I recently came across the following script which can be added in a gadget to remove the links from comments so that I don't have to monitor the comments and can instead let people comment without linking back to their site.

I have recently discovered that room temperature superconductors are a thing, just at a stupidly high pressure. This led me to the idea of what if you could create a vessel that could contain such a pressure. This should be a simple scaling up, for example an aluminium pipe with an internal cross sectional area of 1m^2 could hold the pressure required for a hydrogen sulphide superconductor if the outer diameter was on the order 20m. That is a very thick wall but the superconducting ability of the internal superconductor would allow for some really interesting projects. One of which comes to mind is the idea of a ring around the 50th parallel connecting a lot of the world's population to a shareable power source. That way when the wind blows in one location, or the sun shines in another, unwindy or nightly places can still get power. How much would this cost to build at current aluminium prices, only a couple trillion per ring. Given the ability to arbitrage solar energy prices betw...

 I like to use VIM as my editor. Alongside VIM I use TMUX to be able to have my preferred, keyboard-only setup (with the exception of googling for things which I haven't worked out how to do in the terminal yet). I have found that rather than the default prefix of ctrl+b for tmux commands I prefer to use the backtick or grave. The problem is this isn't always in the top left as it is on standard keyboards. On my MacBook keyboard for example its in the bottom left (not as easy a place to reliably hit) and it doesn't exist on my 75 key mechanical keyboard. This is fine, most of the time I remap escape on my mechanical keyboard to backtick and capslock to escape (This was the original location of escape when vim was first conceived). When using things in vim I can always use the tilda to convert a long set of lowercase to uppercase if needed so the capslock is an underused key when compared to how often I end up using backtick. The remapping on my Chromebook was rather simple,...

This is the final post in a series on setting up using a bitcoin miner to heat my Nana's house. What why? Will it be worth it How to silence the thing The biggest challenge with all the setup of heating my Nana’s house with bitcoin mining was the noise. The machine draws 3.3kW! Yet it needs to stay at preferably less than 70 degrees (Even that is higher than ideal). To dissipate all that energy you need a lot of air. Moving all that air over the relatively small volume of the miner is going to be loud. There isn’t a way around that. The original fans on the device lead to it running at over 90 decibels. That’s like having a strimmer in your dining room. (If you think that’s desirable, read that sentence again) The guy I bought the device off of also sold what he called mufflers, but which is effectively just a big fan designed to disturb the air as little as possible. This lowers the pitch of the noise due to the fan and is a great improvement in comparison to getting the volume ...

  In a world where liquid fossil fuels never took off; A place with such a high baseline radioactivity that no one cares for radiation shielding; I give you… Making a nuclear reactor doesn’t need to be difficult. There actually isn’t much to it, the difficulty comes in making it smaller. Much like how super large rockets can be efficient while being super simple, if they are just big enough, you can get access to the energy locked in uranium ore simply by gathering enough of it and adding a moderator. The moderator is simply a material that will slow the neutrons down sufficiently that they can be captured by the nuclei of other uranium atoms. This isn’t practical. The size required to get the neutron flux required to produce anything useful is prohibitive. As a result, the ore needs to be concentrated isotopically which really is a challenging process and is the step that stops nations from proliferating. In the absence of isotropic concentration technology but with the will and...

Since posting my Minecraft in a weekend post I have been running the demo of a flask service on one of my servers. It would be more prudent to run it on something like GitHub pages but I haven’t spent the time to migrate it so using a static flask delivery service is where I am with that. One benefit of having the service running on flask is that I have access to the logs of people trying to hack my server. It’s been interesting to see how many attempts there have been. Given my blog rarely attracts a single reader, with the exception of when I post a submission on hacker news, it’s interesting to see 90% of the traffic come from bots trying to gain privileges on the server. I want in this post to go through some of the attempts on the server and what I believe the attacker was trying to do and where their attack would have worked. First, it’s interesting to see how many of the attackers check for the existence of a robots.txt before continuing. (There isn’t one so they receive a 404 ...

  One of the expensive elements to add to a machine is the ability to feel its environment. Nature really can generate cheap simple sensing. Animal bodies are covered in a plethora of sensors to sense temperature, touch and vibration. On our fingers the density of our feeling of touch is sub-millimetre. To recreate so many sensory inputs has proved prohibitively expensive, even at costs as low as 50 cents a switch, the thousands of them required adds up to quite a cost. That's before you’ve even wired them up. Even though each switch is relatively simple in its own way you have to make them one at a time, injection moulding parts and adding whatever spring mechanism you need on every switch. I’ve been considering building a robotic arm from scratch recently and I’ve been giving some thought to the complexity of the button. All you really need is some contact and some mechanism for keeping that contact apart when not touched. My idea is to use PCB boards to encompass the wiring comp...