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I don't pretend to understand the thermodynamics of all of this to do an actual calculation, but note that the ISS spends half its time in the shadow of the earth, which these satellites would not do.

The earth is actually a pretty big heat source in space. Solar radiation is a point source, so you can orient parallel to the rays and avoid it. The earth takes up about half the sky and is unavoidable. The earth also radiates infrared, the same as your radiators, so you can't reflect it. Solar light is in the visible spectrum so you can paint your radiators to be reflective in visible wavelengths but emissive in infrared.

Low satellites are still cooler in the Earth's shadow than they would be in unshadowed orbits, but higher orbits are cooler than either. Not where you'd want to put millions of datacenters though.


Wouldn't they?

You would put these in polar orbits so they are always facing the Sun. Basically the longitude would follow the Sun (or the terminator line, whichever you prefer), and the latitude would oscillate from 90°N to 90°S and back every 24 hours.

From the linked article:

> By directly harnessing near-constant solar power

Implies they would not spend half of their time in the dark.


No. Otherwise how would you power them? We could use nuclear power methods, like we did in the Voyagers for instance. But the press release doesn’t mention that and, for a constellation of satellites around the earth, it would be a terrible idea.

NASA doesn't have enough radioactive material for its current needs, RTG is used only for missions far from Sun (and Earth).

To me, this is the only real football game: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football.

(No spoilers please!)


Clicked expecting https://www.sbnation.com/2014/8/18/5998715/the-tim-tebow-cfl... ...and found something different! (Albeit by the same author, Jon Bois.)


That was a really fun experience. Thank you for sharing!


Exactly where my mind went as well :)

And the followup: https://www.sbnation.com/c/secret-base/21410129/20020


Dopest thing I’ve seen this year. Thanks for sharing.


How had I never seen this? Fantastic. Thank you!


Thank you so much for sharing that!


To bad they used red and green that look exactly the same to me


Better on mobile browser.


comes to comments before reading story

reads something from the comments instead

never reads original article submission

leaves satisfied


Crashes Firefox.


What a ride!

The Dash Cart was pretty close.


The "just walk out" surveillance system sucked, but the Dash Cart shopping was actually pretty nice/


This is very forthright (misleading)


"If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking." - Leslie Lamport

Writing a blog entry to simply clarify your own thinking makes it worth it.


> GNU Unifont is part of the GNU Project. This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

I mean that's pretty close no?


Still doesn't exactly say what it is? I get that it's glyphs for printable characters, but honestly it could be a PDF, video, collection of PNGs or SVG files, an Adobe Illustrator file, a linux distribution, a web browser, or pretty much any other piece of software or data format. I presume it's a TTF or OTF font file?



no. as others have stated too, the following should be mentioned

- what's the 2 meaning in BMP

- it's designed as a monospaced (or proportional?) bitmap font

- designed in a single 16x16 size only (or also 8x16? it's a bit unclear)

- provided as an OTF/TTF font format, which can be scaled by most font rendering engines to other sizes, but u need antialiasing to make it look smooth (this is mentioned, but under the download section only)

- use as a "last resort" default font, according to wikipedia at least


I've been toying with a variant of this project for my Honeywell home air filters. I have one in all my "big" rooms, and I like to keep them running at a low speed most of the day.

But I also have time-of-day energy pricing, and it would be nice to automatically turn off (or at least slow) my air filters during the 5pm-8pm window. This project inspires me to at least look into the feasibility of adding that functionality myself.


Depending on your air filter you might be able to just use a smart plug, I went down a similar route this summer before realizing that mine would remember their power state and settings when powered off.

So now I just have them plugged into a few smart plugs with automations in homeassistant


Why not just use a dumb timer plug from a hardware store?

Ten bucks, and completely hacker-proof: https://www.acehardware.com/departments/lighting-and-electri...

$16 if you need a remote control: https://www.acehardware.com/departments/lighting-and-electri...

Or $17 if you want to get all digital and fancy: https://www.acehardware.com/p/3001323


Sure those work, I've tried them before, but I find them more fiddly and less fun to program than homeassistant.

Also I can easily turn them on or off from my phone which is nice if I'm feeling lazy.


I would need a device with a physical switch rather than a touch control. Sadly many devices, mine included, have "power was cycled = device is off" logic.


You might have luck with these... https://uk.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-bot


curiously mine are digital momentary switches, they just happen to store their state in some kind of nonvolatile storage


This is what I do with my dehumidifiers.

It's been working so well I was actually surprised one night when the dehumidifier in the bedroom turned itself on from the automation (which I have set to do after dark if humidity is higher then 70%).

It had been within tolerance for ages and I just hadn't had to even think about it.


You should, it is very DIYable! I did it and reverse engineered it myself a while back. You dont need to make a custom circuit board if you are fine with losing the touch controls



Holy shit, perfect!


Why not this? 24-hour programmable timer https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D7ZS6PGK


I'm so happy that you get to discover Greg Egan. If you can find a copy of Axiomatic, start there.


Sounds like the type of mistake I always make: Notice someone being off by two days, and in haste, post a correction that is off by ten years.


With that username you don't even need to be all that close to get the job done.


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