I just had an experience with a auto soap dispenser, sink, towels and dryer set in the same place in a public restroom, didn’t have to walk to a shared dryer
Plus if electric cars become the norm, the streets will be quiet for the first time since the industrial revolution
The speed of light means that light that left our sun arrives on my roof’s solar panels 8 minutes later. I unplugged my EV from my home charger, and drove to get a burrito. I drove on energy that left the sun 10 minutes before I used it to go get lunch.
Also, my electric bill arrived yesterday and it was the same amount due for the past 3 months: Total bill $0 “No payment due at this time”.
My AVP. Every time I put it on I’m amazed how well I can see the world and all the floating windows are so crisp.
The fact that I can go on eBay and get an actually usable laptop for $40
Like, I was playing around with freecad on it a couple days ago. It just works. The fact that I can get a fully functional personal computer for cheaper than 8 hamburgers is crazy.
The crazier part is that I have no problem spending $40 on those 8 hamburgers over the course of a month, but god forbid I spend $20 on something that should last years.
We pay for things with plastic.
Sorry to burst your bubble regarding quiet streets, but tires make a lot of noise, too. So if we just replaced every car to be electric, the streets would certainly be quieter, but not silent. The best way to make cities actually silent is to remove cars entirely.
USBC-PD and the rise of energy efficient dc appliances. the ability to to toss out ac power bricks and power most of my DC appliances with an electrical grid I wired together with solar panels and batteries. The sun powers most of my convinence and luxuries without burning fossil fuels.
24" TV, desktop vaporizer, video game console, laptop, and led lamp are all run from my offgrid dc electrical system and can use under 50 watts when all are on at once. I can process a load of laundry with a travel sized washer and spin dryer combo. I can brew a cup of coffee, I can get running water with a usb pump/shower head, I can run a small fridge, run a fan, I have a usb electric blanket/ heated jacket poncho that will sip on 10 watts of power and keep me warm on cold nights. If thats not enough I can get a jacket or blanket that runs on dewalt power tool batteries. Even charge a small electric bike.
I can do all of this with a cheap power station and 200w of solar. Just about the only modern convinences that are still hard to do on a 200w dc system is air conditioning(sadly seeming to be more a survival requirement in the coming years during summer) and cooking appliances. In those cases a tank of propane and dual fuel generator are great backup options especially if you can’t afford more solar and batteries to run a 1000+ watt appliance. Fortunately most 5000btu window units only consume 400-600 watts after startup surge or with soft starter so you dont need that much solar and batteries if you have a small space to be conditioned.
All of these things either weren’t possible or gave our ancestors a laborious manual workload 100 years ago. Most of these things required an industrial sized machine and or massive amounts of wattage 50 years ago. Now this is all possible with cheap affordable technological magic that sips power. Solar panels are getting cheaper and more efficent, and so is most consumer technology that power our lives. Its a shame that our generation and future generations will have to pay for the sins of our fossil fuel burning fathers but I am confident that more and more people will be moving towards more sustainable options especially as their homes/enviroments burn down from the ever increasing dry droughts and they are forced into being nomadic vandwellers.
This comment. The internet is wild.
Aeropex - bone-conducting earphones
Coolify2 - Personal neck AC/heating with peltier technology
GrapheneOS - Able to use a smartphone to its full potential, without the tracking/bloat/handholding of other default OS choices.
I really like how those first two are basic science, but somebody was actually able to innovate them into doing something useful.
I wish more technology was like this, and not whatever the crypto/metaverse/NFT/AI people are doing (mostly mistaking fluff for innovation)
Like the progression of LEDs over the past 40 years, an outstanding increase in brightness and colours.
Also, listening to
Kool Keith - Earth People
Given the heat lately, air conditioning. Sure, AC has been around for a long time but it’s becoming ubiquitous (at least in the us). Mine is controllable over Alexa, outputs data graphs, makes intelligent decisions to save money, etc.
Now that we daily experience the results of global warming, we all hide our heads in the
sandACWhen the wildfire smoke turns the air orange.
I want to go back 100 years and show people this picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
Also, places like Pittsburgh were running coal burning factories 24/7, plus there were still plenty of working horses doing deliveries.
Ebikes have transformed where I live. It’s mountainous so the only cyclists you’d see were skinny lycra-clad guys on 5 grand bikes.
Now virtually everyone has a bike, from kids to octogenarians, and the only difference between the lycra-clad cyclists and the shorts n t-shirt cyclists is the fact the ones on the ebikes are all smiling 😊
Lime bikes and scooters, too. Totally transformed our city after we finally started installing protected bike lanes (and light rail), and a ton of people use them instead of cars. I bought an ebike and use my car like, once a month to grab something like a heavy AC unit.
totally this, such a simple idea but it’s transformative in so many ways
When I was a kid, I had to reference several manuals and carefully assemble a double handful of parts in specific order to connect two computers to eachother. I’d have to fiddle with protocols and speeds and obscure features and traits to make the stars align. Transferring 200mb would be an overnight task. If I wanted to show pictures from my vacation on a big screen, I would have to have them printed on cellulose and insert them in tiny frames to project on a thick screen with a huge machine.
Yesterday, I went to a friend, pointed my phone at a
magic symbolqr code and sent a full movie to their PC in a few minutes. Then I pushed a button to make the photographs on my phone appear on their TV.I have a magic little box sitting in my garage that allows me to dream up a weird little device, create it on a computer, convert it to a big pile of computer code automatically, hit “go” on the magic box, and come back in 4 hours to a hunk of plastic in the exact shape I dreamt up only a few hours before. A shape and functionality that had never before existed on the face of the earth.
Ya, 3d printing feels pretty futuristic.
my job is basically design and manufacture, the dependencies of 3d printers make my job wouldnt exist 10 years ago.
The dystopian novel vibes.
Technology that is so ubiquitous that younger gen’s don’t know how to troubleshoot them at all.
I grew up with many examples from mag tape media to 802.11b that was basically only useful within a clear line of site to the router.
