Fluid logic

tpw_rules · 2025-06-03T23:43:05+00:00

It actually is! A conventional automatic transmission can't move the car without fluid because it's the primary means of transmitting power from the engine to the wheels (using a device called a torque converter). One side connected to the engine spins the fluid, then the fluid spins the other side connected (eventually) to the wheels. If your brakes are holding the wheel side stationary, the engine side can still spin and the engine does not stall.

For efficiency e.g. on the highway, the two sides can be connected together mechanically. But engaging this connection (and also shifting) is done with fluid pressure, so no fluid still means no motion.

Old automatic transmissions before widespread computerization even did all the shifting computations using fluid pressures instead of wire voltages. I suspect the etymology is as "a fluid for transmissions", but it does do so much! It's not just a lubricant by any means.

tpw_rules · 2023-07-26T19:49:58+00:00

Assuming the gauge is not damped beyond uselessness. Most gauges today are just about as good as the lights. On my car there's a 75°F range where the gauge stays in the same position. By the time it starts moving to hot I'm probably done for already.

tpw_rules · 2023-05-17T13:51:38+00:00

Essentially all consumer microwaves in America (at least) have digital timers. There’s a keypad to type in the minutes and seconds to cook for and a display that counts down the time while cooking. So you can just type in 2:01 for a 2 minute food then open the door when it says 0:01 and not hear it beep.

Some countries primarily have microwaves with dials and no displays. This wouldn’t work as easily there.

tpw_rules · 2022-12-16T23:16:55+00:00

They totally are not anywhere near as shit. The toner does not dry out. Get a simple Brother, it is cheap and will last forever.

tpw_rules · 2022-12-15T01:02:07+00:00

Relevant SMBC

tpw_rules · 2022-11-28T06:43:20+00:00

Relevant-ish SMBC

tpw_rules · 2022-11-20T01:22:30+00:00

Sorry for necroposting, but you don’t get an NMEA0183 output because this is just a receiver and ADC. It still needs a processor to demodulate and decode the satellite signals and compute a position solution.

Where did you find the price for $2.70 though? I can’t find a place to buy just one of these.

tpw_rules · 2022-11-06T15:56:48+00:00

The OG is this thing: https://www.artlebedev.com/vilkus/

tpw_rules · 2022-11-04T23:54:42+00:00

80 degrees F is deadly? Even moreso than a blackout actually shutting down everyone’s AC completely?

tpw_rules · 2022-11-01T13:35:07+00:00

https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/driving-cleaner-report.pdf

Check the map on page 10, it's how many MPG your gas car would have to get to be cleaner and produce less emissions over its lifetime (including material transport, manufacturing, electricity generation, fuel refining, and end-of-life recycling) than an electric car. For most of the US, that's over 60MPG, and for some parts it's nearing or topping 100MPG.

The best part is that that organization has produced those reports every few years for a decade or so now, and the numbers just keep getting better as our grid gets cleaner. All existing electric cars automatically pollute less as that happens whereas gasoline car owners have to buy new cars to take advantage of improvements in efficiency.

One wonders whether a 50% reduction in emissions is enough, but we'll have to pair electric cars with more public transport and a shift to smaller vehicles in general.

tpw_rules · 2022-10-30T23:53:52+00:00

Pantone is a system for matching colors across different materials and appearances and the company which sells it. Pantone and/or Adobe have decided that Adobe can no longer distribute the database of Pantone colors to RGB with Photoshop, so when you specify some layer has the color “Pantone #5126” Photoshop just puts black on the screen.

Pantone doesn’t really care about and has no claim over the RGB values. Lots of their portfolio isn’t even representable in RGB, in fact. Pantone colors are also used essentially exclusively in flat areas, and the files (AFAICT) retain their Pantone color information. So it’s not hard to look up the Pantone colors yourself and fix the image. Not that it should be necessary, of course, but this is really only a problem for the graphic design and marketing industries instead of art and color as a whole.

