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Power regulation for solar+laptop

Find a relatively inexpensive DC/DC converter that takes unregulated DC input and regulates it to whatever voltage your laptop requires. I found some of these on google that have an output that you can plug a cigarette lighter adapter for your laptop into for ~$70.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Apr 9, 2007
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Physics Teacher From Hell!!

the simplest way I would do this would be using an energy method - potential energy converted to kinetic energy (mgh = 1/2 I omega^2). Without numbers, you'll just end up with answers in terms of the mass and length of the rod as well as some constants. Just because you don't understand the...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #10
- Mar 10, 2007
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Help me understand what voltage is.

Imagine you have 2 buckets of water, one on your roof and one on the ground. If they are connected by a pipe, then current would be the amount of water flow through the pipe and voltage could be thought of as the difference in height of the two buckets. (potential energy converted to pressure...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #3
- Nov 5, 2006
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Why do we like reading fiction?

fiction is just an alternate reality's non-fiction. :)
- ZeroNine8
- Post #11
- May 7, 2006
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Building a bridge...sorta.

You said your constraint is a 1" square or 1.1" diameter circle on either end...what about the middle? The closer you make this to a triangle, the better off you are. If there is no limit to your dimensions mid-span, make a 1" wide sheet metal strip to be the base from one side to the...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Oct 16, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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video capturing problem

i lose at posting :(
- ZeroNine8
- Post #4
- Oct 1, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Can commercial airplanes 'dump fuel'?

it's quite easy to run a pipe from the fuel tanks to wherever a safe release location might be, whether at the wingtips or at the rear of the plane, etc. The only thing you've got to make sure of is that you don't release it in front of some ignition source, which is pretty easy to do at 300+ mph.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Sep 21, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Which animals are capable of perspiring?

Mice have sweat glands (google "mouse sweat glands" and see all the scientific article summaries that pop up). Coyotes, just like all dogs, have sweat glands almost exclusively on their paws. Both of these animals might sweat considerably less than humans, but they can and do sweat.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #17
- Sep 20, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Which animals are capable of perspiring?

yep, even aquatic ones.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #10
- Sep 18, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Which animals are capable of perspiring?

wikipedia says that *all* mammals have sweat glands in the skin and have the ability to perspire. The majority of mammals, however, don't have that many glands and don't use this as the primary means of keeping cool. Maybe that's why there's a lot of panting going on in the animal kingdom.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #7
- Sep 18, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Idea to save (rebuild) the polar ice caps

The calculations are just to show what kind of energy transfer is going on. There's a lot of stuff neglected, such as the existing ice cooling the air back down and warming up by a lesser amount, etc. etc. When fractions of a degree are significant in terms of global warming, if the proposal...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #28
- Sep 18, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Idea to save (rebuild) the polar ice caps

There's no free lunch, and heat transfer / thermodynamics is no different. The short term result is that you would increase the amount of ice while increasing the overall temperature of the polar regions. specific heat of air at polar temperatures (250K) is 1.006 kJ/kg*K with a density of...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #26
- Sep 17, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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phase change cooler

First, your typical water cooling setup is not designed to handle vapor, so you would have to run some pretty significant mods to get it to work. Many solvents (acetone, heptane, etc.) and some alcohols will function well as they hover around the liquid/vapor line at room/CPU heat sink temps...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #8
- Jun 26, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Misquito in car situation...

50mph relative to what?
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Jun 22, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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math experts needed on this problem

This sounds like something analogous to a parametric equation. If you consider your 'movements' along a number line to be the variable and your resulting equation values to be your absolute position on the number line, you could arrive at a similar situation. In this way of thinking, we can...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #11
- May 29, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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What is the Highest Temperature Possible?

In theory, wouldn't the maximum temperature possible be a result of concentrating all of the energy in the universe into a point-particle? This kind of goes back to the predicted temperature of the instant after the Big Bang, I would imagine.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #34
- Mar 20, 2005
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Real clay poker chips: 500 set for $306 shipped

I hope you're joking. Clay chips, just like bricks, tablewear, and other clay products are fired in a kiln which fuses the particles together, and not only are they waterproof, but about the only way to destroy them in normal use would be breakage.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #12
- Jan 30, 2005
- Forum: Hot Deals and Giveaways
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Hot Deals on ATT Wireless G Products

are you talking about WAP or WPA?
- ZeroNine8
- Post #55
- Jan 15, 2005
- Forum: Hot Deals and Giveaways
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Hot Deals on ATT Wireless G Products

this is a $10 MIR on the pci wireless g adapter http://image.compusa.com/pdfs/0011402.pdf which is 1.99 AR (as far as I can tell, at least)
- ZeroNine8
- Post #52
- Jan 15, 2005
- Forum: Hot Deals and Giveaways
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Is this a hot deal?

