kengr

I'm playing with an idea fir a gizmo for stories, and figured I'd try to get some "user feedback" on the design.

The device is a "water purifier". That's what they are sold as, though they do have other uses.

Their first appearance was donations to isolated medical clinics in third world countries. They later started being sold in such areas and slowly spread.

They are about the size & shape of a mid-size tower case for a computer, but turned sideways. The front has two vertical recesses. It comes with a pair of pitchers with tight fitting lids. They are different shapes. (I'm thinking that the recesses have a sliding cover for when the pitchers aren't going to be in them)

One (for input) fits in the left hand recess. The inside is basically square but with the corners and edges rounded with about a 1 cm radius). This is to make it easier to clean. No corners for things to catch in.

The second (for output) only fits in the right hand recess. Its inside is cylindrical with a hemispherical bottom.

Both hold one liter. Extra pitchers are cheap.

If switched on, a power light goes on. With no pitchers in place in a pair of rectangles in the area between where they would go light up around the edges. The rectangles are next to the slots for the pitchers.

The one on the left flashes red. The one on the right flashes blue. When you place an empty output pitcher in the in the right, the outline of the rectangle quits flashing and stays steady.

When you place an empty pitcher in the input side the outline of the rectangle goes red.

If you put something in the input pitcher and then put it in its slot, The rectangle flashes solid red, and then if their is any water in the contents it turns solid green. Then a button lights up (with an icon?). If you press the button the rectangle flashes again and then the top of the green rectangle starts turning red. And the same time the hollow blue rectangle next to the output pitcher starts turning blue from the bottom.

As the water is removed from the input side, the rectangle has the red process down until the rectangle is solid red when all the water has been extracted.

The blue output rectangle will fill from the bottom as the water is extracted. It won't go solid blue until the pitcher has a liter of water in it.

When the input rectangle is solid red, the start button goes out, and you can remove either pitcher.

If you remove the input pitcher, you can put another one in and repeat the process until the output pitcher is full. At that point the start button goes out, and the blue output rectangle is solid blue and flashing. You can remove the output pitcher and transfer the water inside to another container.

The water inside is chemically pure and sterile.

The leftover stuff in the input pitcher is dry unless there were liquids other than water in it. Solids, silt, mud, etc and dissolved substances are a powders (again unless there were other liquids in there) if animal or vegetable material was in there it looks the same, except the water is gone.

The input will even works with minerals that contain "bound" water. Though in that case, the rocks may change appearance or crumble due to the missing water.

Oh yeah the contents of the input pitcher while still contain any infectious material that there originally, but it'll be dehydrated. That will kill most organisms, but won't affect viruses, prions and some spores.

That's one reason for having multiple pitchers. You can use one pitcher for chemically or biologically hazardous materials, and others for things like foodstuffs you want to dry. And yes, someone early on discovered that if you put beer or wine in the input pitcher, what got left behind was mostly alcohol and flavorings. :-)

Oh yeah, if there's anything in the output pitcher when you place it in its slot, the blue rectangle outline will keep flashing until you replace it with an empty one.

And you can remove a partially filled output pitcher when the input pitcher needs changing.

Likewise if the output pitcher is full and the input pitcher display still shows some green.
you can replace the full pitcher with an empty and and press the start button again.

So, any suggestions for changes or questions about how it operates?

note: they are your classic "black box" system. *What* they do is known. How to operate them is known (and hopefully very obvious). *how* they do it is not known

I was thinking about fabbers. That is, the ultimate version of 3D printers.

input a design/template, feed in a bunch of whatever that contains the required elements, and it builds the desired object atom (or molecule) by atom. Unneeded stuff from the feedstock gets output as blocks of something convenient to use when you need more of X element or molecule.

I realized that if you are ethical, a primary design criterion would be that *every* part of a fabber of a given size needs to be such that you can "print" it with that size fabber. this may make designing parts of it (like the outer shell) a bit more complicated, but it means that you can us a fabber to make a backup for itself.

Yeah, that tends to cost repeat sales, but in a society with fabbers, there aren't going to be a lot of sale anyway. mostly of templates and raw materials.

Which brings up another point. The starting set of templates should include ones for all the parts of the fabber.

If neither of these are true, you've got a nasty little monopoly there.

This sort of fabber (with the "dump whatever in" input) makes recycling fairly trivial. Just dump in the "junk" and have it output it as blocks of convenient compounds.

For some things (a lot of metals) just output blocks of the metal of a convenient size. For others, pick some reasonable inert compound, and output blocks of that. For some, you'll want a shell of something to encase them to protect them (like blocks of salt will need protection from water).

I'd advise not breaking down organic molecules unless there's a *very* good reason.

Gonna have a rather different sort of "cheap as dirt" things in a society with fabbers. Silicon and quartz will be that cheap. Aluminum and sapphire will be almost as cheap.

I won't bother listing what else would be that cheap. Just looking at a list of common minerals (and common things that go into dumps) will let you figure it out on your own.

Been reading some old SF set in the depths of the ocean. It reminded me of numerous books, movies and TV shows set there.

Most of them have people living in large domes. Some (mostly TV & movies) have more "normal" cities with building connected by tubes. And the building are many stories tall.

Nice imagery. But neither will work.

Why? Because water pressure varies with depth. So does air pressure, but the difference in pressure between the bottom and top of the tallest building is a small fraction of an atmosphere (1 atm = ~15 psi or 1 kg/cm^2)

Underwater you get a 1 atm pressure difference every 32 feet (10 meters). That means a a 1 storey difference (~10 ft) is a third of an atmosphere.

