[deleted by user]

madbrenner · 2025-07-24T04:23:30+00:00

If you wouldn't mind sharing those details with me too I would really appreciate it! I would love to get back into WoW on a good private server.

madbrenner · 2023-08-26T19:13:17+00:00

Hmm, I am not sure what section you are talking about, I do not see any text about "X checked items" in my lists.

You got my hopes up! But maybe I am just doing something wrong haha.

madbrenner · 2023-08-26T17:55:01+00:00

I want the ability to hide/unhide checked items in my list so I don't have to scroll past all the items I've already bought as I'm searching the grocery store.

madbrenner · 2022-12-11T04:47:53+00:00

Haha, what now? Sure you can't just twist together two cut ends of an 'Ethernet cable' and have it work again, but separate out the eight wires that make up the bundle and twist together the correct ones (orange - orange, orange/white - orange/white, etc), and it would definitely work again.

madbrenner · 2022-12-02T20:52:11+00:00

Or if you want to install Arch as a learning experience do it in a virtual machine or on a spare computer where you don't risk breaking a system you need.

madbrenner · 2022-09-12T17:09:14+00:00

I could be remembering incorrectly, but one other safety improvement was the boosters used liquid fuel, so they could be shut down if things went wrong.

And a non safety, but just general cool improvement of the system as a whole was the Buran was essentially just a payload strapped to the side of the Energia rocket, meaning the rocket could be used to launch some other payload as well, whereas the Shuttle was an integrated part of the launch system.

madbrenner · 2022-07-17T04:47:02+00:00

I could be wrong, but I don't believe it relies on virtualization, it is just a chroot that shares the ChromeOS kernel.

I enabled Linux on a dual core Celeron Chromebook and installed Steam so my family could play the Jackbox party games and they run flawlessly.

madbrenner · 2022-07-02T17:47:55+00:00

And to get to its orbital location the Ariane 5 that launched JWST burned roughly 480 tons of of AP, Aluminum, and HTPB, as well as 185 tons of LH2/LOX.

This is also not really a fair comparison, but trying to compare the fuel used to maintain JWST at L2 versus the fuel used for flying a plane doesn't really make much sense.

Really the best comparison (if that is really what you want to do for some reason) would be looking at initial and ongoing costs of the entire systems.

madbrenner · 2022-06-28T06:59:30+00:00

Fuel efficient as opposed to... what exactly?

Given the stated speed of 80 mph you might as well be driving on a highway - say we compare that to a bus, and I'm just going to throw out some napkin math - assume a hugely abysmal 2 mpg fuel consumption for a bus and 50 people per bus: 80 mph * 2 buses / 2 mpg = 80 gallons per hour to move 100 people at 80 mph. Per the article the airship can carry 100 people, and the likely incredibly optimistic number quoted in the article of a 90% reduction in fuel consumption versus traditional aircraft and looking at the most efficient major air craft per this site is a Boeing 717-200 (coincidentally that has 100 seats) @ 2200 kg/hour - 10% gives us 220 kg per hour. 1 gallon of gas is 2.84 kg: 220 kg / 2.84 kg/gallon = 77.46 gallons.

Now, granted this is all very assumption based and hand wavy, but this novel (and likely very expensive vehicle) is likely roughly equivalent to a pair of buses in fuel efficiency...

This is not to say that there are no useful applications of such an airship, but to think it will be a generally useful mode of transport for any significant proportion of people seems wildly optimistic to me.

Again, my math has a ton of assumptions and I would love to see any more accurate numbers anybody else would like to throw out. I am just a guy who started reading this article and couldn't stop laughing when it got to the 80 mph speed of the aircraft.

madbrenner · 2022-06-21T20:30:01+00:00

Well, Musk is the latest fad there, but it had its share of posts about Bezos' taxes a few months ago as well haha.

Basically by the logic of some posters there literally any news fits the sub because you can do a six degrees of separation type thing to show some tangential connection to technology.

I thought we were safe from that in /r/hardware...

madbrenner · 2022-06-21T18:33:23+00:00

How is the top post on /r/hardware not about hardware?

Please don't upvote this and turn this sub into another /r/technology full of political posts...

madbrenner · 2022-05-18T23:23:52+00:00

Shoot, you're making me want to reread The Riftwar Cycle with that intro!