I had one on my HP laptop, and it's not terribly good for gaming, though it will do ok for "older" games.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #6
- Dec 18, 2004
- Forum: Hot Deals and Giveaways
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Virgin Mary or Hoax

the dark and light areas are, for the most part, randomly located on a sandwich. It is not hard for me to believe that, eventually, the random 'grill pixels' would align in what could be interpreted as an image of a woman's face. As for the other facts about the sandwich not growing mold...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Nov 17, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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oops, wrong channel.

stickies are posts that stay at the top of a forum, read the first post in this forum for an example. as for where you should post this, General Hardware or CPU/Processors and Overclocking would definitely be more appropriate.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #4
- Nov 14, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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oops, wrong channel.

wrong forum, stickies are your friend.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Nov 14, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Why does rubber "dry"?

it's a combination of ozone attacking & deteriorating the molecular bonds and the oils and VOC's evaporating off and leaving it less flexible. the best way to preserve rubber is to seal it somehow, to both prevent ozone from reaching the rubber and prevent any oils and such from evaporating.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Oct 7, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Electron microscopes.

there is also the question of what you mean by 'see'. If you merely mean a visual representation of the electron, then you can place a dot on a screen for every electron-volt you detect. Visualizing the presence of an electron is much easier than magnifying the 'image' of an electron.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #6
- Sep 26, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Electron microscopes.

As far as measurement instruments go, it is very difficult to detect anything smaller than the resolution of your measurement instrument. With advanced statistical analysis of data, you can get a little better than your resolution with some degree of certainty. Using an electron microscope...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #4
- Sep 26, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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fiber optic network cables

The speed of light is only a limitation on the bandwidth at one wavelength. A single fiber can carry multiple wavelengths, so the ultimate limitation is the number of different wavelengths that can be transmitted simultaneously.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #19
- Sep 17, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Math Probability question...

1 in 5^5, or 1 in 3125. (2 in 3125 if you count reverse alphabetic order) If that's not right, 1 in 42.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #8
- Sep 16, 2004
- Forum: OT Discussion Club
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does the A/C in the car use more energy when the fan is turned up higher?

The original question: "does the A/C in the car use more energy when the fan is turned up higher?" Assumptions: The A/C System includes the compressor (and compressor motor), evaporator, all conduits of flow and the fan/motor that forces air across the evaporator. Now let's begin...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #21
- Sep 15, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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does the A/C in the car use more energy when the fan is turned up higher?

It's all about energy. Ambient temperature, fan speed, humidity, etc. all have some effect on the power consumed by the AC unit. Ambient temperature vs. set temperature - the larger the temperature difference, the more energy the system must remove from the air. Just because the...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #16
- Sep 15, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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fiber optic network cables

Perhaps because there are theoretically an infinite number of wavelengths in the spectrum that data could be transmitted on simultaneously? Just my guess.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Sep 15, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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questions about tire pressure

The short answer is that using the same pressure will give you similar performance regardless of max pressure (all else being comparable). For example, 225/45R18 tires with a max pressure of 44psi that are inflated to 35psi will perform similar to 225/45R18 with a max pressure of 51psi that...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #10
- Aug 8, 2004
- Forum: OT Discussion Club
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my lan connection keeps getting unplugged

plug it in?
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Jun 30, 2004
- Forum: Networking
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Home networking wire question

you should wire it straight, so it sounds like you might just have problems with all of the pins actually making the connection somewhere along the way.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Jun 9, 2004
- Forum: Networking
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What if for one split second the moon disappeared?

haha, it's still so wrong it's funny. Gravity is affected by mass AND distance, the moon has significantly less mass than earth (<2%), but the radius is also much smaller, therefore gravitational effects are ~25% of what one experiences on earth. Look up the equations rather than making poorly...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #10
- May 6, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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How to make my USB 2.0 act like USB 2.0?

I don't have any suggestions to help with that problem, other than checking for the latest bios revisions and drivers, but just a heads up: almost every USB 2.0 HD out there has performance in the 15-20MB/s range, so while you will see marked improvement over USB 1.1, it will not be "40x faster".
- ZeroNine8
- Post #11
- Apr 16, 2004
- Forum: Computer Building
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Bandwith management

smoothwall several linux based routers support it if you have a spare pc and know enough to configure them.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Apr 12, 2004
- Forum: Networking
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Tidal Power Costs

I make no representations of the values used to be correct, though I believe them to be reasonably accurate (google): If you consider the earth-moon system by itself, the total kinetic energy from rotation of the moon about the earth is approximately 3.79E+28 Joules (this does not count the...
- ZeroNine8
- Post #2
- Apr 9, 2004
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Can't complete installation of Unreal Tournament 2004

The most common installation problem for ut2k4 is running out of HD space :-P I keed, I keed (sort of)
- ZeroNine8
- Post #8
- Mar 26, 2004
- Forum: OT Discussion Club
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Limiting Bandwidth on LAN machines to Internet? and access to admin tools

Yes, it can be done, however it has to be done at the router level (or on each individual PC, which isn't the central control you're looking for). Most broadband routers do not have this function, so you will either have to invest in a commercial grade router or setup a linux router on a spare PC.
- ZeroNine8
- Post #4
- Mar 24, 2004
- Forum: Networking

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