Oh no not this again. These articles pop up all the time and they’re kind of awful when put in context - like yeah solar panels aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty dang close honestly. It’s great that they mention the stuff at the end about laser welding, but the rest of the article is kind of just fear mongering.

Firstly, panels don’t really go bad - the article mentions this. But that doesn’t mean they have to be thrown away. Yeah, it makes sense to put 300w/m² panels on your solar farm and replace your old 200w/m² panels. But those old panels are generally still producing power, and can be sold as used for projects less focused on absolute peak efficiency. The old three Rs tell us, Reuse is generally better than Recycle.

Secondly, panels don’t randomly leech heavy metals. They sometimes have lead based solder, and contain small amounts of cadmium. If the panel is in tact in a pile or deployed it’s all locked up within the panel and doesn’t just jump out. It can leech out if you put ground up panels in an acidic landfill that leeches into the ground water - that’s bad so we shouldn’t do that, but we already don’t and have even more regulation coming.

Panels are mostly glass and aluminum by weight, they’re not like 20% lead or anything crazy. Recycling them safely is not some kind of crazy future tech, just a matter of regulation and economics.

Moreover, the amounts they contain are miniscule compared to what fossil fuels produce. As Nickelback says, look at this graph:

from here

Or this North Carolina paper:

Every GWh of electricity generated by burning coal produces about 4 grams ofcadmium air emissions.21 Even though North Carolina produces a significant fraction of our electricity from coal, electricity from solar offsets much more natural gas than coal due to natural gas plants being able to adjust their rate of production more easily and quickly. If solar electricity offsets 90% natural gas and 10% coal, each 5-megawatt (5 MWAC, which is generally 7 MWDC) CdTe solar facility in North Carolina keeps about 157 grams, or about a third of a pound, of cadmium out of ourenvironment.

from here

And as far as total landfill waste its dwarfed by what fossil fuels produce, even just general consumer trash:

from this paper via this blog

For most panels it seems like the most polluting thing about them is that they are produced using our current grid and not other solar panels.

I don’t see why not. Hot dogs are generally pre-cooked, you can eat a cold one straight out of the package. The real question is if you made coffee instead of water would you get a coffee flavor caffeinated dog?

5 KILOwatt hours is a typical laptop battery? Aren’t they more like 50-100wh?

Love the idea and article, but…

just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop,

I want to see a laptop with an 800w charger.

The light is immaterial (lol) to the holograms existence. They are only solid via fancy forcefield transmitted from the holo emitters. For all intents and purposes they seem to only exist as programs within whatever computer operates the holo emitters, whatever or whatever that may be. The only limit on where they can be is the speed of the computer system and links within it. They can send holo programs between the alpha and delta quadrants, but are limited by the speed and this can only send smaller programs. The mobile emitter often gets transported, but that’s because they only have one. If the doctor is going somewhere with holo emitters they don’t need to be transported and can just be data transferred.

Personal rant follows:

!The whole hologram plot in Voyager is honestly poorly thought out, and it basically feels like if you followed their logic Chat GPT would be a protected federation citizen. I get that the writers wanted to give the doctor legitimized personhood, but it feels like they forgot to think about what that would mean for literally every other hologram. !<

!Like, they give that one species holograms to hunt, does that mean they invented a species doomed to be reincarnated as prey forever? Is, Moriarty sentient, and if so is trapping him in a simulation moral? If they just run a hologram long enough does it gain sentience? How are they testing for this? Does that mean Vic Fontane is sentient even though he probably would say he isn’t? What about that weird Irish bartender Janeway does - fair haven ran for a while, how long does it take? If you run a training program are you committing infanticide? Is turning off a hologram even moral?!<

There’s a pretty large combination of factors that went on from what I remember. Partly it just plain didn’t get that hot that often in the UK or France back then. Partly they wore entirely different undergarments that layered to keep sweat off their actual clothes and keep them cool. Partly the summer clothes were often flowy or puffy which helped move air near the skin. And partly the fabrics they wore were different. Things like linen and cotton were the go tos. Even the linen itself was different, modern linen has shorter fibers and is much lighter.