If you've got a dome 100 meters in radius (1000 meters high) that's a 10 atmospher (150 psi or 10 kg/cm^2) difference. If you pressurize to match pressure at the bottom of the dome you'll have all that pressure trying to blow out the top of the dome. Very much not good.

If you set the pressure to match the pressure at top of the dome, you'll have all the pressure trying to get in at the bottom of the dome.

Neither situation is good for the dome.

Underwater towers? Every floor will have a 1/rd atmosphere pressure difference. This is somewhat doable, but you'd have to have airlocks between floors! And les not think about the elevators (decompressions times would be significant for a mere 10 floor change).

So for engineering reasons, undersea installations are only going to be one or two floors. Any larger height difference will require airlocks and all the fun that goes with them.

Now if you have "magic" materials that don't *care* about the pressures deep in the ocean (or force fields or the like) then you can just keep the installations at surface pressure and ignore this.

But if you go that route you've got to explain why these super-materials or force fields have made major changes to other things (like invulnerable armor)

I've been thinking about trying my hand at programming again. It was the early nineties when I quit working in the field, so I pretty much missed object-oriented programming and Windows programming.

I've got minimal exposure to several assemblers and to C. I was good at several versions of BASIC, and Turbo Pascal. Also knew FORTRAN IV and RPG,

Anyway, I'd appreciate suggestions as to books and other resources for learning to program for Windows and Linux (I'm running kubuntu on one machine). Also have some interrest in writing code to run on my websites.

The AV program I've been using for 30 years is dropping support for everything but large corporations. So I have to switch to something else.

I don't mind paying if they aren't too greedy. Preferrably something that will let me license several systems (5-10) at a discount.

I also need it to support Windows 7 and Linux.

Other requirements
1. under no circumstance should it *ever* remove a file without asking permission.
2. it must be possible to restore files from quarantine to the original location (I've run into AV programs that don't keep track and want you tell them where to put them file. Utterly useless)
3. It must be possible to tell it to ignore certain directories (my mail program can't deal with a file getting locked or removed while it is processing it)
4. it must be possible to tell it to ignore specific files in specific locations (I have so files that are *not* viruses, but most AV programs insist on treating them as if they are)
5. Being able to tell it to ignore files with specific extensions (like .vir) is necessary to deal with various issues.

So, any recommendations?

I want to look for something like the old slot car controllers. Basically a handgrip with a thumb operated plunger.

Basically the resistance varies with how far down you push the plunger. I'm looking for a fairly generic one because I want to open it up and swap a connection so it works backwards If I'm lucky, the design will already allow for that by just use a different pair of wires.

Anybody know what the "proper" name for one of these would be?

Drive C is failing. this will be the second or third time for this system.

Since all the previous drives have been used, I decide to not only get a *new* drive to replace it, but go whole hog and get an SSD drive. Going to be a 500 gig drive (because 320 isn't a "normal" size for an SSD).

That also means replacing drive D, because I use that to make file-by-file backups of drive C.

Small SSD drives are ridiculously cheap these days. SATA drives are even cheaper. I think I'm paying $60 for one and $20 the other. The SSD is supposed to be here Thursday. I'm gonna try to hold out until then.

If worse comes to worst, I've got another used drive I can swap in, but I'd rather avoid moving the system and opening it up as much as I can,

I know some of you have heard mention of fun chemicals like chlorine trifluoride (ClF3) and dioxygen diflouride (FOOF).

Well, here are a few more

Chlorine pentafluoride (ClF5)
surprisingly, this is *less* reactive than ClF3. Thought to be because the fluorine atoms are packed tightly enough to interfere with each other when it comes to reacting with things.

Trioxygen difluoride (FOOOF)
*Way* more unstable than FOOF. Also, in storage (at extremely low temps) the liquid tends to recombine to form FOOF and FOOOOF. Yes, that's *four* oxygens in a row. and that last reacts explosively with damn near anything.

For folks writing or gaming in situations where people might encounter long forgotten (or hidden) installations there are several technological bits that would make fun additions.

First off, our old friend TIMMs. Thermally Integrated Micro Modules.

These were blocks of ceramic and high temp metals. They were developed after EMP was discovered as something that could survive EMP bit still not be much bigger than the then current gear that used printed circuits with individual transistors and the like.

They were tube based, but the tube were the size of a dime. and the units were a solid block of metal and ceramic except for the cavities that were the vacuum inside the tubes or the filling of capacitors.

The didn't have filaments for the tubes, so that eliminated one common source of failure in tube based equipment. Instead the blocks were placed in what amounted to a well insulated oven and heated to a dull red heat which got the cathodes hot enough to work.

These would be great for gear in the stereotypical volcano lair or around a big nuclear reactor.

Next, if you encounter a *really* old installation (say 1890s to 1920s) you may encounter radio transmitters (morse code only, not voice) that don't use tubes. Instead they use an alternator (a sort of AC generator) to generate the signal.

Another fun thing are radon bulbs. Used for emergency lighting, they are glass globes or other shape, The inside is coated with a phosphor much like the ones used in fluorescent lights. They are filled with radon gas, and the particles emitted by the decaying radon strike the phosphor coat and produce light.

You could probably make some something similar with other radioisotopes, but radon is what was used in the ones I've read about.

"Gee, how are these lights still working? They're a bit dim, but..."

"Wait a sec. Look at how they are mounted. There aren't any wires..."

Just the thing to creep out the radiation averse. :-)

(added later)

Oh yeah, refrigeration gear. Before freon was invented commercial refrigeration used 3 different easily liquified gases as working fluid: Chlorine, ammonia and sulfur dioxide.

all of these are toxic. and they meant leaks were a *really* bad thing. Which is why home refrigeration didn't take off until freon came along.

Note that they are *still* used to some extent in commercial plants.