> I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.
I think NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3DFX card, or maybe that was NFS3, I remember wishing I had one either way!
I remember playing Need for Speed: High Stakes with a 4MB Permedia 2 card, and the game was clearly supposed to have alpha-transparent textures on some lights, but my card couldn't handle it and I got opaque textures with big black borders around all the streetlight lens flares etc.
The worst was the Dolphin Cove track where beautiful shafts of sunlight were meant to lazily filter through the tree canopy onto the road. On my screen, they appeared as fully opaque walls blocking any view of the track ahead.
In its current state this doesn't appear to do more than a bluetooth OBD adapter paired with a cheap tablet can do - its really nothing like a Tesla touch screen at the moment, I guess the blog post title is just marketing.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm a competent mechanic (owned and fixed more cars than I can remember), and also electronically savvy; obviously modern cars have diagnostics via OBD2, but as you say, that's a world away from a Tesla-level control system.
Having had experience of various systems for more in-depth diagnostics (Ford, Vauxhall and PSA systems that I own, as well as the generic phone/bluetooth OBD code reader and diagnostic real-time display), I can't see that this will be easy to get sorted. Having seen the huge amount of work that a solution such as ForScan needs to get it running (and having spent some time feeding back issues to the creator), let alone something that is going to attempt to control a vehicle in everyday use, I think this will be a fair way away from being a real-world usable system - most cars just don't have the features documented, or even present.
The other thing is that I really don't think that a touchscreen is a good interface to use in a car. I'm a Tesla (and EV generally) fanboy, I guess, but this is one area that I don't get; you have to have your focus away from the road to do anything (which I guess won't matter when autopilot works fully all the time on any road) because you don't have tactile feedback and dedicated controls - you need to see where you're pressing to do something. There's a reason why cars' physical controls work so well, and I think a touchscreen (despite being really cool and futuristic) is the wrong way to go.
I mentioned this on the previous HN topic, the way the heating temperature is being controlled doesn't look correct to me. In all the boilers I've used the dial the servo is turning adjusts the temperature of the water being sent through the heating loop (to a blower or radiators) - this is not the heating thermostat. Generally you set this once and don't need to adjust it again, the thermostat does the work of turning the boiler on and off depending on when heat is required.
Similarly the dial above adjusts the domestic hot water temperature, while the system is running. Again, you rarely need to change it once its set to a temperature you are happy with.
Maybe I'm not understanding how this boiler works?
There are circumstances where varying the closed-loop temperature might be useful. (Of course I have no idea whether this applies to the article.) In my system you get better efficiency by operating at lower temperatures (more of the heat in the flue gas can be extracted), but this (along with radiator surface area) limits the total rate at which heat can be transfered into the rooms. If you're allowing the house to get cold during the day when no one's in, having the water temperature at its most efficient setting might mean it takes several hours to warm the house back up. So it might be preferable to briefly run the system at a higher water temperature to more rapidly bring the room temperature up, then back off the water temperature to allow more efficient operation.
Talked to the heating technician this week. Here in Germany heaters are set to 55-60 degree by default and it's advised to not increase the temperature or the minerals buildup will ruin the system very quickly.
Water hardness here is high, around 20 degrees, so your mileage may vary.
Are you mistaking different for correct? Generally the thermostat just turns the pump on, but is there actually anything wrong with leaving the pump on and changing the temperature?
Yes: efficiency and keepimg temperature stable at a certain point (ie, with a small hysteresis).
Ad 1: the gist is that it takes less fuel to heat a liter of water from 30 to 31 degrees, than it does to heat it from 60 to 61 degrees.
Ad 2: with a lower temperature, it becomes easier to control your overshoot. Actually this is related to 1, but what you want in the end is to have a system that runs at as low a temperature as possible, all of the time.
I'm not entirely sure, however running the pump without actually heating the water seems like a waste of energy. Maybe that's how this boiler works though, I'd be interested to know more from the OP.
Not only is it baffling to me also, its annoying as well. I came from the UK where I would order a week's shopping and get it delivered Saturday morning. I never had to visit the store and placing an order took maybe 20 minutes.
Now I live in downtown Toronto and I have to walk to the store (no car here) a carry groceries home, which means at best I can purchase a few day's worth of food at a time.
I would so gladly pay a reasonable amount for delivery, and I don't mean these bespoke pick-everything-and-deliver-within-an-hour services - I just want to be able to choose a time, pay maybe $5-$10 and have a week's worth of food delivered. Is that so hard Loblaws?
> I would so gladly pay a reasonable amount for delivery, and I don't mean these bespoke pick-everything-and-deliver-within-an-hour services - I just want to be able to choose a time, pay maybe $5-$10 and have a week's worth of food delivered. Is that so hard Loblaws?
It takes time for the labor- maybe 2 hours of time for someone to get your food, bring it to your house, and go back. So that's probably at least $30 worth of their time.
So yeah, $5-$10 is not reasonable. If you're paying that little the labor is being subsidized by something else, or you're exploiting a desperate underpaid worker.
> The marginal cost of one delivery is obviously not 2 man-hours, that'd be ridiculous.
Why not? 1 hour to walk around the store and collect everything, 20 minutes to check it out, load the car, drive the the person's house, 10 minutes to walk the groceries to their apartment, wait for them to sign and open the door, 20 minutes to drive back. At least 2 hours of work.
Of course if you run a delivery service in the most idiotic way, it'll cost you a few man-hours per delivery. But we're talking about supermarket chains, i.e. people who know a thing or two about preparing orders and dispatching them efficiently.
Why as a renter would I want to use your service over a traditional letting agency? They also provide legal services, handling of finances and often handling of maintenance and repairs etc.
The main difference I see here is using clout as a company to reduce or remove the rent deposit, and as other comments have mentioned some additional concierge services, is that worth an extra fee on top of my rent?
I have rented in the UK before, I am currently a landlord in the UK. Filling in paperwork, providing references etc. isn't particularly difficult or time consuming and I wouldn't pay £99/month myself personally to have that done for me. Maybe a one off fee.
In the UK (and I'm sure many other places in the world) rental agencies already provide the services you are describing. As a UK single-family home landlord I ask my rental agency to find me tenants, run background checks, handle deposits, rent and other finances etc. For this I pay them 5-10% of the rental income/month. They will also handle repairs etc. if I need them to and bill me accordingly. This is a great service for me as a landlord who lives abroad because it greatly reduces the amount of time I have to spend dealing with my property to maybe a couple of hours every few months.
I'm a bit confused here; looking at the video and pics of your water heater/boiler, the knob the servo is turning looks like it sets the temperature the boiler heats the water to for the central heating loop. This is generally not the thermostat, and once set to a value you are happy with shouldn't need to be adjusted.
Yes, it is not a thermostat, I have similar heater (also Vaillant) and it just sets the temperature of the water in the pipes (generally you set it higher when the outside temperature gets lower, and all the way up when it reaches the minimum at your location).
This is interesting for me because I am moving to Toronto in July, I've done research into how much I should be expecting to earn but some anecdotal evidence is always welcome too.
The numbers compared to my current employment in Cambridge, UK seem fairly similar, I believe living costs are pretty similar too. Not all of us have the ability, or the desire to move to the US!
Performance seems fine (on a Pi 2). I am going to have to add some URLs to the whitelist though, as it has recently started affecting the ability to log into Xbox Live.
I think NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3DFX card, or maybe that was NFS3, I remember wishing I had one either way!