They even went as far as having us string wire out to our ambush sites when we were on the Iraqi border during the first gulf war and reel it back up when we came in. Zero radio signals out there because they didn’t want them to know that a whole division plus French armor was there.
Modern tech is good and all unless you have some dumb Joe that keeps erasing the codes out of the radio by turning on the truck without putting it on standby or something…never quite figured that one out.
Pure hacking.
People helping each others.
And I learned something.
> our concrete homes are not designed to be habitable without AC power.
and a little web-searching confirmed it. The reason being that concrete-made buildings in Ukraine are definitely habitable right now without AC (I live in a concrete-made building myself a couple hundred kilometres from the border with Ukraine).
> I think Probably the war will end because Russia and America are busy in Ukraine
"Concrete" can also mean "the cement based building material" or "specific", as in "this specific building needs power to be habitable, because <unusual detail>" (pumping drinking water for example, which is mentioned).
The comment "because Russia and America are busy in Ukraine" indicates OP is not in Ukraine.
Small improvements are important, especially for people in dire straights.
Without the internet, the author of the question might well be left to try it out and possibly getting harmed, or with no support at all.
Ukraine has been impressively fast in rebuilding critical infrastructure after Russian cruise missile strikes. It also helps that many of the Ukrainian men that have gone back to Ukraine are construction workers, electricians etc. Many of them are even working under the risk of Russian double-tap strikes.
Tell me you're in NY without telling me you're in NY
So much of our modern world is designed for modern infrastructure, and when that infra falls down, you either have to do without or accept a level of danger that is probably higher than the modern world takes, but lower than what our ancestors 100 years ago took.
"I cant give you this advice because it would be dangerous."
"I am in a warzone, it's fine..."
"OK, then what you need to do is..."
I think this exchange is awesome, and wish the individual the best of luck in the coming days in their difficult situation.
Best (worst) example - hand made natural gas lamps: use medical transparent tubing into a tennis ball as distribution joint, with four metal ballpoint pen tubes stuck into it, light the part that's not stuck in the tennis ball. Voila, chandelier!
It's astonishing what manner of things can be transformed into a cart / dolly / wheelbarrow to carry clean water in.
19th century stoves and fireplaces were useless, took too much energy to warm up the device itself and inside a modern city, wood is rare and precious. Sarajevo War Stove was a large 1-2l tin can, conducts heat directly and doesn't absorb much itself, lets you boil water or make some small soup.
Candles could be almost endlessly recycled. Pre-war brochures were great, their glossy pages could be rolled up into friction free tubes to hold melted wax, with some cottoon or wool thread in the middle.
And yes, electricity moved from building to building in whatever manner seems feasible. As a 13year old I've handled live male-to-male 220v cables, and can vouch, they give you quite a nice buzz if you're not careful :-)
(some experiments did not work out great; chain smokers tried to light up all kinds of things, up to and including various kinds of tea; apparently it's just not the same).
You’d be surprised!
I’m near Ottawa and in the past year I’ve been without power for 8 days, 5 days, and a handful of other times.
I’m on well water and our septic system requires a pump. When the power is out we have no water, sewer or heat.
The cell tower nearby only has about 1-2 hours of reserve power. There’s no hardwire communication here so we lose all outside communications after a couple of hours.
During the eight day outage, everywhere within about an hour drive was out of power. Gas stations were closed, grocery stores were closed, etc. That’s if you could even get anywhere—many highways and roads were closed due to fallen trees and power lines. Our own driveway had half a dozen mature trees across it.
It’s no active war zone, and it’s certainly not _two years_, but a lot of stuff you might not think would fly in Canada was exactly what many people were doing to get by.
Efficient stoves can indeed be fairly simple, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverage-can_stove, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo_stove or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove.
A hightech variant has a battery-operated fan. I find that a weird combination, but apparently, it works well (https://www.techxlab.org/solutions/zz-manufacturing-sierra-z...)
I've tried smoke a lot of things, including tea.
Don't recommend it.
Might satisfy the social and psychological aspects of addiction, but the physiological part is rather difficult to sate without nicotine.
Customer Service: How can I help you today?
hacker: I need help resetting the password to this account that is totally mine.
