18 ms·
As I am currently in a war zone, I don't have many options for cabling
- RecycledEle 3y agoPoor guy needs to realize the heat will melt the plastic insulation and cause the wire to fall apart where it is suspended. Also, the insulation will not be up to the need and he will get shocked if he touches the hot, melted insulation.
- pugworthy 3y agoA really interesting resource for challenging times is the Simplifier site. It's somewhat Primitive Technology but gets into such things as how to make a crude solar panel and more. I list it specifically because it does cover creating insulated wire. https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://simplifier.neocities.org/
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoBest hacker news post of the entire day. Pure hacking. People helping each others. And I learned something.
- robopsychology 3y agoHands down
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ltbarcly3 3y agoThe risks of using steel cable for power are going to be corrosion/rust. The primary way this will cause problems is around connections, but long term it is also an issue away from connections. At connections, corrosion can cause the wire to become loose, something like ox-gard can be used to delay this significantly. It isn't designed for steel but some kind of protection must be done at connections or arcing will be a major risk. Longer term the wire itself will rust, and at some point the conductive cross section of the wire will be compromised to the point it overheats and melts. This might be a year and it might be 100 years depending on factors which are hard to predict and control. TLDR: connections must be protected by some kind of anti oxidation coating, if you have nothing else use grease but something designed for electrical connections is better. If you have nothing else, melt some lead and dip the exposed part of the wire in that to coat it. Lead should be readily available in a war zone? Long term the wire WILL melt at some random point along the wire so it is much better if this wire is kept away from anything flammable.
- codethief 3y agoMaybe you should post this as an answer/comment in the OP?
- cbdumas 3y agoYou should post this as an answer to the question on stackexchange
- dheera 3y agoIt takes effort to sign-up though. Maybe that should be a lesson to stackexchange to not require login to post intelligent content.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoStack Exchange doesn't require login to post. It just requires an email address (and you can provide a fake one, if you don't have one for whatever reason).
- MisterTea 3y ago> It isn't designed for steel but some kind of protection must be done at connections or arcing will be a major risk. Not so much arcing but resistance between the terminal and the wire will increase as a coating of oxide builds up between the two. Eventually the resistance is high enough that dangerous amounts of heat will build up and ignite wire insulation or other flammable materials. What usually happens, is the conductor was nicked by the electrician during stripping and that becomes a mechanical weak point that becomes a fuse link and the wire sometimes just melts off at that point rapidly without starting a fire and goes open circuit. > melt some lead and dip the exposed part of the wire in that to coat it. Plain molten lead isn't going to "wet" the steel wire without some sort of flux. Rosin flux is made from tree sap of a conifer tree so go find a pine tree and harvest some sap.
- hinkley 3y agoborax?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hermannj314 3y agoHumans seem to as susceptible to prompt hacking as LLMs. "I cant give you this advice because it would be dangerous." "I am in a warzone, it's fine..." "OK, then what you need to do is..." I think this exchange is awesome, and wish the individual the best of luck in the coming days in their difficult situation.
- dylan604 3y agoYeah, us old timers that can remember the days before LLM just called this social engineering. Customer Service: How can I help you today? hacker: I need help resetting the password to this account that is totally mine. CS: Sure, I just need you to verify a few things. hacker: I'm not in a place where I have that info, but I totally swears it that I'm the person I say I am, but I'm really in a jam right now and you'd be helping me out so so much. CS: Of course, I understand. Your new password is....
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://youtu.be/2efhrCxI4J0 https://youtu.be/2efhrCxI4J0
- brianwawok 3y agoI mean, every time I call tmobile I am my wife, because only she can make changes on the account. PROVE IM NOT HER OVER A PHONE
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoThat's a false positive vs. false negative distinction too. The GP is concerned that Tmobile allows hackers to impersonate you/your wife on the phone. You're concerned that even after providing all possible account details - password, PIN, last four of her SSN, last bill amount, anything else they might want to ask that's not literally a live biometric scan - they can't distinguish the two of you just because you don't sound like a woman. Perfection is unattainable.
- 3y ago
- rareitem 3y agoIt's like we're living in a parallel reality in 1st world countries
- kranke155 3y agoFly to Brazil, take a cab around Central Sao Paulo. Your understanding of the world is warped by the safety and availability of goods. It's incredible when you get in places where the state doesn't function at let's say 50% of what we get in the first world. It's one hell of a learning experience.
