Actually have some light PVC plumbing work on the agenda this afternoon. And the research, as per most projects, involves an amalgam of downloaded product manuals, improvisation and youtube tutorials. And yes, a myriad of specialty products, fittings, tools and treatments.
I see tremendous need for a resource like this. "How To Make Anything". Using what you have at hand. Readable on a phone with cellular internet. Great work and will surely inspire some wonderful projects!
"Actually have some light PVC plumbing work on the agenda this afternoon."
I used to have that item on my agenda all the time ... and then I just started buying sharkbites and putting things together like Legos.
It's not a solution for every plumbing and irrigation task I have - I still do find myself using PVC solvent from time to time ... but long gone are the days when I had to connect two pipes that were sort of off axis from each other and out of plane and how in the world will I put together 3 45s and 2 22.5 elbows to somehow make that connection.
Get yourself a roll of PEX (Uponor is the nice stuff) and some sharkbites and these jobs get really easy ...
> As TOC decreased, the ultraviolet absorbance at 254 nm increased. Pipes consumed as much as 0.5 mg/L as Cl2 during each 3 day stagnation period.
Both of those results mentioned in the abstract are really fascinating. I'm really curious why UV absorbance increased as leachates were released, and the chlorine consumption kind of makes me think that if I ever have a house with PEX, I will want to install a whole-house purification system to remove chlorine, or run copper to at least all drinking locations.
I was not proposing replacing proper, copper drinking water lines with PEX. I was proposing replacing PVC lines with PEX. I'm thinking irrigation, utility supply, etc. ... I wouldn't expect a house to be plumbed with PVC for drinking water ...
Although the sharkbites are also really, really handy to have in your copper water system - if only to have a handful of caps in case of line breaks ...
>... I wouldn't expect a house to be plumbed with PVC for drinking water ...
Manufactured (AKA mobile) homes are typically plumbed with PVC or PEX[0], and PEX is pretty popular for traditional (AKA site-built) houses as well[1].
Yes, most new homes are plumbed with PVC (or actually, CPVC, which is a variant that tolerates higher temperatures and is sized like copper pipe) or PEX.
I wouldn't trust sharkbite fittings for anything really permanent (inside a wall, etc) but they are super handy for quick repairs.
Understood. I wasn't trying to shoot down your point with a drive-by, just want more people to be aware that PEX, which is quite common in new construction for household drinking water plumbing, is a questionable choice for at least that purpose.
PVC, CPVC, and PEX are all commonly used in drinking water plumbing.
I can't offer a qualified view on irrigation or utility plumbing; not sure if PEX leachates are worse than PVC, etc.
You used it correctly. The term minimal has been hijacked to mean something entirely different these days. It often means “I’ve thrown away important bits so the design looks sexy, I can list it on SiteInspire and get kudos from my friends for following too much white space and anti-functionalism trends”.
> HN-friendly design
We need to own this. When newcomers, youngsters and uninformed people want to be inspired, they’ll instead see this as “Old fashioned, grumpy, nerdy HN-friendly design”. There, we killed it already.
That said - This web design has some short comings. For me the legibility is compromised by using a fixed width typeface, line-spacing is too tight and paragraph column width is too large.
While I generally agree with your sentiment, I did want to point out that you lambast the minimalist movement for adding white space, then critique this site for not having enough white space.
> No matter what skill I intended to learn, I found that its permanence had been eroded by the chaos of technology. Materials were replaced by brands, techniques replaced by accessories, and craftsmanship replaced by consumerism. Clearly, this was something that needed to be fixed. Clearly, this is what I had to do.
> "No matter what skill I intended to learn, I found that its permanence had been eroded by the chaos of technology."
I find this particularly correct. There are some technologies and/or things which are very simple, yet very hard to improve upon. Incidentally, these items are very durable too. Double edge razors and fountain pens come to my mind.
Yet, these technologies and items are thrown away or forced to obsolescence just because they don't produce the profits today's corporations seek. I think it's a very sad outcome. One can say that modern razors or writing implements doesn't have similar disadvantages of vintage counterparts, but the contrary is also true. Not all modern technologies supersede older ones flawlessly, and older ones still had distinct advantages. Same is also valid for computing technologies, both in hardware and software side.
Because of this reality, I find this kind of documentation projects very valuable and important. We need to address permanence of knowledge as soon as possible. It's a very hard problem, but we can start somewhere.
IIRC, Ford has a simulator just for testing these controls in the cockpit. They design and implement a cockpit, mount it to the simulator and run some scenarios like animals crossing roads or someone braking hard in front of you.
I drive a 2001 focus, and all controls can be operated so-called blindly. I can do anything (HVAC, hazards, lights, etc.) without moving my eyes from the road. I think it's very important.
As much as it's a fascinating project, a lot of the things described are things you can easily find described by looking for just slightly older books and magazines.
E.g. my dad had a series of books from his childhood setting out "experiments for boys" from the 1950s and 1960s, that because they were targeting low cost and ability for children to reproduce them (though by the time I got them in the early 1980s some materials were already tricky to obtain because they were considered too dangerous - the books contained plenty of experiments including fireworks and e.g. acids for example).