CS: Sure, I just need you to verify a few things.
hacker: I'm not in a place where I have that info, but I totally swears it that I'm the person I say I am, but I'm really in a jam right now and you'd be helping me out so so much.
CS: Of course, I understand. Your new password is....
PROVE IM NOT HER OVER A PHONE
"How can I do a thing?"
"You shouldn't want to do that thing."
Danger/risk is a situation that happens sometimes, but it's never an excuse to dismiss the asker's question and need.
Explain the warning or concerns ("May catch fire and explode" or "Will not be to code, would cause your building to fail inspection" or "There's this other framework/language that might make it easier"), but also give them a damn answer!
In this case, there's no @$&#ing reason someone sitting in their office shouldn't do the calculation that's being requested from the parameters supplied. It's a simple emag calc.
I'm pretty sure stackX would tell someone asking about the time required to boil water for sanitization to never drink boiled water and use the tap. :/
"You shouldn't use that sort of electricity, you should switch to three-phase."
Whether it's right or not, I have no idea since I'm no EE.
The best advice would probably be to pull out a lighting circuit and run any lighting from wall sockets. Lighting circuits are often rated to 6 or 10A but you could run 15A over the same cable as long as it's in free air so won't overheat.
"Yes. we already done that but not over do it because we hope the power will be restored.I think Probably the war will end because Russia and America are busy in Ukraine and hopefully will not supply fighting parties with bombs, rockets and ammunition and they have to keep fighting with sticks and swords"
They were merely pointing out that the US and Russia are too "distracted" with Ukraine to provide arms to the warring parties in Sudan, and so hopefully the Sudanese conflict will fizzle out sooner than if the Ukraine war was not going on.
I don't believe OP was making any kind of judgment on whether or not the West supplying weapons to Ukraine is a good or bad thing, or is morally right or wrong. Just observing a possible effect on their own situation.
The never ending "civil war" in Sudan is just one of the countless proxy conflicts between the US and Russia
The population doesn't want to be under Russia's boot, of course. Nobody does. But you're clearly playing the naivety card when you should, and do, know better
I was an exchange student in Ukraine in high school and the town I lived in periodically gets shelled now… we live immensely privileged and comfortable lives.
This is not a bad thing, it’s great, but we should try to make everyone else’s life as good instead of hoarding our privileges.
Your understanding of the world is warped by the safety and availability of goods. It's incredible when you get in places where the state doesn't function at let's say 50% of what we get in the first world. It's one hell of a learning experience.
> Fly to Brazil, take a cab around Central Sao Paulo.
source: Am Brazilian, would not recommend it.
To be fair, Central São Paulo isn't even what I would consider third world yet, if you really wanna see how good some of us have it go to the northeast of Brazil, or Venezuela (if you manage to get in somehow).
What are you referring to, specifically?
The only thing that comes to mind are the homeless population, but then again you could say the same problem (and at arguably larger scale) afflicts San Francisco or New York.
Sao Paulo is not even particularly violent, too
Made me realize there are still big chunks of the world where you can't take basic literacy for granted in 2023, even of people in their 30s.
I kept thinking he might be better off figuring out how to move the transformer instead.
TLDR: connections must be protected by some kind of anti oxidation coating, if you have nothing else use grease but something designed for electrical connections is better. If you have nothing else, melt some lead and dip the exposed part of the wire in that to coat it. Lead should be readily available in a war zone? Long term the wire WILL melt at some random point along the wire so it is much better if this wire is kept away from anything flammable.
Goddamn, son.
Probably fine in Sudan in late spring, tbh. They have to pump water up from the ground with electric pumps, hence the need for cabling, so I guess they don't have much rain right now.
Not so much arcing but resistance between the terminal and the wire will increase as a coating of oxide builds up between the two. Eventually the resistance is high enough that dangerous amounts of heat will build up and ignite wire insulation or other flammable materials. What usually happens, is the conductor was nicked by the electrician during stripping and that becomes a mechanical weak point that becomes a fuse link and the wire sometimes just melts off at that point rapidly without starting a fire and goes open circuit.
> melt some lead and dip the exposed part of the wire in that to coat it.
