security? For surveillance or something more?
SirEDCaLot
joined 1 year ago
This is harder than it looks.
See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don't mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that's working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there's big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can't be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that's not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it'll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.
What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It's huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.
As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it'll keep the cars cooler in summer.
The key is make them easily removable.
If it's 'removable' but it requires heating the edges of the phone up to 120F and then prying apart a sheet of hair-thin glass without breaking it, then most people won't bother.
If it's 4 Philips head screws then you'll find a lot more people doing it.
Unfortunately, the economics for device manufacturers are clearly in the adhesive category- cheaper to assemble, and they'd rather a user buy a new device than service the old one so they DGAF how hard it is to service.
The only exception is companies like Fairphone catering to a niche audience of nerds who value repairability. Most people don't even consider how hard something is to fix when buying it.
Sadly I think legislation is the only way to fix this. You have to legislate either a. that the battery be removable and replaceable without tools or 'with standard fasteners and not adhesive' or something like that.
The only way to really fix this is to stop gluing phones together.
Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn't store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn't have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.
However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.
If you have home assistant, you don't need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There's a whole bunch of them, I think they're all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also. I'm 100% Z-Wave so I can't say personally what is the best stick to use... Just check the forums and whatnot.
Or just get a ZigBee hub and keep using the bulbs without the Hue hub
Um, isn't that exactly what MFi (Made For iPhone) did with branded or licensed chargers and cables?
Oh don't get me wrong, I love the idea too. I remember back in the early 00s there was a watch that was like 3-4" wide, only single strap, but had a big display that, while segmented, still showed a lot of stuff. I just don't think most 'normies' would go for it though.
I dunno. I think it's the same issue with Google Glass, AR kits, and Bluetooth headsets. The vast majority of people aren't interested in being quite so openly nerdy as to wear that constantly, and then a lot of the people who do wear it act like douchebags so then nobody else wears it because they don't want to look like douchebags. That happened to Bluetooth headsets- what SHOULD have been an easy 'wear always' thing became a 'I'll act like a douchebag and yell into my headset in public places' thing and then nobody wants to wear one when not on a call lest they be grouped in with the douchebags.
I like the concept of a 2-strap watch/phone, but I don't see it having common appeal. That will also be heavy, and even a basic phone's current weight will be felt a LOT more on the wrist than on the belt / in a pocket. Plus a watch gets exposed to a lot more damage as the user goes about their day so it will need to be a lot better armored (increasing bulk and weight) and also easy to repair.
You may though be right about the device makers wanting us to have two gadgets rather than one...
That was a fairly famous situation. The reporter was very anti-EV, and trashed the car's crappy range and said it ran out of power on him with no warning.
Tesla released the logs showing that it popped up low power warnings and suggested places to charge several times, all of which were ignored. When the car reported 0% it was then driven to a parking lot where it drove around in circles (the whole time, suggesting a nearby charger) until it finally shut down.
The reporter was then fired.
Screen and battery weren't there for it. Still aren't I don't think unless you significantly increase the size of the watch to either be a real hockey puck, or more likely stretch it out to be both thicker (probably about 1/2" to 3/4" thick) and wider (I'm thinking 3-4") it's gonna be an option anytime soon.
Of course it is.
We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don't.
Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.
Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.
And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it's supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don't keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there's shareholders to answer to?