After the great renunciation (when men started wearing the modern(ish) suit) you start to see a lot more references to taking off layers either to cool off or to keep them clean or whatever. You also start to see variations in really hot places like the American deep south and Bermuda to deal with climates that get way way hotter than Europe with its nearby seas and cooling prevailing winds.

Please note that all of this may be wrong and I am entirely going off what I can remember off the top of my head.

Whoever found and cited [10] is doing God’s work lol.

Ah, ok. The Unifi stuff is a bit weird like that. I recommend installing the controller on a computer if you continue to have issues. You don’t have to run it all the time, just use it for config and then turning it off is fine. It’ll give you way more information and control over exactly how the AP is set up.

Which model is it? As far as I’m aware all the Unifi APs need the controller for config. It doesn’t need to stay running unless you want a couple features for large deployments but you do need to run it to set things up initially. The Air Max / uisp lines are the ones with web based config.

Do you have a continuously running unifi controller or is it only running when you do the config? Does it do the same thing with the controller opposite to how it is now (ie if you aren’t running it does it do it when you leave the controller on)?

Are you running the 2.4 and 5 as separate SSIDs or the same one?

Are you on the latest controller and firmware?

As per the article, there’s a bunch of subsidies for hydrogen plants that are going into effect, but they don’t require it to be “green” hydrogen that’s made from water or whatever like people normally assume and instead is made from fossil fuels. On the one hand it means we might have a reason to build out hydrogen infrastructure for when we get “green” hydrogen figured out, but on the other hand it’s not really much better than just burning fossil fuels (maybe? IDK article doesn’t really put any numbers to it) if it’s not “green” hydrogen so it’s kind of a putting the Kart in front of the Mario situation. Also since it’s all fossil fuels based production it’s fossil fuel companies doing it all, which are notoriously just honorable and good in all ways and would never do anything that could harm the public; so there’s definitely no reason to be concerned.

TLDR: it’s not the hydrogen it’s the everything else when you make hydrogen.

I believe you can change the scaling algorithm obs uses? Right click the source and go to “scale filter” is what Google is telling me, not at a computer right now. I think it defaults to bicubic which should be ok though? The switch does its own internal scaling a lot of the time and that can look pretty bad though, but unless you get into some serious shenanigans that’s basically baked in.

This is the correct answer - I know because I was there 10000 years ago and had to decide between this and buying a special case from koolance. Amusingly they still sell one for the outside.

They can also be handy if you have to do anything weird like route display cables from the GPU to the motherboard like for a thunderbolt display.

No one memed on Elon when he shut down his tracker? Or Kylie Jenner for the 3 minute flight?

If you already have a camera with HDMI output sitting around a capture card can be a great way to get really good image quality for not much money. If 720p is enough I’ve actually had really good success with these incredibly cheap ones: https://youtu.be/daS5RHVAl2U - I’ve even seen them at places like Walmart and Target under the Vivitar brand so they’re readily available.

If you don’t look around locally for used Sony cameras. Because 1080p is only 2 mega pixels and many of the nicer old Sony cameras have clean HDMI output you can get kind of amazing image quality for very cheap. Some newer model mirrorless cameras got updates to run as a webcam directly off the USB port but they’re likely out of your budget and some require software. (Edit: make sure you check if the model you’re looking at has clean HDMI out - some do, some don’t, and some do with some tweaking. This site has a decent bit probably incomplete list: http://wasge.es/clean_output/ )

If you want a more traditional webcam and need autofocus something like the Logitech c920 family is probably your best bet but the constant revisions may have added a software install. Most cameras are including software since realistically they’re all basically the same and most of the “features” are added in the software.

If you don’t need autofocus, there are a number of companies taking Sony “security camera” sensors and slapping them in boxes with screw mount lenses. ELP and Mokose are examples but there are others. With enough light these generally look pretty dang good. If you pick one up and decide later to upgrade, it can probably live mounted up high just for playing magic, especially since there are a few 4k ones that will probably let you read the tiniest of text on the cards.