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brianaker

91 karma · joined January 15, 2023

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brianaker··on Cities turn to ‘extreme’ water recycling
I use rainwater for gardening that I store in an underground cistern; I would not recommend this to most people. The water is only useful during the summer when Seattle receives no rainfall, and during the rest of the year the cistern is used to handle stormwater surges during the rest of the year. Unless you can store water in a tower, you will need a pump. The pump we have for our cistern can handle grey water; it can handle a certain amount of muck in the water. Even with filtering you will end needing to clean your cistern at some interval, and the penalty for not doing this? You will burn up the pump.

The Yale article is entirely unrealistic for residential and much of what it talks about would only work for some very large buildings that don't have any mixed usage ( if you follow the links in the article, you will find that the water system installed in the one San Fran had a starting cost of $1M dollars, which did not include all of the redundant return sanitary plumbing ).

The article glosses over the fact that you cannot re-use water in your home and that this is not going to change.

Reusing water that was used for washing your clothes?

People put all sorts of stuff into their washing machines and not all of it can be cost effectively, or even safely, reused just for toilet water.

In one word? "bleach"

Any sort of cleaning is going to involve soaps, detergents, etc... none of which you want to pump into a pipe with a smallish diameter to feed to a toilet. Environmentally? It is not worth the copper nor the electric required for a pump; a pump which would need to be designed to handle the grey water. Your municipal water is likely to be gravity fed, which is energy efficient.

Let's talk about the reality of residential properties.

Home owners are never 100% on top of every maintenance requirements and adding systems which will require ongoing maintenance and refitting? That is not viable.

Even using rainwater for toilets is not going to be cost effective, or reliable. You may believe your rain water is "all natural", but that is far from the truth once it hits your roof and makes its way to where you believe you are going to store it. It will need to be treated/cleaned before it can be use; which will then require its own pump that requires electricity.

The Yale article is misleading, at best.

brianaker··on The Work of the Audiobook
With AI?

Every character in the book can be voiced in a unique manner, with the narrator matching only the character as needed.

Additionally? Those voices can be tuned for the listener; an AI that has been trained for your preferences well beyond the simple matching that AirPods do today with an audiograph.

If you listen to Audiobooks, try listening to one that has been performed by a cast.

brianaker··on Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?
By the year 1998 I was using the term "shard" in slides for MySQL, and I believe mSQL as well. The term might be found in Slashdot's source code. I am pretty sure I gave a talk on sharding at the open database summit in 2001.

I had previously used the term shard for an app I wrote and distributed for VMS around '92, but that app only ever had a handful of users. It was available via FTP.

FWIW I took the term from the movie "The Dark Crystal".

brianaker··on Tell HN: iOS lets carriers add WiFi networks that you can’t stop from joining
Managed Networks are loaded via the carrier profile. The "attwifi" SSID is defined in:

Payload/ATT_US.bundle/profile.mobileconfig

You can find the the carrier file, i.e. the ipcc for AT&T here:

https://updates.cdn-apple.com/2022/carrierbundles/002-77749/...

Just unzip the file in order to see its contents.

If you remove the SIM card from your iPhone the managed networks are removed. If you have disabled any of the Managed Networks and remove/reinsert your SIM card the networks will be re-enabled.

Once upon a time you could edit and load your own ipcc carrier bundle, I do not know if this is still the case. ( Whether this has ever been ok/allowed/etc,... I have no idea. )

brianaker··on How a heat pump works
I too live in Seattle and have friends who bought a heat pump; they ended up in a hotel room and until they could had a HVAC company come to their home and install a backup heat source.

In Seattle are highest usage months for electrical is in the winter, right when you will be maxing out that 50A breaker you had to install in order power that beast; check the notes from Mitsubishi, they are clear that it is not an efficient device in the range you suggest ( and seeing how in Seattle most homes are still at 100A service you must either be living in a newer home or one with an upgraded service ).

You realize that Seattle is now an importer of electricity and is no longer running surplus?

Or how about that the city has been using an unsustainable amount of water? ( i.e. where our power comes from ) Or that our electrical come at the expense of Salmon and the endangered Orca pod that lives in the Sound?

If you replaced your "furnace", which implies a central HVAC system, with a Mitsubishi Hyper-Heat, which I believe is only installed as a mini-split, what are you doing about your air quality?

The Seattle area suffers from "inversions" through out the year; a mini-split does nothing for air quality issues. The smoke that we dealt with in the fall? That wasn't even the worst air quality issue we have had in the last decade.

I am sure your electrical bills are 1/2 of what you were paying for an electric furnace, but unless you are abandoning the use of your heat pump for providing cooling your overall energy yearly costs are unlikely to go down.

I don't know situation, I don't know what options you had when you installed your unit, and I have not listed all of the good and bad that come with the unit that you installed.

There has been a lot of "mini-splits will save the environments" coming out of our City Council; there have been zero reports presented that back up those statements. The local heating and cooling people are happy to install units which have a higher markup/generate more work for them.

brianaker··on Homelab analog telephone exchange
You might want to consider looking at Asterisk, the open source PBX. They have a list of analog cards that they support.
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