• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s the same in any country with buildings over 100 years old.

    In here 100+ year old houses are pretty common but practically all of them still have at least somewhat up to date electrics with that 3-phase input. It’s been around for decades after all. My house is built originally 1928 and my mothers house is from 1909 and both of them have 3x25A main breakers with those 380V 16A CEE sockets around.

    And as garages commonly double as a work space with 3-phase induction motors on the tools it’s still pretty common to have that 3x16A available as it’s not that much more expensive to pull 5x2.5mm² cable to the garage compared to 3x2.5mm² for single phase 16A outlet.



  • Though, if I remember correctly, your outlets have resettable breakers?

    Here in Finland we don’t have breakers on outlets themselves, they’re all on electrical panel. But we have ‘automatic fuses’ which you can reset, they’re just referred as ‘fuse’ almost always. Also, as our house is older, the 25A main fuses are actual porcelain ones, but new ones obviously have those automated too. Similarily, nearly all of the fault current protectors are on electrical panel instead of individual outlets.

    And in here nearly all fuses for lights, sockets and everything are either 10 or 16A with bigger main breakers, normally 3x25A for individual houses.


  • I watched the video and it seems to make good points, but no matter how many times I see something related to US power circuits it just feels so … antique? I have 3x25A fuses on the house and several 3x16A outlets around so getting 11kW out is just a matter of plugging in a socket.

    Obviously it would be a good thing to have controls so that water heater, floor heating or sauna stove aren’t all on together but I think I’ve replaced a single 25A fuse over 10 years we’ve lived on this house and I’m pretty sure that was caused by a small(ish) surge on the grid and not our load.




  • They need to bring back the sporty station wagon/estate.

    Or “soccer mom” cars, there’s very little on minivan market today at least here in Finland. My wallet says that I don’t drive fully electric for quite some time but about a year ago we had to get rid of our Toyota Previa (too expensive repairs were needed) and there just isn’t too much to pick from. With 3 kids and a dog we just can’t fit the whole circus in a VW Golf and there’s less and less cheap used cars on that category. Sure, if you throw 30-40k€ to the table then you can get a newer VW Caravelle or MB Viano, but below 5k there just isn’t much to choose from. Currently we have Mitsubishi Grandis but with all 7 seats there’s not much room for luggage.

    We used to have E-class Mercedes (S210) and it could easily fit the whole family (with child seats) and have plenty of room in the trunk for the dog and luggage, but if you try to seat 3 nearly adult sized kids on the Grandis the middle row seat alone is really not comfortable for multi-hour trip. And it’s pretty much the same for all the station wagons we’ve had over the years. Sure, we’ve had a lot of them, but I think it’s better for not just my wallet to get old ones and drive them “to the end”.

    But even if we use bigger cars none of them has a bonnet you need a ladder to reach. Grandis, Previa, Hyundai Trajet, Renault Espace and Peugeot 807 all had very rounded front end and “normal” height bumpers. That makes services a bit more pain in the rear, but you can easily see what’s going on in front of your vehicle.


  • I heavily doubt Germany could make that change. It’s pretty analog country still on a lot of things and stuff like card payments aren’t available everywhere. My bet would be Estonia. Here in Finland we’re pretty digital on everything already but a crapload of offices (both public and private) are pretty heavily married to M365 (and microsoft in general) environment and workflows and have been for quite a while so even if I would absolutely like to see the change I don’t see it happening any time soon.

    And then there’s the plain scale of things. You can find at least half decent windows helpdesk/admin staff everywhere but (at least in here) similar linux knowledge just isn’t around. Plus then there’s areas where linux just don’t have replacements on windows environment. Basic desktop stuff is easy, but replacing AD forests with GPOs just doesn’t have similarily easy replacement. There’s of course workarounds and you can get similar end results but you’ll need a skilled admin and pretty tightly controlled environment to do that.



  • I came to suggest HGST but apparently I’ve been living under a rock, it’s been sold to WD over a decade ago. And yes, I know Hitachi is not European. Brand name is still around and the drives seem to be pretty decent, but they (too) are owned by US company and manufactured in China/Thailand.



  • The “keeping it weak” approach, after all, has already led to Putin.

    No one kept Russia weak when Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia and it was heavily leaning towards west on multiple areas. Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.

    But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.




  • You could get around with a normal file share service (assuming you already are using one) via tinyurl or similar redirect. I don’t know how much the free services track you or if they have other security implications, but I have couple of domains laying around and it would be pretty trivial to just create HTTP redirect from “class-a.up.mydomain.foo” to my nextcloud upload link.


  • Or put data centers where the air itself is colder. There’s been small-scale studies on how servers work on greenhouses at the Finnish winter and they are just fine with air cooling at below zero temperatures. I’ve also ran my own homelab in an non insulated attic without issues. The only problem is that if your hardware shuts down it starts to gather ice, so you need to move them in a warm location during maintenance, but they’ll run just fine even at -30C as long as they’re shielded from elements other than temperature.

    And in colder climate the excess heat is a resource in itself as you can pump it into district heating loops and not just dump it to the environment.


  • Also when sodium hydroxide reacts with acid it releases CO2 and it affects growth of at least some fungus. Also, if a brick sized fuel cell can provide 1kWh and single transatlantic flight consumes at least 20MWh you’d need a pile big enough to build a house which doesn’t sound feasible.

    But I’m not a chemist either, I suppose it boils down to comparing negative effects between this new cell against kerosine. Plus there’s always the case which affects any new kind of storing energy where it’ll be indefinetly ‘ready for market in next 5 years’.


  • it will waste less space in the recycling bin

    In here pretty much every bottle and can for beverages has a deposit included in them. 0,10€ for small (<1l I think) plastic bottles, 0,15€ for cans. They’re included in the shelf price and when you bring them back to the recycling you’ll get your deposit back. Then the recycling machine crushes all to pallets and they’re hauled to a factory which then makes new stuff out of the plastic and aluminium.

    No need to throw them away. In here the return rate is >90% and even if you don’t care about the few coins it’s common to leave the empty bottles on top of or next to a recycling bin where others can pick them up and return.



  • That’s something along the lines I do as well, but your methods are far more in depth than mine. I just glance around documentations, how active the development is and get a rough idea if the thing is just a single person hobby-project or something which has a bit more momentum.

    And it of course also depends on if I’m looking for solutions just for myself or is it for others and spesifically if it’s work related. But full audits? No. There’s no way my lifetime would be enough to audit everything I use and even with infinite time I don’t have the skills to do that (which of course wouldn’t be an issue if I had infinite time, but I don’t see that happening).