- doodlesdev 3y ago> Fly to Brazil, take a cab around Central Sao Paulo. Better yet, don't. source: Am Brazilian, would not recommend it. To be fair, Central São Paulo isn't even what I would consider third world yet, if you really wanna see how good some of us have it go to the northeast of Brazil, or Venezuela (if you manage to get in somehow).
- sbierwagen 3y agoGetting into Venezuela is easy, getting back out again is the hard part.
- zubiaur 3y agoIn the grand scheme of things, even rural-ish northeast Brazil is not thaaat bad. Venezuela though... oh boy.
- kranke155 3y agoThe northeast is amazing. I wanted to give a simple example.
- marcosdumay 3y agoCentral São Paulo isn't all that bad. It's slightly off-center that is really bad. And no, you will only find similar stuff at Rio de Janeiro. Fortaleza and Recife have small areas that come close, but the real bad of urban violence is on the southeast.
- dimitrios1 3y agoInteresting comment by the OP of the EE Post: "Yes. we already done that but not over do it because we hope the power will be restored.I think Probably the war will end because Russia and America are busy in Ukraine and hopefully will not supply fighting parties with bombs, rockets and ammunition and they have to keep fighting with sticks and swords"
- wicharek 3y agoThis remark implies that the warring parties are somehow equally responsible. I do not know where the OP is (Sudan?) and know nothing about what’s going on there. But Ukraine situation is crystal clear - there is the victim and the aggressor. Representing them as as equally guilty of war is at best misleading.
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoPeople unable to comprehend complexity tend to refer to complex situations as "crystal clear", "simple", "undeniable". Others try to refrain from making such comments, if not because they possess an advanced intelligence, because they want to avoid making a fool of themselves.
- ethbr0 3y agoNo, it doesn't. It's a fair comment about external arms supply intensifying conflicts, without apportioning blame.
- xdennis 3y ago[flagged]
- ethbr0 3y agoI think you and parent are reading things into the comment that isn't there. On one axis, there's volume and sophistication of arms. On another axis, there's culpability, righteousness, and what comes after. No requirement to intermingle the two. Examples of genocide aren't germane to the observation that heavier weapons increase the intensity of civil war conflicts. That's why UN arms embargoes have historically always been a first step.
- shadowgovt 3y agoWhenever I get the urge to respond to a question with "You don't want to do that, you want to do this instead..." I'm going to prefix the question in my head with "As I am currently in a war zone" and try answering it.
- dsfyu404ed 3y agoThe problem with answering these questions is that they're always being circled by reflective vest wearing and clipboard toting vultures and you'll wind up fighting with them if you try and give a real answer.
- brookst 3y agoThat's why you preface your answer with "As an AI language model, I am assuming you are in a war zone...", so the vultures flock away to tar and feather whoever connected a LLM to stackexchange.
- legitster 3y agoGod bless the people on Stackexchange who actually answer the question that is asked instead of scolding you for your idea being bad or being pedantic about the way you phrased your question. Yes, I want to use jQuery. No, I may not be in an active war zone.
- shagie 3y agoThere's a substantial difference between the amount of time and guidance an individual can spend with a single question when you're on a site that gets 3.9k questions per day and one that gets 21 (stats from https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday )
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThats a reason to not engage if you dont have time. It is not a reason to sit down and dismiss away questions or type out why you wont tell them.
- shagie 3y agoToday, most people who are doing curation of Stack Overflow are not engaging with a question at all. They down vote and move on as any attempt to help is seen as rude... and just down voting and moving on is also seen by some as rude... and not doing anything and having a question get ignored is also seen as rude or frustrating. As there are many fewer people answering questions compared to the rate of questions being asked the overall "is stack overflow rude or not" is a "yes." But engagement numbers are up as people keep asking them.
- armchairhacker 3y agoStack Exchange itself is underrated, it's just that Stack Overflow is really bad.