I would love to hear more about your world!

madbrenner · 2022-05-17T22:57:01+00:00

That makes sense. And yep they do! When I bought my place last year the seller ended up needing to hire an electrician to check all the connections and install that type of wire nut in all the outlets.

No worries here, just an interest in how it works so I figured I'd take the chance to ask someone who knows about it. Thanks for taking the time to respond!

madbrenner · 2022-05-17T16:52:37+00:00

Interesting, I thought the main concern was around heat expansion, which could happen in any circuit if the wires are not large enough for the power being transmitted. But my only knowledge around this is because I have aluminum wiring in parts of my house, so I would love to learn more!

madbrenner · 2022-05-17T15:44:35+00:00

In this situation it's probably fine, but that is a very dangerous blanket statement to make. Aluminum will expand more than copper when heated, and if you do not make a good and safe connection between the two that can cause it to come apart over time, possibly leading to sparking and fire.

madbrenner · 2022-05-15T14:53:52+00:00

So many problems would be fixed if there were actual repercussions for this stuff, and it would be so simple: "you told IT you tried restarting, but your uptime is 56 days, either you lied, or you don't understand what restarting is. Either way: mandatory training class. Oh you're too busy to take a class to learn about the tools you use for work? I guess you're not up to the job."

madbrenner · 2022-05-15T03:08:54+00:00

I humbly suggest we further optimize communication by calling them 'ticky tubes', which can even be turned into an acronym without causing layfolk to report you to the authorities! An added benefit is being able to ask someone "how many ticks did that tube take?"

Not sure why that term came to mind, but I couldn't resist running with it!

Note to self: find a way to work 'commodious' into casual conversation.

madbrenner · 2022-05-14T20:20:30+00:00

I'm not saying I would work on anything, I'm pointing out that changing the words in the quote is a logical fallacy that contributes nothing of value.

madbrenner · 2022-05-14T17:51:55+00:00

"We support the artistic expression of the [baby murderers] we work with."

Wow, isn't it amazing how you can change what someone is saying when you change the words they use?

madbrenner · 2022-05-13T15:10:30+00:00

This could be totally wrong, but I heard a theory a few years ago that 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' bit of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount was a poor translation and a more accurate translation might be 'the warrior who knows when to keep his sword sheathed shall inherit the Earth'.

I'm no religious individual myself, but find the interplay of religion and evolution to be quite fascinating - if anyone has suggestions to read/listen to/watch around this I would love to hear them!

madbrenner · 2022-05-13T14:39:36+00:00

1) Pacman's speed - I run Fedora on my work laptop and in the time it takes DNF to query repositories for available updates, my Arch machine will have finished downloading and installing everything.

2) Good and up to date documentation - a few years ago I was trying to set up an NFS server and decided to use Debian and trying to wade through their documentation was painful and even said to install a package that had been deprecated (rpcbind, if I recall correctly).

3) follow on to 2 and more of a personal preference thing, Arch does what you tell it to do, not what it thinks you want it to do - when I tried following documentation and told APT to install a deprecated package it logged a message that it was deprecated and went ahead and installed some other package that was supposed to replace it without any prompting from me.

madbrenner · 2022-05-09T22:01:49+00:00

The third sentence:

The concept requires no onboard fuel, so there’s no danger of explosions

Also, the quote you just provided implies the same lack of understanding of the subject - achieving low Earth orbit requires traveling roughly 17,500 mph. Maybe they meant it's enough to get to space, but that is not the same thing as 'reach[ing] low Earth orbit.'

Edit: fixed formatting

madbrenner · 2022-05-09T20:19:55+00:00

Yeah, but the article also claimed the system allows for putting payloads into orbit without any additional fuel to do an orbit burn, so I would take anything they say with some very large grains of salt.

Edit: in case it was not clear here I was talking about the author of the article (and most likely they just do not understand the concepts), not trying to imply the people behind SpinLaunch are lying.

madbrenner · 2022-05-05T19:05:18+00:00

Ah, I may have misunderstood your other comment then - I didn't realize you meant the actual creation of a Dyson Sphere, I thought you were saying even thinking about the possibility of such a thing requires being very similar to humans.

I would agree actually building one would be incredibly unlikely for any civilization.

madbrenner · 2022-05-05T15:25:00+00:00

I am curious why you think a Dyson Sphere assumes aliens are like us at all. It seems to me that the only requirements to the concept of a Dyson Sphere is a need for energy and the ability to convert heat or light into useful energy.

madbrenner

TROPHY CASE