really apply in this particular case, the other elements in its group are all pretty reactive and solid, and include elements like phosphorus and arsenic. Even nitrogen compounds can be pretty damn reactive, it’s just kind of a quirk of chemistry that diatomic hydrogen (N2) which makes up most of our atmosphere is pretty stable and nonreactive under most circumstances.

We need certain nitrogen compounds as part of our biological processes but we don’t get that nitrogen from the air, we get it from food we eat, which ultimately get it from the air mostly from microbes in the soil that are actually able to take nitrogen from the air and turn it into other chemicals.

However since atmospheric nitrogen is, for the purposes of this conversation, inert, you can pretty much replace it with any other nonpoisonous gas, like we often do for deep sea divers, because under high pressure nitrogen will dissolve into our blood and then when we resurface it creates nitrogen bubbles in our blood which is very bad.

Fondots , 7 months ago

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shower in the US (assuming you’re in the US) without access to the plumbing somewhere, I’m sure they probably exist somewhere, but it’s not common in my experience, usually there’s a little access panel on the other side of the wall somewhere, maybe hidden in a closet or behind a piece of furniture or something. If there’s not, I’d consider adding one anyway, at some point if you’re there long enough you’re probably going to want access to it for some issue or project that comes up down the line.

They make small tankless electric water heaters that run off of regular 110V outlets for heating a single sink or shower, if there’s convenient electrical nearby you may be able to just hook one of those up.

Fondots , 7 months ago

Building on a concrete slab doesn’t exactly make a difference when I’m talking about an access panel in a wall though

Fondots , 8 months ago

If you’re growing salt-tolerant crops and only ever intend to use that land as farmland, that could arguably be a benefit, don’t have to use as many chemicals to control weeds and pests if the weeds and pests can’t tolerate the salt

Probably need to make sure that the salt is being contained to the farm area, and I’d imagine you would need to periodically flush it with fresh water or something if too much salt begins to accumulate in the soil for even your salt tolerant crops.

Fondots , 8 months ago

There are atoms for which we believe they are stable, although they theoretically could decay. But we never observed it.

Bismuth-209 was for a long time considered to be the heaviest stable primordial isotope, it had been theorized for a while that it might technically decay, but no one proved that until 2003, it has a half-life of over a billion times the current age of the universe, and so for all practical purposes can be treated as if it is stable.

I’m no physicist, so I very well be way out of my element, but I would personally not be the least bit surprised if it turned out every atom was technically unstable, but since the decay is so incredibly slow we may never be able to accurately detect it. Using the lead-209 example you gave, if it ever is proven to be unstable, the half life should be at least 10^25^ (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000/ten septillion) times longer than the age of the universe. Smarter people than myself probably have some ideas, but I couldn’t imagine how you could possibly attempt to measure something like that.

Fondots , 9 months ago

You could probably make an argument that we’ve still put some sort of evolutionary pressure on game animals and affected the course of their evolution, though definitely on a much smaller scale than with the animals we have deliberately bred.

One example is there’s a mutation in African elephants that causes females to not have tusks, that gene has been around for a long time, there has pretty much always been some portion of female African elephants without tusks (Asian elephant females are usually tuskless or have very small tusks,) but because of ivory poaching we’re seeing more of those tuskless females than in the past in a lot of populations, because the tuskless females have more opportunities to reproduce and pass on their genes since they’re less likely to be targeted by poachers.

There are probably more examples, and a lot of them are probably a lot more subtle.

I debated on whether or not to list these, because the actual science to back them up is spotty at best, but I think they help to illustrate the kinds of effects we could potentially have on a non-domesticated species. Some people think deer antlers are shrinking due to hunting pressure, and that rattlesnakes have smaller rattles or rattle less than they used to because the ones that make a lot of noise are more likely to be noticed and killed by humans. Again the actual science to back those claims up is lacking, and even if they are happening, which isn’t a given, there’s a lot potential explanations like environmental factors that may be separate from evolutionary pressure.

Fondots , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

An “integer” is a whole number- a number that isn’t a fraction/decimal. You can have negative integers/whole numbers, and 0 is also an integer that isn’t truly positive or negative.

If you specify that you want a positive whole number/integer that technically wouldn’t include 0, same if you specify a negative number.

So if you’re looking for a value that is a whole number that is either zero or positive “non-negative integer” is probably the most succinct way to phrase it.

They can also be called “natural numbers” but depending on context, that may not always include 0.

Fondots , 10 months ago

I’m by no means an expert, but off the top of my head I don’t think I’ve ever seen a purpose made wood anchor, threaded insert, t-nut, etc. with a hex head like that. They may exist, but I’m not personally familiar with them.

Which makes me suspect that what you’re looking at is just a regular nut stuck into a hole that’s been carved into the wood, and probably glued into place, so my suggestions are going to be based on that assumption.

I would try to find a matching bolt that you can grab onto to pull it straight out, maybe use a prybar or claw hammer for some extra leverage.

It’s possible that a little heat could break the bond if it’s glued in (depending on the type of glue.) You of course need to be careful with that, but you could try carefully using a blowtorch, heat gun, or lighter. If you have an inkling about what kind of glue was used, you can also try to find a solvent that would work with that.

Failing that, if you have access from underneath depending on how the size of the hole in the insert matches up with the through-hole in the wood (assuming it’s a through-hole, of course you could always make it one if needed) you may be able to get some kind of punch at it from the underside to hammer it out.

If that doesn’t work,you can try drilling it out. Personally I’d start from the bottom and see if that would allow you to hammer or pull it out, then fill the hole with a matching diameter dowel glued in place and cut and sanded flush. You could also grill out the nut itself, but may take a while, and may wreck your drill bit if you have a cheap bit.

Depending on how flush it already is and what kind of finish you’re going for, you may just be able to slap some putty over it and call it a day.

Fondots , 11 months ago

for military bases to use.

My dad used to work on a military base as a civilian in wastewater treatment plant. Part of his job, about once a day he’d hop in their little public works pickup truck and collect some water samples from a handful of places around the base, check on some gauges at a couple different sites, etc. If I had to guess he logged probably a max of 5 miles on a busy day (and that’s probably a very high estimate) All low speed, pretty sure speed limit around most of the base was like 25mph. He could practically have done his rounds in a power wheels Barbie jeep (and really the little Chevy S10 or whatever they had was probably overkill for their needs, something like a golf cart or kei truck would probably have been plenty)

And except for that maybe hour out of his day he would drive it around, that truck would pretty much just sit.

That would be such an ideal niche for an EV, it’s got like 23 hours to do nothing but charge. Hell, you could probably even charge it off a solar panel, doesn’t take a whole lot of juice to go 5 miles.