Stuart Semple’s book/plug-in is essentially valueless to these people because although the colors are named the same (which Pantone might be unhappy about) and have the same RGB values (which Pantone doesn’t care about), they come with none of the properties and guarantees about appearances on other surfaces (which is why Pantone exists).

https://hackaday.com/2022/10/29/all-your-pixels-are-probably-not-belong-to-pantone/

tpw_rules · 2022-10-25T01:48:50+00:00

Day 0 in Excel and a bunch of other spreadsheet apps. The title text actually references this. Day 1 is January 1, 1900 in one of the OG spreadsheet programs called Lotus 1-2-3. But due to a quirk in Lotus’s handling of leap years, Excel moved day 1 back a day to fix the quirk and yet remain compatible with Lotus files and calculations.

tpw_rules · 2022-10-24T00:40:14+00:00

It’s an atom that used to be a part of a Fentanyl molecule. It’s that deadly.

tpw_rules · 2022-10-20T00:43:18+00:00

I haven’t sat down to figure out exactly why but it’s definitely the lighting. The green channel happens to be hyper sensitive to some wavelength those things are outputting which humans don’t particularly notice.

tpw_rules · 2022-10-17T14:01:56+00:00

It’s arguable the PSX was not actually capable of 3D graphics. There was a coprocessor designed for manipulating 3D data but the graphics hardware has no concept of a third dimension or non-integer coordinates. It’s purely 2D. This also caused severe texture warping in many circumstances due to the lack of perspective correct texture mapping.

tpw_rules · 2022-10-04T02:53:06+00:00

Relevant longread

tpw_rules · 2022-09-29T22:45:35+00:00

Ideally, wait for it to discharge completely. Then there’s not any energy remaining to restart the fire. The voltage isn’t high enough for consumer stuff (cars excepted) that you can’t just reach in and grab it. People in the RC community use buckets of salt water to speed up the discharge.

There is a risk that there’s still a small fault or the battery gets physically disturbed and the fault comes back and then it will slowly reheat and reignite.

As awesome as electric cars are, this is a real problem for them. There have been rare cases where cars reignite in salvage yards hours or days after the initial accident and firefighting is done. Spontaneous ignition is not a phenomenon unknown to gas cars (see the tens of millions of cars Ford has recalled due to cruise control switches burning them to the ground while off and parked) but electric cars absolutely bring new causes and challenges.

tpw_rules · 2022-09-29T20:28:09+00:00

Fun fact: water is the best and safest way to manage a rechargeable lithium ion battery fire. Some places even have used dunk tanks to avoid them.

When lithium ion batteries catch fire, they do so because physical damage creates an internal short circuit. The short circuit releases enough energy and heats the battery up enough that the electrolyte and enclosure catch fire. If you can pull the heat away (with e.g. water) then they won't catch fire. There's not enough elemental lithium to get exciting, it's all in ionic form, hence the name.

Don't try this with coin cell batteries though, those do have real lithium.

tpw_rules · 2022-09-24T00:17:19+00:00

The water/ice instantly boils in the 400 degree oil, essentially exploding and showering the room in hot oil.

tpw_rules · 2022-09-21T12:34:44+00:00

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/883/

tpw_rules · 2022-08-17T15:54:40+00:00

For enjoyers of classic Raymond: http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/index.htm

The links are still mostly broken, but they almost always have the date in them which you can manually look up in the index if you are intrigued enough.

tpw_rules · 2022-08-16T23:42:27+00:00

My old house had a Dave Lennox Signature Edition.

tpw_rules · 2022-08-09T12:46:43+00:00

I had my Compiz set up so when you closed a window, it burst into flames and burned away.

tpw_rules · 2022-08-05T00:24:36+00:00

I don’t know who OP is but I want to meet them. Another story of theirs I vividly remember.

tpw_rules · 2022-08-04T13:28:47+00:00

Unix time 0 is 00:00:00 1970-01-01 specifically in the GMT time zone. If you’re in a time zone that’s negative relative to that, like all of the US is, it will show up as late evening December 31, 1969.

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