I use okular and it works great on linux. Once in a while PDFs with forms display funny, or some minor challenges with data entry....but not sure if the issue is how the pdf was made or if okular. Nevertheless, i really like it. Plus as stated, a few KDE applications like okular happliy can be used on Windows. (For work machine, where i am forced to use Windows, i happily have used the Kate text editor.)
You lean back as hard as you can and the regen breaking stops you. It works pretty well actually, if you look up "EUC braking test" on YouTube you're likely to find some videos that will give an idea of their braking performance.
I think the niche of "personal vehicle that you can take on the metro" is better filled by PEVs. Shrinking down a bike's drivetrain size is harder than just putting together a single wheel, some circuit boards, batteries, and an electric motor to make an electric unicycle.
A big advantage EUCs have is you don't have to bother with folding like a bike, just hop off, grab the trolley handle and walk on.
Electric scooters have similar advantages but they have to compromise range, performance, and compactness for their ease of learning.
I haven't had a chance to try a single-wheel electric vehicle as they are not street legal in Germany. But usually I vastly prefer riding a bike over an electric stand-up scooter. My weight is distributed much better on a bike, making the right more stable. On a scooter I cannot reliably raise one arm to give a turn signal. Not signaling can be quite dangerous on shared roads or narrow paths. I never see anybody else indicate their turns on these scooters, so it's probably not a personal problem. Did any manufacturer figure out a way to put easy to read indicator lights on these?
The other thing is that you actually get some light exercise on a bike. Most people with desk jobs would do well to move their bodies a bit more during their days.
One thing that's nice some times about scooters is being able to stand up tall, rather than get into a slightly hunched up position on a bike. The Kwiggle from the GP allows for quite a unique upright body position. So that may be intriguing.
The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2. Even if the power plants supplying electric heat pumps/radiators is natural gas, the shorter supply chain (only to power plant and not to every building in the city) go some way to offsetting extra emissions. Then you have the obvious benefit that once the NYC grid transitions to renewables there won't be as many natural gas ovens and heaters that need to be replaced.
The commenters pointing out that natural gas stoves don't have a significant effect on emissions are right, but once a building gets a gas hookup installing natural gas heaters and water heaters becomes more attractive and economical. That's something we don't want to be incentivizing
Climate town recently released a new video talking about this issue as well as the decades of marketing and lobbying the natural gas industry has paid for to neuter or outright kill legislation like this.
I lived in a very old SF house that had some original gas lamp fixtures. These are overhead lamps from the 1900s that burnt gas for illumination.
There was a very faint gas smell in the entryway and we eventually traced it to one of these lamps. Its gas line was still under pressure and it wasn’t fully shut off. I tightened the valve and the smell stopped. (Though also the leak was so small a gas inspector’s equipment couldn’t detect it, but some people’s noses could)
Agreed that running gas lines everywhere may not be the best idea. We were dealing with the repercussions 100 years later.
> The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2.
This is only true in the short term. Methane has a half life in the atmosphere of less than a decade. By comparison, CO2 has a half life of thousands of years. Methane's greater immediate warming is drastically overshadowed by CO2's long-term persistence.
Global warming potential can be calculated over any chosen time frame, some use a 20 year time frame [1]. One hundred years is indeed short term when some greenhouse gases have a half life of thousands or even tens of thousands of years.
Many of the nice qualities of natural gas is the much higher power output. Gas burners go up to 60kw (normal kitchen burner is 9kw) while an electric resistance stove is 2.6kw. We now have inductive stoves that can surpass electric resistance stoves in power output and can match burners more powerful than a typical industrial kitchen.
tl;dr the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over.
I know that this is talking about household energy use, but one of the larger uses of natural gas is metallurgy and industrial processes (like making fertilizer). Industrial natural gas use almost matches consumption for electricity generation in the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur...
Changing these systems to use something other than fossil fuels is a big conundrum. In theory, hydrogen could replace it. But almost all hydrogen today is generated via steam reformation (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2) which emits greenhouse gases. Electrolysis powered by renewable power is theoretically possible, but scaling it up proves difficult. Some hypothesize that thermochemical hydrogen production [1] with heat provided by fission could produce hydrogen at the required scales.
We no longer need to deliver natural gas into cities to deliver power to a process, that was the original argument. Delivering it as a feedstock and or specific chemical heat source, sure.
I agree that we're trending to your conclusion, but we're not there yet.
You're kidding if you think the electric grid, especially in NYC, could handle the removal of all gas appliances and replacement with high amperage electric appliances. You're talking about an order of magnitude (or even two) increase in electricity usage.
Not kidding, totally doable with batteries. The power density in hybrid car batteries is roughly 500Whr @ 50C, so max power output is 25kW. So 72s at max power, even at industrial cooking of 9kw we see 200s. At max home resistance heater output we see 700s of runtime.
We can cook with batteries and have better performance than gas right now. Which means you don't even have to run 240v to the range. You can run a high power stove top off any regular circuit.
Where will these batteries be stored? How will the risk of a fire be mitigated? What's the plan for recycling the batteries or dealing with battery failure? The infrastructure should have a lot of redundancy - I like batteries but I personally wouldn't rely on them in extreme scenarios.
We are talking about a battery pack that is 100x100x600mm. LiFeO4 and other chemistries don't have the same failure scenarios. A home stove is not an extreme scenario, I believe you are just throwing up chaff and moving some goal posts.
this is all stuff we’re going to figure out anyway, it’s already happening… replacing old appliances as they fail and retrofitting existing buildings will take much longer
Electricity usage, not energy. Electric heat, even a heat pump, uses orders of magnitude more electricity. Of course then we save on the efficiency of moving gas, but that wouldn’t necessarily be NYC
IIRC Signal doesn't have a web app for security reasons. With a iOS/Android/Desktop app, you can verify the checksum of the binary against what signal provides.
But with a web app you redownload the application everytime which means you'd have to recheck that checksum every time you use the app. I guess that WhatsApp, Discord, et al have decided that this is a reasonable risk. But the privacy oriented Signal team disagrees.
I don't think it's a prioritization issue, the desktop app is currently running via electron which means it's effectively a web app already.
Something being Electron doesn't mean it's ready to be a web app it means the UI is web and the rest of the app is somewhere between "the standard web sandbox" and "a native app" in terms of what it has access to do.
Wow... I was totally convinced by the security argument until I read through this thread, which completely obsoletes that premise. It's no different from a PWA (like WhatsApp) in its update behavior then.
