It's going to be a spreadsheet and a bunch of impenetrable PDFs, isn't it?

That’s my favourite kind of game! Management simulation. Hate it IRL, love it for games.

Nope, that's the EU farming subsidy simulator. The UK left the Common Agricultural Policy after Brexit.

(Although I doubt its home grown replacement is much better.)

From the footer of TFA:

Walter Murch has been working in film for more than 50 years, as an editor, sound designer, writer, and director. He edited and sound-designed many films for Francis Coppola (The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain). His interest in science can be seen in his editing of Mark Levinson’s film Particle Fever (2013), about the search for the Higgs Boson.

Yes, That Walter Murch.

In The Blink Of An Eye is on the bookshelf just behind the monitor I'm typing this on, with my headphones and BMD Speed Editor slightly blocking my view of it.

> to very minimal and hyperspecific firmware (300 lines of assembly)

So, just normal BIOS boot?

BIOS is massive. It implements a ton of interfaces that nobody cares about any more but they have to be there for compatibility, so vendors just shove in some code modules someone else wrote and hope for the best. Nobody writes their BIOS from scratch because it wouldn't run something and someone would certainly complain, and there's no benefit to it. And to top it off you've got this weird execution environment that nobody has the right toolchains for unless you buy them.

It was an obsolete design before they even started.

A modern nuclear power plant using a pebble bed reactor could be the size of a couple of Portakabins, with a third Portakabin to contain the wellies and gardening gloves you'd need to handle the fuel.

When I was in South Africa their pebble bed reactor was the thing. They were working on it from 1993 until 2009 then gave up. Not totally sure why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_Bed_Modular_Reactor

There was a German one too:

>constructed in 1960, grid connected in 1967 and shut down in 1988. It was a 15 MWe, 46 MWt test reactor used to develop and test a variety of fuels and machinery. ... Over its lifetime the reactor had many accidents, earning it the name "Shipwreck".

Not quite sure what goes wrong but they seem problematic.

This is clearly not true because nobody is building one of those? Not just in the West. The one that's actually getting built is PWR.

There are startups. See Standard Nuclear making TRISO or X-Energy

> Nearly no equipment uses 120VDC by itself, so you would need specialized DC-DC converters that can deal with the 120VDC input to go down to usual voltages like 48VD, 24VDC or 12VDC

Most switched-mode power supplies ought to cope with 120V DC. If you look at a circuit diagram the first thing they go through is a bridge rectifier and smoothing cap to provide a 165V (or 340V outside the US!) DC supply for the chopper.

I have some Thinkpad charging bricks I'm prepared to sacrifice for the cause, if you want me to try it.

Well, one potential issue that springs to mind is that DC 120V might overstress the diodes in the full bridge rectifier. With 120V AC only 2 of the 4 diodes are active at any one time and on average each of them is on only half the time - with DC only 2 of the diodes would be active, but they would be active 100% of time. Say the power supply needs to draw 1A of current, a reasonable good estimate for the voltage drop of a forward biased diode is 0.7V, so each diode that is on will dissipate 1A*0.7V = 0.7W. With AC, each diode would only be on half the time, meaning it would dissipate an average of 0.35W. With DC, 2 of the 4 diodes would be on constantly dissipating the full 0.7W each - this will result in the two diodes getting much hotter. Ask yourself how likely it is that most power supply manufacturers are designing in a safety margin of *2X*...

And that's just dealing with power supplies for electronics (which mostly just want low voltage DC) - if you get into appliances, while almost all will have a power supply that converts to DC, they usually have some circuits that use AC directly (think heating elements, safety critical sensors that use the 60Hz AC waveform as part of their feedback to make sure they haven't locked up, etc). Even appliances that convert the AC input straight to DC (think anything using an inverter to drive a motor or compressor) will often use a voltage doubler circuit to get a DC bus that is ~340V from the 120V AC input (it doubles the peak voltage, which is actually ~170V and not 120V in US) ... The voltage doubler circuit will not infact double a DC input, and the appliance will likely be most unhappy when it's DC bus is a lot lower than it was designed for.

> Well, one potential issue that springs to mind is that DC 120V might overstress the diodes in the full bridge rectifier.

I see what you're saying but it's a bit theoretical. Nothing in a switcher is run at that tight a tolerance, because in normal operation the load will be highly variable. One of the el-cheapo switching PSUs I have on my bench right now is rated for 90V to 270V, for example, and will run quite happily fully loaded across that full range (and considerably beyond - my variac goes from 0 to about 300V output).

> they usually have some circuits that use AC directly

AC motors won't enjoy it, but heating elements won't be affected.

If you look at the switching power supplies used for network equipment that often actually *does* have ratings for DC operation.

Diodes may not like a constant DC load like that. In any case you're now definily running that equipment out of spec and totally at fault for any damages to the equipment, buildings and people stemming from that, so you better know for sure that that specific power supply can handle it.

I am not saying there isn't anything that can handle this out there, what I am saying is nothing is rated for handling it and this is experimental territory.

Diodes are used with a constant DC load all the time.

Look at any power supply where you don't want a downstream regulator's decoupling capacitors to have an effect on other regulators.

I run my garden tools and shed on a 1.2kVA 12V inverter, bought for pennies off eBay. It's just about enough to run my little "lunchbox" flux-core welder on a low enough setting to do thin metal and tubing, perfect for sticking exhaust pipes and such together.

I've been rednecking up some panels and storage and I'm buying second-hand 250Wish panels about 10p/watt.

It's already getting close to "not really economic" to buy second-hand panels, because people have slightly inflated prices for them, but the way I look at it I get a nice run out to somewhere, have a nice lunch in a cafe, and come back with a couple of kW of panels for about as much as a tank of fuel.

New panels just get cheaper and cheaper and better and better, and you can often find clearance deals on 400W-ish panels for ridiculously low prices.

This is precisely the setup I'm planning for my place up north. A few kW of solar, which ought to still kick out useful power even in winter - down south here at 56°N days are pretty short, and I'm about a degree or two further north up there - a couple of kW of wind turbine, and an LPG-powered genny just in case. This latter will be mounted on a trailer with a couple of large automotive tanks so I can just take it to the petrol station and fill it with the same pump as the dual-fuel car, because it's roughly half the price to buy autogas than bottled propane.

Greetings, fellow 56N resident - you may be interested in my seasonality stats from here in Edinburgh: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html

I'm a little further north than you, north of the Tay but not so far as Aberdeen. My solar panels down south here are also facing more-or-less southwest and I'm seeing similar figures.

Up north of course I've got the space to put my ground mounts wherever the hell I like, and sufficient power from them to run the welder so they can be any shape I like :-D But the weather in the wet and windy west isn't quite so conducive to solar.

Ah, see that's what I thought at first.

But then I thought, no, don't delete it.

Because then you can bust them for possessing CSAM again, just about as soon as you hand it over, if you've a suitably vindictive frame of mind, and you've no reason not to.

Wouldn't that mean you're distributing CSAM?

Ah, yeah, it kind of does, doesn't it? That's a bugger.

But then you have to *retain* the CSAM as evidence anyway.

These days of course you capture off your DV and HDV cameras with a cheapy PCIe firewire card, dvgrab, and ffmpeg ;-)