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Putting a solar roofs over any open-air carpark you happen to own is just a hilariously easier option. Hell, you could erect these OVER the train tracks.

https://greenox-group.de/photovoltaik-carport/ (Article is in German, but it’s really more around the picture)

According to a completely un-sourced picture I found online, one carpark (in the USA) is typically around 5.5 x 2.6m, so if you had even 50 carparks on your site you could have ~715 square metres of panels. More, if you figure a way to cover the aisles between the rows of carparks too.

At the top end of all applicable figures (panel efficiency, solar irradiance, inverter efficiency), that could net you ~160kW at solar midday.

Now on the other side, standard-gauge railway is around 1.4m wide, and maybe you could cram a 1m width of panels between the rails.

That sounds like a lot - 1000 square metres per kilometre, and there are thousands of kilometres of railway lines out there - but it’s harder to install, harder to service, gets dirty faster, is liable to get damaged, and now you have to figure out how to extract power from somehing a kilometre long, instead of an area that could be a square only around 35m (~115’) on a side (for the above 50 carparks).

I know which one of those I’d want to run the cables for.

As has been pointed out many times when this dumb-ass idea comes up, only once you’ve exhausted every other possibility (carparks, rooftops, putting panels ABOVE roads/rivers/canals/cycleways/railways) and have literally no other viable installation locations, then we can talk.

Funnily enough, I just watched it for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

I think it might have been a different viewing experience when it was new, but it’s hard to not view it through the modern lens where 30 Rock made it - and therefore defined the “genre” of show-about-a-SNL-type-show - and Studio 60 didn’t.

Wikipedia indeed includes an entire section about this in the pages for both shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_60_on_the_Sunset_Strip#Similarities_to_30_Rock / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Rock#Similarities_to_other_media

But it does answer the question of “what if in a parallel universe, 30 Rock was a slightly weirdly paced character drama?”.

Only if it’s at least a six minute video, in which lighting the candle doesn’t begin until at least minute four.

Per the article… yes

We’ve put taco meat in places that I can never repeat

I mean, that depends…

Can also recomment “Sqwincher” (stupid name aside) products.

https://www.sqwincher.com/products/single-serve-qwik-stik-zero/

As they market primarily to people working in construction / other trades - and are therefore sold at the likes of electrical and safety supply stores - we buy them in bulk for when we’re spending weeks installing racks of servers in our datacentre at work.

it’s essentially 2 PCI Express x1 lanes and USB 2.0

Sometimes there’s only a single PCIe lane though. And as you say, that’s not a x2 but explicitly two x1s.

No WiFi card needs the bandwidth (yet), at PCIe 3 speeds you’ve got around 7.8Gbps for a x1, and PCIe 4 double that.

The Coral comes in a “dual” version for exactly this reason (https://coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-dual-edgetpu/) you just have to be very sure the slot you’re putting it in is actually delivering two PCIe connections.

Also for bonus fun, most WiFi/BT cards use the PCIe interface for the WiFi and USB for the Bluetooth.

It sounds like you’re thinking of LoRa, another 900MHz radio protocol.

LoRa has similar bandwidth to Zigbee (125kbps), and as you say is designed for low-power devices running on battery. I have PIR motion sensors at home which have used only around a third of their battery after 2 years.

Security cameras seems to be a large target market for HaLow though, where you need a couple of megabits at a few hundred metres.

My last laptop (owned from 2013-2020) had an NFC reader under the touchpad.

I managed - exactly once - to get my phone to send a file to it using Beam. Did everything exactly as expected; initiated the transfer by NFC and sent the file over Bluetooth.

I could never repeat the experiment. Once, and only once.

Thanks, not hungry anymore.