sparkman55

10 ms·

31.
by sparkman55 12y ago
It's not clear from the (beautiful!) article, but 4 times as much water goes to agricultural use than to municipal use in California. People won't die of thirst in California, but crops aren't doing as well. In particular, o
32.
by sparkman55 12y ago
The Android toolchain is also significantly less developer-friendly than the corresponding iOS toolchain. Plug in an iPhone, and (after jumping through the byzantine code-signing system) you'll be able to deploy development code to it
33.
by sparkman55 12y ago
If you visit Bellingham, you'd do well to visit one of the best brewpubs on the West Coast: Boundary Bay Brewery, home to award-winning IPAs (often available from the cask) and a surprisingly-solid menu. With a university and proximity
34.
by sparkman55 12y ago
When I flick my fingers up, I expect a smooth vertical movement of the view pane, exposing new content at the bottom. I can scroll fast and far if I want to scan for interesting content, and scroll backwards if I might have missed somethin
35.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Yikes, what did they do to the page's "scroll" function? Do people actually find that usable? It definitely made me think the page was broken at first... The slideshow seems like a 'play' (right-arrow) much more t
36.
by sparkman55 12y ago
There's a really cool snowblower train that plies Donner Pass between Sacramento and Reno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItdRfvYHPAY
37.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Rinse - https://www.rinse.com - San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. Our customers use a mobile app, our website, or SMS to schedule a delivery, and then we use sophisticate
38.
by sparkman55 12y ago
A number of people live in (beautiful!) Santa Cruz but commute over the hill to work in San Jose or elsewhere in Silicon Valley. It's a long commute on a treacherous but crowded mountain highway, so it's no surprise that they nee
39.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Frankly, it's a pretty terrible sport hunting rifle. The round is too small for most big game, and the cartridge is too powerful for most small game. The mainstay of sport hunters is actually the 12-gauge shotgun. Hunting isn't r
40.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Most people use an infrared thermometer 'gun' for this. You can buy them at Home Depot...
41.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Another card reader that plugs into the audio port. I'd like to include one of these card readers into my own mobile app; has anyone had success using an SDK for integration? CardFlight seems like it would work, but it's a bit ex
42.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Right now, the lethality of this outbreak of Ebola is around 60%, so an infection is definitely not certain death, particularly with the supportive care possible in the U.S.'s best hospitals. When you've already dedicated yourself
43.
by sparkman55 12y ago
You're right, panels are generally ganged together in battery to avoid the 'thick copper cable' problem. However, the individual panel assemblies do run at lower voltages (individual cells run at the band gap of the semicondu
44.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Each element on an electric stove is roughly 2 kW. Let's say you have a 4-burner stove, and they're all on. That's 8kW of power. Let's say we run your 'simplified' household at 48V (the highest voltage common
45.
by sparkman55 12y ago
If inverters were smaller and more efficient, they could be placed on a per-panel basis ("string inverters" or "micro inverters") for significantly better performance, particularly when some of the panels are shaded. Se
46.
by sparkman55 12y ago
The Devil's Slide Trail, a brand new park along the coast south of Pacifica (south of San Francisco), has an example of one of these emplacements. http://parks.smcgov.org/devils-slide-trail
47.
by sparkman55 12y ago
This airliner was flying at a nice cruising altitude of 10,000m - the man-portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS [1]) that the systems you linked to can't easily lock-on to planes that high (only about 6,000m according to the wiki),
48.
by sparkman55 12y ago
(Since I can no longer edit my post:) The link has been updated, and they are now for sale in the U.S.! $129.00
49.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Cool stuff! They cost 91€ plus shipping, and cannot currently be shipped to the U.S. http://www.digitalsundial.com/ordering.html They are apparently tuned for a particular latitude, so they won't work in the tropics e
50.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Of course, you can also share a taxi... it may be an indulgence to hop on a taxi alone as part of your daily commute, but it becomes much more convenient, private, and cost-effective when in a pair or small group. These taxi data do not see
51.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Point-to-Point (Fixed) Wireless is actually also an attractive solution in rural / semi-rural settings as well. If the distances are moderate (with line-of-sight) but demand is too sparse to warrant the cost of running coaxial / f
52.
by sparkman55 12y ago
If you are actually taking about the icon/logo for the app, you'll probably want to spend some time working on it. It's the first thing that a user sees, and so can have a surprisingly significant effect on engagement. You&
53.
by sparkman55 12y ago
It's not quite the same thing, but Palo Alto (suburban San Francisco) has been turning side streets into 'bike boulevards' that are inconvenient to drive on, and therefore safer to bike on. Roundabouts, signage and even boll
54.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Yes! Caltrain is actually very accommodating to bicyclists, with no extra charge for bikes and special bike cars (that are often full at peak hours). I personally bike about a mile to a train station in Palo Alto, and about a mile from Cal
55.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Yep, that's the gap. It's about a mile from the commuter rail to downtown, and the public transit options between are quite slow. It's no wonder that private transportation startups abound in San Francisco. I guess I'm
56.
by sparkman55 12y ago
San Francisco has a "Jitney Bus" that attempts to correct the horrendous hole in transit between the Caltrain commuter rail and downtown. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/A-One-Man-Traffic-Buster-... T
57.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Rinse - San Francisco, CA https://www.rinse.com Although the domain isn't sexy at first glance, Laundry and Dry Cleaning really are problems that would benefit from today's technical prowess. Modernizing laundry has re
58.
by sparkman55 12y ago
It's definitely possible, but much more unlikely than going without a passport, for two reasons: 1) The expanse and culture of the U.S. favors driving cars, so most people learn to drive a car. A driver's license is most people&#
59.
by sparkman55 12y ago
You can get plenty of resolution off an airplane. I have seen aerial imagery of sufficient resolution to do stand count analysis, which is basically counting individual green shoots of corn in the spring. As another poster mentioned, thoug
60.
by sparkman55 12y ago
Exactly! Heroku should be building that 24/7 operation so I don't have to. Isn't that the whole point of PaaS?

More ›