It was how I learned both to make carbon microphones like the one he described, and other fun things like electroplating (unfortunately I learned how to do that by toying with electrolysis with lead electrodes and accidentally covering one of my mum's silver spoons in lead - it was not popular)
Combine those kind of books with a good guide for how to safely extract the chemicals etc. that are now a hassle to come by, and you'd bootstrap a very substantial amount of processes and skills.
the author lists a set of foundational materials to be mastered: fiber, wood, metal, clay, and glass.
coincidentally, i'd been thinking about the construction of buildings in terms of timeless (and less toxic) materials, where it would be wonderful to remove as much plastic and concrete from modern buildings as possible, and design them with only wood, metal, ceramics (clay), stone, and glass. the hard part is elements like paint, wiring, and insulation, but this person is actually tackling those kinds of issues head on!
Ha! This is coming from the second chance pool! I was there when I upvoted this article. Apparently, not many people go to the second chance pool, since today I didn't even know how to access it. IMO, it's at least as interesting as the actual front page.
Go to /lists to see all the options or /pool directly to see the pool.
There's always the anecdote about USA not being able to rebuild some sixties nuclear bombs because some styrofoam manufacturer had gone out of business and nobody knew what the foam contained.
This is an interesting subject. If you're building something very critical, you need to track precisely where your components come from, where the material for those comes from, where the raw materials came from etc. This is also one of the reasons why nuclear power or medical technology are so expensive. We have gotten used to having extremely low cost hardware, but that is because it's produced by obscure long subcontractor chains spreading all over the world, intense competition, constant optimization and churn.
it's interesting to me how classified FOGBANK was, despite being apparently just an aerogel. I wonder why they couldn't replace it with something off the shelf.
But I'm not sure I agree that using more generic components should make the technology so expensive.Especially if there was a demand for that.
So using a versatile mcu, with lots of ram/flash, dual-core(big/little) for low power, and a rich set of peripherials, together with some affordable fpga, and some greenPak programmable gellybean logic, and some voltage conversion parts could be good building blocks for digital electronics.
As for Analog, programmability exists too, in the form of via-programmable analog chips(laser programmable at the factory, I think for volumes of few thousands). That still doesn't cover high-performance parts but that would fit many projects.
As for power electronics, I don't know much about that, but I do wonder.
> Fundamentally, my work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves. As of writing this, I believe I have done this on a conceptual level, but I intend to continue this work to the highest level of technology that I can achieve on my own. I encourage readers to utilize anything here which they find practical for whatever purpose they see fit, and to consider adopting a mindset of simplification in projects of their own.
This really reminds me of "the old internet", where stuff like this felt like a higher fraction of content that surfaces to my attention. These days, something like this is a rare find.
I’m amazed at how clean and neat most of this stuff looks. The telephone (with light bulbs and wall switches) is really cool but it’s also very neat as in well made, uncluttered. Everything I try to build like this might work, but it’s ugly with tape,glue, torn cardboard and jagged cuts all over. I’m impressed with the build and the build quality.
As someone who finds most things at least a little bit interesting, this is pretty awesome. Love seeing someone doing what they love to do and sharing it.
This is so hard to read. The font size is so small that the serifs make it cluttered, monospaced fonts are terrible for readability, and it's hard to read successive lines since they span the whole width of the page.
I think it's ironic that other commenters praise this as "HN-friendly", when HN itself uses a sans-serif proportional font at a reasonable size, limited width and margins for legibility, and background color to reduce contrast.
It's interesting, and rather ironic, that this use of monospace is an affectation that makes the site's HTML _more complicated_!
It's been done by wrapping everything in <tt> elements, adding an extra layer of indentation and more code. If that was simply left out, the browser would use its default stylesheets - and the preferences of the reader - to display the text.
12px monospaced is really easy to read. The problem is not the website in this case. The website is fine. Consider pressing CTRL+ a few times if it is too small for you in particular.
It's just not very convincing given that basically no site, even the one that you're on right now, uses monospaced fonts for prose. By putting every character on a grid with each getting the same weight (even punctuation!), it makes text harder to skim.
You keep making these assertions, but do you have any sources? Again, there's a reason why monospaced fonts are used almost nowhere. Think about it: monospaced fonts are much easier to typeset, and yet English texts almost universally use proportional fonts. Proportional fonts give each word a unique width and shape, which makes them easier to skim; monospaced text is so grid-like that you have to actually read the word to skim it (there is no "flow"). There are actual studies that have shown that monospaced fonts are worse for legibility and comprehension, and take longer to read.[1]
[2]
A side note, this may be quaint to us in the developed world, but this sort of thinking separates impoverished nations from developing ones, which is a fascinating anthropological topic.
Actually have some light PVC plumbing work on the agenda this afternoon. And the research, as per most projects, involves an amalgam of downloaded product manuals, improvisation and youtube tutorials. And yes, a myriad of specialty products, fittings, tools and treatments.
I see tremendous need for a resource like this. "How To Make Anything". Using what you have at hand. Readable on a phone with cellular internet. Great work and will surely inspire some wonderful projects!