221–230 of 351 posts
I send my son emails with links to different interesting projects. He is ten. Too bad I can't send this one out. Why do people use foul language everywhere and in between? It's like a disease.
There are plugins for browsers to replace foul words, you could scrub it with one then print to pdf.
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The guy in town running the (presumably) lucrative home tool rental store? Do these things exist in urban areas? Seems useful for apartment dwellers who don't have the space for anything more than a tiny toolkit anyhow
http://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/tool-lending-library
He needs a diode between the two batteries in parallel. Otherwise slight differences in voltage between them causes them to cyclically charge and discharge each other, wearing them out and wasting energy.
That's incorrect. At no point or state of charge can you connect two lead battery packs in parallel and have them oscillate charging/discharging no matter how long connected. Either one will charge the other or they will sit without changing.
I have not tried it myself, but from what I read if you leave two batteries connected in parallel for a while they will have less charge than if you had left them not connected to each other.
Batteries also don't discharge at identical rates, so each time you use them you will end up cross charging them, which wastes energy.
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Sure, $9K on top of $80K is pretty steep, but that $80K build is orders of magnitude more comfortable than what an old VW could provide, and at reasonable speeds too. You're right, I'm just being a cranky old man who thinks candy bars are still a quarter of a U. S. dollar. A/C? PNW, don't need it. But it's going to be $4K (installed) for the rest of the country. Power? 70bhp in that 4000 lb. tank. Now myself, when co…
I work out you have an '81 T3/T2.5/vanagon (depending where you are). Got a 1.6 diesel '88 and have to put it in 2nd to get up some hills lol.
In the US these are not as seen as romantic and adventurous as they are in Australia, New Zealand and Europe
One thing I'll say: a pop up conversion can be done while maintaining the possibility of incognito mode, and it is really lovely when you are in proper campgrounds to have the pop up!
So happy to see this post on HN, but also kind of sad because if this because a thing it will no longer be as unique, and they will start drawing more attention. Also, people in these campers are the coolest, nicest, most down to earth, happiest, most respectful, adventurous, amazing people (in my experience), and if this becomes 'cool,' then we'll start having the cool kids driving around in these.
I did something similar. I wanted a vehicle I could explore the world with, so I turned my Jeep into a house on wheels with fridge, drinking water and filtration, solar and dual batteries, interior cabinets and a custom modified pop-up roof so I can stand up and walk around in the Jeep. I joked about applying for a home owners grant :) The full pictures and story are in this album - http://imgur.com/a/OLK3o I'm drivi…
Yeah, true story: I make 250K per year and live in a minivan. Wellll, ok, I actually have a mortgage and a house but that's somewhere else :) Pro tip: xfinity is your friend. The reality is that everyone can do this. And why not? The big problem with this model, though, is lack of property taxes. And parking spots. I would happily pay for X per month for a nice parking spot though and my fair share of property taxes.…
Hank bought a bus: http://hankboughtabus.com/
Castle truck: http://www.doityourselfrv.com/house-truck-castle/
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That's not exactly true. He could have done the build-out in plenty of other manners, some less efficiently. With some extra money, he might have had it done more quickly, even. Camping out during the build time, or getting a hostel/hotel for 40 days, renting a room, building it ahead of time, etc. Lots of reasonable options. I noticed on some page he mentioned "focusing on building less expensive homes" and then poi…
...social taboo When I've lived in mobile homes, I've found them to be substandard in various ways. One might be prepared to accept that in exchange for their advantages, but if not it seems perfectly rational to seek other solutions with different trade-offs. E.g., most mobile homes are over 70' long, while tiny houses are much shorter.
Tiny houses are what happens when a garden shed has sex with a travel trailer. Practically tiny houses copy the floor-plan and interior design of an existing high end travel trailer and paste it into a traditionally constructed building. The result is basically a travel trailer optimized for staying instead of going.
As people realize they want more space than a tiny home they're gonna basically build mobile homes, realize they're heavy as all hell and not really mobile and see that the mobile home people are actually on to something.
His "Can I live without my precious possessions?" answer is the most engineering LOL thing I've read all day: "Pile up my crap. Anytime I need something in the pile, take it out of the pile and save it for later. Monitor usage." Thank you for posting this.
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That's minimalism taken to an extreme, which is just as thoughtless as hoarding. A screwdriver costs less than $5 and takes a minimal amount of space to store. Yes, the slippery slope is when you have a thousand tools falling out of your closet, but again, thought and moderation. The "if I haven't used it in the past year" rule is a great idea overall, but it's not appropriate for this example. Now if we're talking a…
The problem is it might cost 5$ to buy, but buying it also takes effort. IMO, the way around this is to keep a good multi tool which is a so so version of a lot of things and then only the real tool if you are going to do a real project. Cellphone camera good enough? Ditch your actual camera.
There's a point where it becomes very hard to reduce item count without greatly increasing the frequency that the task at hand can't be performed with the existing set of items.