Plain molten lead isn't going to "wet" the steel wire without some sort of flux. Rosin flux is made from tree sap of a conifer tree so go find a pine tree and harvest some sap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_chloride#As_a_metallurgic...
Though I have no idea if either can be found locally.
Or is its speed purely a consequence of temperature + environmental gases?
Oxidation (and reduction) are literally electron flows.
Oxidation is a loss of electrons and reduction is a gain of electrons.
Since the oxidizing material is the anode in this (oxidation "circuit") you can connect a "sacrificial anode" to the material you want to preserve and the electrons will flow from that instead of the (material you want to save).
We have sacrificial anodes connected to our underground propane tank:
http://www.pettank.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/cathode-pr...
... which means a bag of magnesium does all the rusting instead of the tank they are connected to.
I’ve also heard of cathodic protection or electronic rust proofing doing the opposite though? Maybe it has to do with moving charges vs static charges? Or ground a cable preventing rust vs charging it accelerates rust?
I list it specifically because it does cover creating insulated wire.
You can probably do this for a little while, but your total current through the circuit is limited to the photocurrent generated by the lowest performing cell. Otherwise you'd get a charge buildup.
(sorry, I don't have a quora account)
Not sure how you'd handle high voltage DC with most things though, it's only slightly better than using high voltage AC with a commercial inverter.
Generally the current ratings on those wires is given in terms of temperature rise over ambient. The current rating for a wire that is allowed to rise 60C is much more than one only allowed to rise 30C.
As it gets hotter the resistance goes up and the system becomes less efficient, but it's not usually a sharp break. It will get hot, so you'll need to keep an eye on it. That's not so bad to do manually, just be conservative.
If we're talking days, I think you should just use trial and error. Use the inverter to up the voltage, add loads slowly and keep an eye on the voltage on the load side (if it drops a lot you're drawing too much current) and keep an eye on the wire for hot spots (honestly wish I could suggest a way to do this without hazard of touching it, I don't know if you have a thermal camera).
Said another way: the conductor is rated for amps and doesn't care about volts, while the insulation is in volts.
In an urban environment, there are many opportunities to salvage. Industrial areas especially have good pickings.
Rural environments are limited by the lack of salvage opportunities.
Don't bother trying to salvage wire from vehicles for anything substantial. Find the lowest effort option to improvise based on what's available.
Maybe even copper piping is an option?
Also, the insulation will not be up to the need and he will get shocked if he touches the hot, melted insulation.
Yes, I want to use jQuery. No, I may not be in an active war zone.
Tangentially, the real MVP is the home depot guy who helps you find the one right-sized screw that costs $0.5….
Straight from the GE "How to mortgage a company's future for a small boost in the present" book.
There were also some hilarious anecdotes told about him refusing to get out of his car in the corporate parking lot until security met him and escorted him in, presumably because he understood how much employees disliked him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nardelli#The_Home_Dep...
I recently spent 4 hours online trying to solve a carpentry problem and not even knowing what words to use. I finally called my dad and in less than 2 minutes it was solved.
I guess home depot has won, and the employees have enough faq experience to help now.
Now if home depot sold 80/20 supplies...
But as much as you push, sometimes you need to put on the rubber boots and gloves going up to your shoulders and figure out a somewhat safe way to run some Windows XP based machine controller in an environment. Or wrangle some Java 1.6 thing back into function. Or figure out the least security reduction to support some old system not supporting modern crypto.
And yeah, usually the idea is to put trusted isolation layers around the dumb idea we have to deal with, as the water hose suggested in the article.
Personally, when I answer a question it's because I want to, and feel I can be helpful. I have no skin in the game with regard to the site's overall ability to keep up with incoming questions. So, I take as long as I need, and do as much hand-holding as I feel is appropriate, not governed by external pressure.
But I suppose there are professional moderators and such who really do have that external pressure, and thus have incentive to give curt feedback, or even to drive people away — thus reducing that pressure, making their lives easier.
As a SO user from the early days, I do miss that feeling of mostly interacting with people doing it "for the love of it," rather than governed by efficiency.
It is not a reason to sit down and dismiss away questions or type out why you wont tell them.
The problems Stack Overflow has seems to me to be very much self inflicted, caused by the decision to optimize for political games instead of optimizing for solving problems.