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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • So I was talking about hydro generators that go in the water rather than a wind turbine that rely on direct wind. I prefer the former as it doesn’t muck up the aero on the boat (sails can rob it of power with their dirty air) nor does it get in the way of the deck space that is often limited on a smaller boat. You could use both but I am not fan of wind turbines except at anchor.

    With a normal sail boat its common to have more wind that you can safely handle with the boat, you can use the drag of a hydro generator, which goes in the water only when you need it, to help slow the boat down rather than reefing or reefing as much (intentionally making the sails smaller). As wind is the only thing generating motion for the sail boat, its free energy that you otherwise would not be using.

    Motor boats rely on the motor to move them, so any drag means the motor has to work harder, imagine dragging a drogue (water parachute used as an anchor), its the same thing, its no longer free energy and you are actually spending more energy moving the same distance as the hydro generator doesn’t generate as much energy as it costs to use. Its the same problem for a wind turbine, as that increases aero rather than water drag for the motor boat, requiring more effort from the motor for the same speed & distance.

    Motor yachts would be better switching their engine over energy generation as a generator for recharging the EV batteries. Indeed there are some bigger motor yachts that do exactly this as a backup to their solar and dock derived power.



  • Super rich all have crewed boats, so its mostly to do with living space per foot of boat length or them as they just pay their way around the skill issue. Those who do like to occasionally pilot or race their own boat tend to have sailing boats as they are much more rewarding to sail.

    The bits that are different between a motor and sail yacht is really just the sails, that part is actually pretty simple to learn (mastering is something else). In mast/boom mains, electric furling head sails, hydraulic or electric winches, all make operating the sails push button.

    The navigation and marina skills are the same, if you have bow thrusters. As everything else is at a slower pace, sail boats are easier to get to grips with when under way and new to sailing.

    I completely get that not everybody wants to tack their way upwind, but its the pleasure in actually sailing in silence rather than a noisy and smelly motor that is the reward here. That, and the cost saving. I can do two weeks sailing covering hundreds of nautical miles for £50 in fuel for a 40 foot sail boat and that’s with having to run the motor as a generator to charge the batteries (charter boats suck for house electrics and solar), vs. £500 ish for a motor yacht.


  • Big part of this would be that its a foiling boat and that massively reduces drag from the water. Keeping weight and drag down are the secret to improving efficiency for EVs be they boats or cars. Any decent marina its easy to get multiple 22kw shore supply as well, it can be expensive and metered but you aren’t going to be waiting that long to recharge your boat.

    Electric makes the most sense on sail boats as they already have a green source of energy, and thanks to hydro they can convert some of that motion generated by the wind into charge for the batteries. Couple with solar and you start to look at a decent amount of energy generation.

    Sail boats also tend to have far less powerful ICE than your average motor yacht, so you need less powerful EV motors to achieve the same speed, and in the right conditions you only really need the motor getting in and out of the harbor so your battery bank is smaller and lighter. Plus you could make the batteries do double duty as the house batteries as well.

    The trick will be to get the super rich out of their shitty super yachts that burn a couple of thousand dollars of fuel per hour, they could already have sail boats but choose not to for the increased living space that they can get out of the same length of boat due to being able to build much higher due to no masts.



  • I’m only ever logging on because there’s a problem, so i login infrequently, like may be every few months.

    So i want want to see the os version as I have some downgraded on purpose, and that’s helpful to see. I also want to see uptime, disk space, ip address, ram, and kernel version. These all help me understand basic issues if the box is rebooting or needs a reboot or it out of disk space very quickly.

    Obviously, there are a million and one other ways to get this information, I could even stick them in my .zshrc to auto start on login as I’ve done with fastfetch, but why on earth would I do that when fastfetch works, takes less than a second to run on sign in, and looks pretty?

    It’s not like I am not launching a connection to them 100s of times a day.






  • I have a few that will be very close as I decided a bit over a decade ago to limit myself to one rewatch a year of each to stop myself sucking all the joy out of them:

    • Alien - my favorite survival horror

    • Aliens - my favorite Nam movie

    • Jaws - my favorite version of Moby Dick, although I really like Godzilla Minus One take on Jaws

    • Jurassic Park - best big stompy monster film for me

    • Lord of the Rings - this is always over Christmas. Its not faithful enough for me to the books but it still manages to be an outstanding Trilogy.

    • Emperors New Groove - favorite body swap film


  • Never tried sharpening them myself, always used a service as standard jobber bits are less than a pound to get done for you. I normally save up a bunch of stuff including saw blades and get them done at once to save on shipping at hit the low volume discounts.

    However, its only worth doing on quality components, I wouldn’t pay a pound or waste my own time to get a cheap ass drill bit sharpened, I would just replace it.

    My saw blades start at like £70 so paying £12 to get it sharpened is good value, but a £30 blade is not really worth it, not least for which it won’t cut anywhere near as much material before getting blunt between sharpens. Same logic for drill bills, some of my SDS ones are over £30 each, my augur bits can be over £50 each, so those are worth looking after, not going to bother for a set of 10 bits for £20.


  • But don’t cheap out on drill bits, nor should you try and use the same drill bit for like a decade without sharpening it.

    Think of drill bits like a good, sharp knife. Knives cut far better and far easier when they sharp, exactly the same with drill bits. If you trying to cut something you would normally pick the right type of knife to do the job, exactly the same with drill bits.

    If you driving screws or other fasteners with your drill consider better quality driver bits if you have a lot of them to drive, such as building a deck. Good quality driver bits cam out far far less and will take more torque so be faster/go in better. Using cheap driver bits is probably worse than using cheap drill bits.


  • I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

    However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.


  • I was under the impression that ios used sleight of hand with apps to reduce memory footprint for inactive apps rather than how android manages its recent apps list? Is it still requiring special permissions to run non apple apps in the background as active tasks? AI will need to run the background and will need a decent chunk of RAM to do so.

    I completely agree that changing the processor or revising NPU or similar is too much to do late stage, I reject that for increasing RAM or storage, both can be changed closer than 12 months from release and I would also reject that apple had the AI changes planned for much less than 12 months out as well. It just feels like a big fuck you to anybody buying a flagship from apple this year as it wont last the length of time it should do for normal consumers who would expect all of the latest AI features to roll out during the supported window.


  • With how polished Apples AI on mobile was at launch compared to Gemini on Android at launch were it could not even do basics like timers I suspect Apple had it in the works for far longer and it would not have been a total surprise.

    Also you are describing the situation at launch for new hardware, the software will evolve every year going forward and the requirements will likely increase every year. If I am buying a flagship phone right now I want it to last at least 3 years of updates, if not 5 years. The phone has to be able to cope with what is a very basic requirement that is enough RAM.

    This isn’t some NPU thing, this is just basic common sense that more RAM is better for this, something the flagship iPhones could have benefited from for a while now.