I have recently been building a solar-powered water pump for use in the field (so completely portable and no resources other than water). The main reason was to assist a friend in getting water out of a stream beside his allotment garden to water the plants, but I also fancied it as an interesting hobby project!
As part of that project I have learnt about switching power supplies and solar panels, pcb design and testing, and more. This is the prototype PCB:
I thought it would be useful to post an update on how my M1 is going after a month's use.
In general, it is indeed a very nice machine, and despite anything noted below I am not at all sorry to have bought it sight unseen (ordered the day after launch).
Whether it is worth the cost for someone with a newer original machine (e.g. a 2020 MacBook) I cannot say; the additional performance is noticeable, but it would depend on you use patterns.
For the last couple of years I've been contemplating the replacement of my mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15" which I called Marvin, and which has been my workhorse laptop and one of my favourite computers overall ever. However, its battery has been aging, and the screen suffering from various blemishes, and of course the "new shiny" factor ...
A cookie is a name + a (short) value, such as "mysite = 3927y394AIcy" or "google = dbkfvhdbfkvhsudbcksjuc". Cookies are often used as index keys for data stored in a website database, such as the account details you are logged in as. The name is usually fixed for a particular {website & purpose} and the value is often a very large random string (as much as 60 letters), to make it very unlikely to guess a correct one. The site uses the number via an index table to get at the useful data. To be clear then, the cookie value not only looks meaningless, it is meaningless.
On Friday 9th August 2019 the 727MW Little Barford gas-fired plant went off line in an unexpected outage, followed two minutes later by the 1,218MW Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm. This caused such a drop in the available power on the national grid that the grid went into "self-protect" state, cutting power to prevent further damage. The result of a widespread power cut across southern Britain for several hours.
My take on most of the big digital projects is that the scope is far to ambitious at the start, because during initial planning the details are ignored and so it looks easy. As the project proceeds, a number of things happen:
With the apparent rise of energy scarcity in the UK some in the media have been asking whether the Govt is indeed correct in wanting to build more nuclear power stations, and of course that is one option. However, when you restrict nuclear power to mean only uranium fission reactions, you get a distorted picture.
At one point, pretty much the whole of the south-facing land in Sutton-in-the-Isle (of Ely) was dedicated to orchards and fruit growing, with the basket-making businesses thriving along the bottom edge of that ridge. A large chunk of the land - well over 8000 acres - between Cambridge and Sutton was used for fruit, much of which was processed by the Chivers factories at Histon and Huntingdon. I have an article, "How The Railways Deal With Special Classes Of Traffic" by A. Chauncy, describing the Histon factory:
I've been thinking lately on the subject of Grand Challenges - those things that seem too big to address now but which are in fact achievable. In the last decades we have seen Challenges such as the complete sequencing of the human genome, the first fully-autonomous robotic vehicle, the landing of spacecraft on Mars, and finding the last significant component of the Quantum Physics model (the Higgs Boson) come to pass, so perhaps it is a good time to muse on new challenges.