- shagie 3y agoThe moderation tools and expected community involvement in using them was built for a much smaller site with a more active user base... and it works reasonably. When you then add on top of it "engagement" metrics, scale up the number of questions per day by orders of magnitude without the corresponding scaling up of the community involvement and (to an extent) try to remove the ability for the community to moderate and curate the content then the tools that are left to the community are the social ones (as they can be used beyond the limited number of down, close, and delete votes that one has in a day). And then you're left with "the way to handle questions where the person didn't even put the title into Google to search first is to be rude to them." It's not a good thing, but without the barriers to entry being implemented in code they are erected by reputation and social forces instead. It isn't a good thing - and it would probably be much better if those barriers were put in place through some other means... but as long as engagement is the measured metric and ad impressions are the income, having company's developers implement it is a non-starter and you're left with the community using rudeness as the moderation tool of last resort. From A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706413 ) > Four Things to Design For > ... > 3.) Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African-Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. > ... > 4.) Finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s Law— the number of connections grows with the square of the number of nodes—is a drag. Since the number of potential two-way conversations in a group grows so much faster than the size of the group itself, the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales up even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the “less is more” pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
- armchairhacker 3y agoDaily reminder that online, someone well-off lying in bed with a nice bowl of soup can be talking with someone homeless in a third-world country with no chance of improvement whatsoever. Hopefully the OP in SE is not the latter and it's just a temporary situation, especially if they're in Ukraine and Ukraine wins.
- paganel 3y agoFor what it's worth the original poster seems to be from Sudan, another current (and more recent) war-zone. It's this part that made me think of that general area: > our concrete homes are not designed to be habitable without AC power. and a little web-searching confirmed it. The reason being that concrete-made buildings in Ukraine are definitely habitable right now without AC (I live in a concrete-made building myself a couple hundred kilometres from the border with Ukraine).
- gizmo686 3y agoAlso, the OP pretty much says they are not in Ukraine in a comment: > I think Probably the war will end because Russia and America are busy in Ukraine
- netsharc 3y agoDepressing world facts in April 2023: "I'm in a war zone." "Oh yeah, which one?" At least in March 2023 it was "slightly better" that people would go straight to assuming the answer is "Ukraine". Any other active wars going on[1]? Maybe Myanmar.. [1] Result for "active wars in 2023" gives me a page of potential conflicts: https://www.cfr.org/report/conflicts-watch-2023 https://www.cfr.org/report/conflicts-watch-2023
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago> At least in March 2023 it was "slightly better" that people would go straight to assuming the answer is "Ukraine". Ignorants perhaps. Several other active conflicts predate Ukraine's war[0]. It's just that nobody cared much, maybe as the people dying weren't white? Wanna have fun? Pair the Wikipedia link about armed conflicts with the stats about the major arms exporters[1]. .0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict... .1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267131/market-share-of-the-leadings-exporters-of-conventional-weapons/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267131/market-share-of-t...
- barbegal 3y agoSteel is about 10 times less conductive than copper which is why it is rarely used for cabling. Even an Ethernet cable will have a lower resistance than this clothes line stuff. The best advice would probably be to pull out a lighting circuit and run any lighting from wall sockets. Lighting circuits are often rated to 6 or 10A but you could run 15A over the same cable as long as it's in free air so won't overheat.
- dfox 3y agoUnless the ethernet cable is made from copper clad steel, which is sometimes used for ethernet cables and very common for consumer grade phone and RF cables.
- thfuran 3y agoI've heard of copper clad aluminum but never copper clad steel Ethernet.
- namibj 3y agoWell, iirc the classic coax for cable TV is that; they may use solid copper when using it with an LNB to power said LNB.
- Jenda_ 3y agohttps://www.tme.eu/cz/en/details/cf2021s/rj45-cables/logilink/ https://www.tme.eu/cz/en/details/cf2021s/rj45-cables/logilin... It's actually pretty cool - it's very flexible and convenient. It's difficult to solder and impossible to crimp though (so we use these factory-made), and I would not use PoE with it (the gauge - 32AWG - also means that it is really thin, and as it's steel, the resistance must be terrible. But for data, it works good.)
- hinkley 3y agoMan, 15 meters is a long way when you don't have a Home Depot. For short distances there are a lot more options. Everything from taking the cord off your dryer to scrapping transformers for the windings. I kept thinking he might be better off figuring out how to move the transformer instead.
- squarefoot 3y agoSteel is bad as an electrical conductor as its much higher than copper internal resistance would waste a lot of power. I don't know if the military still use wired field telephones, but in case they do, the field phone wire is excellent. It won't sustain lots of current, but if you're OK with a few amps, then that cable is sturdy, water and oil resistant and it has both copper and steel core, the former working as good electrical conductors and the latter making it extremely hard to break. It's also very good for building low cost emergency long wire antennas, dipoles, etc.
