endlessbeard

Yes and no, the progress of solar array technology continues unabated, with multiple areas of research that are beginning to reach commercial applications. Module conversion efficiencies now are in the 20% range, but heterojunction cells, or Gallium Arsenide, or Perovskites, or any number of other possible advancements could easily put efficiencies up into the 30% range.

That being said, the price of the solar modules themselves has already shunk to a small piece of the cost to build a solar array, with the bulk of the costs now being the support structures, wiring, electrical equipment, labor, development, etc. And those costs aren’t going to decline, they’d still be there even if the solar panels themselves were free, so they effectively set a floor to the cost reductions we’re seeing.

Assuming efficiency of ~4 miles per kWh (on the high end of current EV efficiency), that’s a 200kWh battery. charging that in 10 minutes would require 1.2MW’s of power, enough to power about 50-100 homes simultaneously. Now imagine a handful of vehicles charging simultaneously, consuming as much power as a small city.

As others have commented, the open source home assistant project can take voice commands and perform smart home functions like turning lights on and off, reading off the forecast, taking down notes, etc etc. But it does have limits, you will have to script any kind of complex commands, like pulling headlines from an RSS feed, or playing spotify playlists, or really anything that requires fetching info from an API, it won’t do those kinds of things out of the box.

The other factor which others have called out is that it doesn’t currently handle wake word functionality, though that’s been on their road map this year and the Oct update might fix that. That being said, running a dedicated wake word app to fill in that gap is very much possible. See my thread here for more info: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/setting-up-a-100-local-smart-speaker-on-an-android-tablet-using-tasker-and-snowboy-to-handle-wake-word-detection/611435

Typical Buffalo PD, they probably finished off the night by concussing some old folks and beating the female officers.

Same, including an IR led is such a simple thing, why did this ever go away. Though I’m pretty sure most Chinese phones still have them, Xiaomi phones do for sure

Hell yes, just jumped on the ulefone train myself!

I actually meant to reply to your comment but replied to the main thread by mistake, I had the same frustrations with modern phones losing features, and even fairphone dropping the 3.5mm jack was a wtf decision to me. See my comment on the ulephone 18t, it had virutally everything I wanted in a phone.

I’m going to chime in here to plug the ulefone power armor 18t I just got. I was pretty nervous to get a chinese phone as I’ve only had samsung and lg phones before, but this thing legit blows me away. Not only does it fully support every band that my carrier uses (rare even for phones made for the US market), but it has:

• Replaceable battery that lasts 3+ days between recharges

• Extremely rugged, IP69 waterproof and designed for underwater photography (physical shutter button and diving camera app)

• 3.5mm jack, sd card slot, FM radio (with built in antenna - no headphones need to be plugged in), and an RGB notification led

• Dimensity 900 chipset that beats a lot of the snapdragon chips on the market.

• 12 fucking GB of RAM… yes, 12…

• Wifi 6(ax)

• Wireless charging and reverse charging

• A fucking 60x magnification microscope? (Why???)

• A FLIR thermal camera (Just because, why the fuck not)

• Runs mostly bloat free stock android

All that for under $600 (on aliexpress)

The only thing it’s missing is an IR blaster, otherwise this is the best phone I’ve ever had, bar none. It is a chonky beast though, be warned.

This has really changed my view on Chinese electronics, especially at a time when phones for the western world are losing features and functionality all the time (including stuff from South Korean). Turns out capitalism isn’t that great for innovation!

Because color is photons in a narrow range of wavelengths/energies visible to the human eye. Atoms have electrons that can emit and absorb photons under certain circumstances, but don’t have any intrinsic color themselves.

Color charge is a property of quarks thats trinary in nature, and is usually described in terms of red, green, and blue, since color is a useful analogy to how it functions. Despite the name, colored light and color charge are not actually related outside of the analogy.

The answer is no, but if you take an imaginative view of color charge in quarks then yes!