1. Moving my technological dependencies from big tech companies to self-hosted, open source solutions, running Linux on my machines etc.

2. Gardening on my balcony. I am growing tomatoes, broad beans, peppers (chilis, bell) and an assortment of salads and herbs. I am mostly self-sufficient on herbs, during growing season I am fully self-sufficient on salads. Pretty far from it on tomatoes and peppers, and especially on beans as they are not fruiting :(

3. In general getting more in touch with local flora. I've been photographing flowering plants in my neighborhood lately and identifying them, trying to learn what grows around here. Goal is to be quite well-versed in local flora, including what is edible (and how to use it) and not

4. Contributing to OpenStreetMap, both in my neighborhood and also through tasks.hotosm.org where I help trace missing buildings in disaster-struck places for first-responders to use (and in preparation for possible disasters in the future). This kind of collaborative project I find to be very solarpunky.

Living in a rented apartment, there is only so much I can make changes here. There was an initiative to install solar panels, but it was voted down for some reason - not being an owner, I am not involved in those discussions. Dream is to find a small house outside the city to expand my garden and to become as off-grid as possible.

This is more accurate than you would think. I've seen people synthesize a new inorganic compound, and is then more or less forced by supervisors to test it as an intercalation host for Li- or Na-ion batteries without really having thought through whether that makes sense at all.

Li is small, and as long as there is room for it (sites for it to sit when intercalated and paths to diffuse through the material), and there is some species that can accommodate the additional charge (as one Li+ is introduced into the material, there needs to be a charge compensation to maintain charge neutrality - typically this is a transition metal cation that is reduced from a higher oxidation state to a lower one). In that sense a lot of materials could serve as hosts, and depending on the intercalation potential, it could be used as a cathode (LiCoO2 for instance, where the intercalation potential vs. Li/Li+ is so high that it makes for a good cathode) or an anode (LTO for instance, where the intercalation potential vs. Li/Li+ is so low that it rather makes sense to pair it with a high potential cathode, and instead make for a more niche application where things such as safety is more coveted). That said, only three structure types have been widely used commercially as intercalation hosts for Li-ion batteries: layered rocksalt types (like LiCoO2 and its deriviates, NMC and NCA), spinels (LiMn2O4 or LTO) or olivines (LiFePO4, or LFP).

Li-S is not someone randomly mixing Li with some other elements though, it has been researched for a long time and is considered one of several "holy grails"

Even if I wouldn't need to, I would still want the freedom to change the brake pads myself if I wanted to.

That uncle role is not something I am looking for, though. I am after adult relationships, and it is the loss of these I am saddened about. For the record, I do not blame neither the parents or especially their kids for this change. They do not owe me a continued adult relationship for our entire lives. It is completely up to them to pursue this life, and as I said, I am happy for them as long as this is what they really wanted, and I agree that their kids should be their priorities once they have had them. But so far, in my experience, the kind of relationship becomes completely different. For instance, my girlfriend and I were invited over for dinner to one of my close friends from my twenties, his wife and their two kids. After we left, we were both left with a feeling that we hadn't talked with them at all - we were interrupted constantly by their kids seeking their parents attention. Some parents handle this better - I know others who are better at setting boundaries for their kids and teaching them to not interrupt and wait for their turn, but the interactions with them are still very different - their lives almost entirely revolves around their kids. I was once involuntarily part of a conversation regarding the color and viscosity of kid's shit.

When I reread my original post, I realize it could be interpreted like I want to somehow get things back to how they were before. I know they won't be, and it's not what I meant. I was simply after real stories (i.e. not imagined solutions) of how people in a similar situation, having experienced a similar loss of close friendships, ended up with either new, great friends with a similar outlook on life or anything else that improved that part of their life.

In this case, C refers to the current rate, not the unit Coulomb. It is a standard way of giving the current rate in battery research, and 1C is defined, as oldfart says, as the current rate required to charge that particular battery fully (to its nominal capacity) in one hour. 2C is twice this, so it is charged in half an hour, and C/2 is half this, so it is charged in two hours.

It is a convenient way of giving the current rate, because it allows a more application focused comparison (i.e. my EV battery or phone battery should be able to charge fully in one hour), but it hides the actual capacity of the battery (you have no way of knowing, without additional information, if the cell has a small or a large capacity).

ETA: The last point here is what deranger and AwesomeLowlander is getting at. You can have a very small battery with very little active material, and charge that at 10C and achieve reversible cycling for many, many cycles, and it is meaningless if it cannot be scaled to a larger cell (unless we are only considering microbatteries for example). Usually, results at a small scale is not directly transferable to larger scale, and you encounter all kinds of challenges as you scale up.

