I plan on sort of following the path of the OP, but in an automated way.
Longer comment on Reddit[1], but the goal is to make a climate controlled greenhouse that houses a heavily automated aquaponics setup along with backyard chickens for eggs and eventually meat. I may take on a couple goats for milk but that would follow later. As part of this I also want to setup solar and vertical axis wind along with evacuated tubing for heating to cut down on energy dependence at the same time.
Once you realize how much of your working time is going to just provide food, shelter, and energy, it makes you question if you could manage to provide those basics in another way than money. With the tech we have now and the rising costs of food taking a bigger cut of your paid time I think we very soon could find that the cost/time investment to DIY will become less than the time investment to purchase from someone else.
This is all of course ignoring the upfront capital requirements but the idea is that if I can reduce the portion of my pay going to those things, I could either a) have more money left over for other things, or b) reduce the amount of time I work equal to the reduced expenses and have more time available for other things. Either way, less external dependencies = more degrees of freedom.
There's still one left (I just got one). The pricing model of the Retina MBPs is just craziness to me. To get larger storage sizes you have to jump entire model lines to get it, you can't just upgrade storage on them.
Just for the older Retina models. Copied from the link you provided: "Specifically, the "Mid-2012" and "Early 2013" models use a 6 Gb/s SATA-based SSD whereas the "Late 2013" and "Mid-2014" models use a PCIe 2.0-based SSD. These SSD modules are neither interchangeable nor backwards compatible."
The reason for the sentence you quote is to explain that PCIe chips are different than the proprietary-pinout m-SATA port in 2012-2013 Retina MacBooks. They are strikingly similar and if you're not paying attention, you might try to move one into an incompatible machine.
You can still swap a drive in newer models, just with a PCIe card instead of an mSATA drive.
Simply put: Newer generation of hardware = newer storage interface.
Here is a replacement guide for a 2014 model Retina MacBook Pro:
I was thinking long and hard about maybe getting a refurbished 15.6in MBP. I ended up with a HP Omen gaming laptop instead, because I could get it with a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM for $1700, instead of about $2500. I'm giving up battery life of course, and then there's the issue that it runs Windows...
However, I've been pleased so far. The keyboard takes a little getting used to (because it is in the exact center of the laptop), but is good for typing overall. Good feel, no flex. The display is good too, with a wide viewing angle.
I just tossed my Macbook Pro across the room the other day by accident (didn't check that my backpack was closed...). It did indeed bend the metal a bit, and the display cracked in the corner, but having seen plastic machines make the same tumble I think it would have fared significantly worse if it weren't aluminum. The force that bent the metal would have surely cracked the plastic into pieces and the display would have taken more of the shock and cracked way worse than it did.
When I lived in college dorms a few years back, my thinkpad would fall ~6ft out of my bed onto tile a few times a week. Occasionally I had to pop the battery back in.
Plastic can flex to absorb the stress without permanently deforming, aluminum not so much. Even the panasonic toughbooks are plastic, and those are probably the most durable laptops I know of by a large margin.
Interestingly enough destroying a Panasonic Toughbook is easy. Stand on it with high-heels... The Panasonic rep had just been stomping on it, and then this smallish woman asks if she could try.
It didn't boot or do much of anything after she had traipsed all over it.
That being said, I am not saying the MB would fare much better, but those Toughbooks are not as tough as they are advertised.
Several years ago while walking outdoors during the winter carrying my thinkpad in my hands, I slipped on a manhole cover that was covered in ice. The thinkpad fell about 4 to 5 feet straight onto the manhole cover, landing on it's corner (left-side palm rest corner).
The corner itself was obliterated, leaving a small hole where it used to be, but that was the only damage the laptop sustained.
Unibody metal laptops are nice, but I think the structural advantage of them is heavily oversold. Plastic laptops with metal frames can be amazingly durable.
I had posted a discussion to Reddit[0] about a year ago that touched on a similar idea. Its a model for AI using a community of simple IA that as a whole becomes the AI. It injects social behaviours into the IA to govern how they interact with the community and to allow bias to develop among groups, and domain proficiencies to develop within individual IA. Because I envision the model being distributed, the proposed implementation includes a blockchain-like ledger of points of confirmed knowledge. I'm really not all that knowledgeable on the subject of AI but given the relevance and knowledge of HN I figured I'd toss it here to see if anyone wants to read a wall of text and give feedback. I have a backlog of books on AI I want to read, so if there's anything you'd like to add to my reading list after skimming through the idea I'd appreciate any suggestions :)
There was an article[1] from a few years ago about Cloudflare's infrastructure and from the sounds of it they can't link customers to data. Data does exists because that's the nature of a cache, but its defined with an undefined timestamp and is purged regularly in order to have enough disk space.
>Unlike most database applications, the cache stored at each CloudFlare facility has an undefined expiration date—and because of the nature of those facilities, it isn't a simple matter to add more storage. To keep the utilization level of installed storage high, the cache system simply purges older cache data when it needs to store new content.
>The downside of the hash-based cache's simplicity is that it has no built-in logging system to track content. CloudFlare can't tell customers which data centers have copies of which content they've posted. "A customer will ask me, 'Tell me all of the files you have in cache,'" Prince said. "For us, all we know is there are a whole bunch of hashes sitting on a disk somewhere—we don't keep track of which object belongs to what site."
Good luck! We recently launched ours - web app that turns multiple Internet devices into a stereo system; all devices play the same audio at the same time.
Any chance either of you could link? I've done it too but i was never completely happy with the result and it would be nice to see how other people have done it for some inspiration.
Yeah, i prefer that approach but i find that a lot of recruiters still insist on a resume despite having linkedin. Thanks for the link and inspiration though!
Nice. I hadn't come across box-shadow before - useful to know. One issue I noticed is that the border-bottom:2em isn't working - there is zero border in chrome, safari and ff. Perhaps you need "bottom:2em" or something? Sometimes css drives me insane fiddling about trying to fix shit like this :)
Longer comment on Reddit[1], but the goal is to make a climate controlled greenhouse that houses a heavily automated aquaponics setup along with backyard chickens for eggs and eventually meat. I may take on a couple goats for milk but that would follow later. As part of this I also want to setup solar and vertical axis wind along with evacuated tubing for heating to cut down on energy dependence at the same time.
Once you realize how much of your working time is going to just provide food, shelter, and energy, it makes you question if you could manage to provide those basics in another way than money. With the tech we have now and the rising costs of food taking a bigger cut of your paid time I think we very soon could find that the cost/time investment to DIY will become less than the time investment to purchase from someone else.
This is all of course ignoring the upfront capital requirements but the idea is that if I can reduce the portion of my pay going to those things, I could either a) have more money left over for other things, or b) reduce the amount of time I work equal to the reduced expenses and have more time available for other things. Either way, less external dependencies = more degrees of freedom.
1 - http://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/2yovsq/canada_risks_...