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DARPA’s “Cornucopia” program has the same goal.

https://www.darpa.mil/news/2023/food-air-water-electricity


Half of the comments are in this subthread which derailed the discussion on this submission before it even started. Here the damage is done but maybe, please, refrain from doing so elsewhere.

To remove SMD ICs more easily with a soldering iron, you can create a tool to help with it. Cut a lengthy piece with a curved end at the front (looks a bit like a finger) from an aluminum can and sand away the inner coating and print on the outside.

Then work the curved end between IC and PCB and start heating the contacts left and right while continuing to move the tool further in once the solder at a leg melts. The legs with solder on them will not attach to the aluminum and you have the IC off the board in no time.

For soldering the author might consider “drag soldering”, i.e. put a small blob of molten solder on the legs and keep moving the tip of the iron over the legs on one side. Keep doing that until there are no bridges left.


Or you could just use a hot air gun, as the author did. IMHO trying to work with SMD using an iron is a losing battle.

I’ve considered that before but never actually got one. For soldering SMD a small hotplate was a difference like day and night already. How cheap could I get away with when buying a hot air station/gun?

I paid $60 for mine on Amazon. YIHUA 959D.

Save the hundreds of dollars for a good desoldering gun for thru-hole stuff.


The Quick 861DW has been a hobbyist favorite for a long time, and comes in at ~$300 (USD)

An 858-style station costs roughly 1/10th of that and should be fine for hobbyist use; many commercial repair shops use them too.

Or similar/clones, like the Atten ST-862D.

That should be the most common behavior. Barcode readers work the same. In the past, you even plugged barcode scanners between keyboard and PC and they injected the key codes of the detected code into that.

The ones I have tried in the past, at least under Windows, only seem to have support for the PC/SC Smartcard API, so you typically need a specialized application to use them, unless it's just for logging in to Windows itself, but I'm more interested in logistical/asset tracking purposes.

All the ones I’ve used have configuration options that dictate how it interacts with the host. I’d bet the ones you used were just configured that way instead of being configured as an HID

The search phrase here is "keyboard wedge".

Very nice, thanks for sharing! Maybe show which upper or lower values are included in the intervals? A notation I am familiar with uses outward facing brackets if the value is not included in the interval. That always applies to infinity.

Applied to the cases here:

]-∞, -1] U [0.5, +∞[

The excluded interval in between becomes ]-1, 0.5[ then.

That’s how min (and analogously max) works, right? min(A, B) = [lo(A,B), lo (hi(A), hi(B))].

Edit: idea: copy a formula from the results section to the input field if the user clicks/taps on it.


I was also a bit confused by this. I thought the standard notation was round brackets, but maybe doesn't work well in ASCII?

Round brackets are standard in the US but that notation is used in France and some other places.

  (0, 1)
Is this an twice-open interval or a 2D vector?

See, this is why Bourbaki introduced the ]0,1[ notation.


Is there any reasonable situation where you'd be confusing a vector with an interval? Having done mathematical writing and grading of tests using both styles of notation (simply adapting to what was used at the institution), I can't say that I ever noticed any practical difference between them.

From reading the linked paper[0], It explains closed interval only. "An interval union is a set of closed and disjoint intervals where the bounds of the extreme interval can be ±∞".

[0]: https://www.ime.usp.br/~montanhe/unions.pdf


It's possible to support that but it makes the code very very much more complicated. I've decided early on to not support it. Would be a cool addition though!

Nominally. Corrected for purchasing power, it’s only approximately 50% higher than either of them.

A easy solution might be to mix the concentrate with sparkling/carbonated water?

The title was slightly editorialized for clarity.

Taking differences between degrees Celsius values is absolutely fine.

Ratios are undefined because the Celsius scale has no absolute zero while the Kelvin scale has.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement


We should have kept using nuclear? That nuclear of which refinement capacities are over 40% in Russians hands? For conversion it’s even a combined 63% for Russia+China.

“Russia's Stranglehold On The World's Nuclear Power Cycle”, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-nuclear-power-industry-graphi...


The reliance on Russian nuclear fuel services is a consequence of decisions made decades earlier in U.S. made during Bush era and later Obama era.

"Following proposals from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Russia, and in connection with the US-led Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), there have been moves to establish international uranium enrichment centres."

"The first of these international centres is the International Uranium Enrichment Centre (IUEC) established in 2007 by Rosatom at Angarsk in Siberia"

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...


Reliance on Russian gas (which did increase after shutting down nuclear) is a bigger problem than relying on nuclear fuel: in nuclear energy fuel cost has much smaller impact on electricity cost than gas price for gas fired power stations.


In 2024, the EU imported a little over €700 million in Russian uranium products out of a total of €22 billion Russian energy imports.

https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/ending-european-union-impor...


Interesting article. According to it, the missing piece is scaling the conversion facilities from 8% to x%, and then scaling uranium enrichment process from 30% to x%. With that in place heavy dependency to Russia+China would have been solved, no?


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