Thanks for sharing your experience. It seems you have found a sweet spot that works well for your life, and you sound like a good friend. I get the impression that you enjoy a kid's company far more than I do, though. I generally get exhausted around them and the stressful lives their parents lead, and I don't actually want to be a part of this. Which is a me-problem, I know. I fully agree with you when you say that they will probably not be knocking on my door when they are ready to be social again, but it sounds like a very one-sided effort to maintain a friendship in the meantime. My friends mostly move out of the city back to where they grew up as well, so just popping over with a meal is not always possible. I have myself moved elsewhere for work now, partly because the number of friends still staying in the city I lived in before had greatly diminished.

I used to go on mountain hikes with my best friend from my childhood once a year (we've already lived in different cities for a long time, so we haven't really been hanging out for many years), but he's awaiting twins anytime now, so it's going to be at least some years before it will be possible for him to even consider spending any vacation days on such a trip. I used to have yearly cabin trips with friends from university until they got all got kids approximately at the same time (during COVID). They now go on kid-friendly family vacations together. I used to frequent restaurants with a fellow foodie. We sometimes still do, but it's gone from maybe once a month to once every two years. It is these kinds of relationships that I miss.

A bit silly comparing hourly wage to yearly wage. The barista just needs to work 22500 hours a year to earn the same... that's not even three times the amount of hours in a year.

If only traffic congestion could be solved by having fewer people rely on driving... oh well.

When long texts such as these are posted, it would be very helpful to have some kind of summary to go with it, or better yet: OPs thoughts on why it should be read. :)

Adding this to my readlist for later this week. I see it starts by outlining batteries as critical to mitigate climate change, but right now, from a European perspective, I think energy independence will be a much more powerful driver than climate change to make sure we have regional production of critical energy infrastructure, including battery manufacturing. Time to realize we can't be dependent on China and the US for this, and that China in particular will not allow us to successfully establish this industry according to free market principles with them flooding the market with cheap batteries (as they've done before in other sectors, and likely will do more as a result of US tarrifs). We can't compete, so we must subsidize to ensure establishment of regional production capacity.

For computer related stuff there are tons of good free and open source options with focus on privacy that kind of goes under the radar when just following the masses. And then there's always piracy. Yarr!

Until your system does anything useful with third party votes or couch-sitting, you go out and vote every time for whatever does the least damage to democracy. But don't disengage from the political world after the election. Between elections, you work to change the system. Find groups that tries to do this and volunteer. If you really care about it, you will need to dedicate your time to the cause, even though it might seem hopeless and may very well be.

I understand your situation sucks and you are tempted to say "Fuck the status quo" and desperately do something different in hopes that something will somehow change. But you know who do go out and vote, every fucking time? The racist assholes who would love to see Trump and his fascists cronies in power. And if that happens, it is game over. You will never get any chance to change anything, except from after a big traumatic event such as a big war ("civil" or otherwise).

Hehe, that one is often suitable, and I think it fits nicely here.

I don't count English as a particularly easy language to master. Do you not think there are some problems that arise from assymetry in ability to learn English? Not just thinking about legal documents, but debates, discussions, negotiations etc.

And is this massive amount of translation not just very inefficient? Although I suspect at best a new language would come in addition, so we're back to the xkcd-strip and nothing was solved there.

So not just sales, but the actual use of them? I've only ever been to Hanoi once many years ago, but there was an enormous amount of gasoline-powered motorcycles there then that would need replacement. I guess their domestic Vinfast brand will see a surge in sales in anticipation of this legislation, but the transition might even be well on its way?

Gone are the days when I had to do science writing as part of my job, so this is entirely a pet project, and I avoid committing to releasing anything to avoid it becoming another deadline in my life. If I lose the motivation to work on it, I will take a hiatus and get back to it if and when I am ready. There are enough things in my life that are not like this, so why add to that list?

The project is essentially to write up a coherent picture of the observable, physical world (from where I am sitting and looking out the window) and their associated physical processes. So essentially everything from the fusion reactions of the Sun, to the scattering of light in the atmosphere, to the colors of things, weather phenomena such as rain, fog, lighting, the sounds moving through air and through media, the relative movements of Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars etc. I have a PhD in a natural science discipline, and have touched upon most of this in my studies, but have 1) forgotten a lot of it, 2) have some big holes of topics I never learnt (fluid dynamics being one of them, optics being another) and 3) have probably a bunch of misconceptions originating from a misunderstanding at the time I originally learnt it.

So it is a quest to relearn and document this stuff in a way that is for my enjoyment and not for passing an exam or getting a paper published.

Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I’m interested if you’re using any kind of special organizational tools or “knowledge base” in your writing.

I write in LaTeX, keep my references in Zotero and will use Obsidian for notetaking during research prior to writing it up.

Nice, cool to hear!

I have two favorite navigational applications that utilizes OSM-data: Organic Maps/CoMaps (there's a lot of drama here that you can read up on if it interests you, but CoMaps was forked from Organic Maps after some mismanagement of funds was uncovered) for a clean, simple and quick navigation experience and OsmAnd~ for a very tailored experience that takes some time to get into, but gives you a way to set up different profiles for walking, hiking, cycling, public transport, driving etc. The premium version with a full feature set (~) can be purchased in Apple Store and Google Play Store, but is offered for free through F-Droid on Android.

I mentioned tasks.hotosm.org. Here is a cool writeup of the project which introduced me to it just some weeks ago, which was posted somewhere on Lemmy: https://sheets.works/data-viz/strangers-draw-maps

I also use StreetComplete to solve some outstanding questions about features in the neighborhoods I walk in, such as the quality of the road surfaces, whether a street is lit or not and speed limits. Organized as small tasks that show up as icons on the map. Kinda like a Pokémon Go-experience, as [email protected] described it as. There's another one called Every Door that is supposed to be better for adding information about points of interests (shops, restaurants, monuments, drinking fountains, etc. etc.). I have not tried that yet. I also have Verspucci installed that is a more full-fledged editor for Android, for when I want to make more detailed edits. A bit steeper learning curve. I have not used it that much yet, but I did update some very out-of-date restaurants in a city I visited earlier this Summer.

I've not had much time to spend on my untitled science book that I described some time back (essentially "a coherent scientific account of what I can see from the vantage point of my balcony") - that's fine, I expect it to be a long process and something I do for my own enjoyment, and it is not meant to cause me to feel guilty if I'm making no progress on it over a stretch of time. And lately there's been a bit too much on my plate for my limited free time to go to this.

However, I've recently had some time to expand on the outline for the book, so I now have a clearer view of what topics I need to write about / research. This should make it easier to just jump into one of the topics and start :)

My answer: I'm leaning more towards A), getting increasingly desperate to find a better way. I've tried for some time to use RSS-feeds to avoid scrolling the front pages of the newspapers I follow. This makes the situation much better (the constant headlines updating is better), but it is still overwhelming. Ideally I would want to have a mixture of daily and weekly digests of the most important news (with descriptive headlines), made by knowledge and trusted teams, with sensible analyses and links to longer reads if I were so inclined. That way I could spend 5-15 minutes a day catching up, and then diving in deeper if I needed that. I just don't know where to find these. I would also ideally like to be able to follow important events in other regions than my own, such as Africa and Asia. I've tried following AfricaNews for events in Africa, which gives me at least a sense of things going on there that I never hear of in domestic news outlets, but have not found similar for Asia or South-America for instance.

Thanks for a detailed account of your system!

one things i really wish existed is an extension that detects and blocks any site leading to garbage about the current US president, who i despise and want to ignore, despite ignoring it being to my detriment most likely. that vile man needs to go away.

I think that man (and the team around him) is a perfect example of someone who exploits this barrage of "information" to their advantage, and does that very well. I remember how nice the relative silence some months into Biden's presidency (after the insurrection stopped being a constant headliner in the news cycle). This is one of the reasons I desperately want to find a way to keep on top of things, because it feels like the overall events matter if I can only cut through the noise and understand the big picture. I live in Europe, and current events leads to a lot of uncertainty for the region that I think is better to understand and be prepared for, rather than ignorant of.

additionally, i have a collection of hundreds of map sites bookmarked, with a folder containing a set i check with about the same regularity as my news sites.

This is an interesting source I have not really explored myself (aside from weather and occasionally a flight map). I need to investigate what kinds of local maps could be beneficial to have bookmarked. The event map is already bookmarked now!

Congrats on landing your job! But yes, it really can be a drain, and I've been struggling with this for some time myself to have sufficient surplus to get to writing during a regular work week. Unfortunately between work, housekeeping and some other personal projects that for the time being need to take priority over writing, there's not been much left for writing on my projects. However...

Last month I mentioned I was trying to set up Neovim for writing. I didn't quite get as far as properly setting it up, but I've been trying to use it to get used to the keybindings, and I've done my yearly (very personal) retrospective write-up (or rather I've started and gotten quite far, but it's still a WIP into January) and will follow up with a 2026 outlook, also entirely personal. At least this is getting me writing again.