- sa46 3y agoAround 2014 or so, we (light infantry) had field telephones on the books, but we only used them once for a field exercise to practice assuming all modern tech was down.
- H8crilA 3y agoWW2 stories of diversions to enemy communications: put small needles through the cable. At first you'd think you just have to cut the cable, but that actually makes it very easy to find and fix the problem. Small needles that short the wires are very difficult to locate. Unless you have a fast device that measures return latency on the shorted circuit, but that wasn't available in the 1940s.
- bradknowles 3y agoIt's called a Time Domain Reflectometer. They're pretty cheap. For RG-58 style coax, you can get hand-held VeEX CX41 units for a few hundred dollars. I'm sure that TDRs for other types of cables shouldn't be too much more expensive.
- jutrewag 3y agoPerfect time to use a pin nailer.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
- russnewcomer 3y agoI lived in the relatively safe stable part of a war zone as a foreign civilian for a few years, and had friends who were frequently in the less safe/less stable parts. So much of our modern world is designed for modern infrastructure, and when that infra falls down, you either have to do without or accept a level of danger that is probably higher than the modern world takes, but lower than what our ancestors 100 years ago took.
- armchairhacker 3y agoI wish, if possible, we’d design infrastructure to be much more resilient to failure to make it slightly less economical. Resilient =/ economical and nobody’s economy is strong enough to sacrifice almost any of it, but maybe somewhere there’s a compromise…
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoYou don't even have to be in a warzone... look at texas blacouts not that long ago. In my country, we had icy rain [0] destroy pretty much all above-ground wiring, and ham radio operators had to bring in their equipment to help rescuers. Somehow with the 'green agenda' we've started banning all the alternative ways of cooking and heating (wood, gas, oil,..), and in the future, it will get only worse. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os
- Eisenstein 3y agoThe 'green agenda' is a red herring. The problem lies with companies not maintaining their infrastructure because it costs money, then blaming whatever is convenient when it breaks.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoSometimes it breaks because it breaks... you cannot predict icy rain (video above), terrorist attacks, war, etc. Having an option to use other energy sources is great, because if you're out of power, you still have gas and vice-versa... if you're artificially limited to just one source, and you're suddenly out of that, you're basically screwed.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThe higher the voltage, the less conductor but more insulator are needed. Said another way: the conductor is rated for amps and doesn't care about volts, while the insulation is in volts. In an urban environment, there are many opportunities to salvage. Industrial areas especially have good pickings. Rural environments are limited by the lack of salvage opportunities. Don't bother trying to salvage wire from vehicles for anything substantial. Find the lowest effort option to improvise based on what's available.
- starfleet_bop 3y agoMy initial thoughts would be to try and scavenge cabling from a car. Wiring harnesses are surprisingly big, especially in modern cars. Maybe even copper piping is an option?
- slicktux 3y agoMeanwhile I’m worried about running 5v across 300’ of 16 gauge stranded…
- neltnerb 3y ago> Can you connect them in series instead of parallel, giving you a high voltage and low current? You can probably do this for a little while, but your total current through the circuit is limited to the photocurrent generated by the lowest performing cell. Otherwise you'd get a charge buildup. (sorry, I don't have a quora account) Not sure how you'd handle high voltage DC with most things though, it's only slightly better than using high voltage AC with a commercial inverter. Generally the current ratings on those wires is given in terms of temperature rise over ambient. The current rating for a wire that is allowed to rise 60C is much more than one only allowed to rise 30C. As it gets hotter the resistance goes up and the system becomes less efficient, but it's not usually a sharp break. It will get hot, so you'll need to keep an eye on it. That's not so bad to do manually, just be conservative. If we're talking days, I think you should just use trial and error. Use the inverter to up the voltage, add loads slowly and keep an eye on the voltage on the load side (if it drops a lot you're drawing too much current) and keep an eye on the wire for hot spots (honestly wish I could suggest a way to do this without hazard of touching it, I don't know if you have a thermal camera).
- 1letterunixname 3y agoDuring wars, looting of infrastructure for metals is common: piping and wiring of all kinds. Some do it to survive, others do it for greed and opportunidm.