Yesterday was the kind of day that makes me want to give up programming and revert to hunting and gathering for my existence. It was abysmal. Today is going to be better.
Need some hot water to wash your hands, and don't want to run 5 gallons until some reaches the tap? Use a little hydrogen peroxide. The dirtier your hands are, the hotter it gets. Makes a nice lather too, for shaving. I understand it can be made by bubbling ozone through water, but haven't yet tried it. Not sure how to actually accomplish that; you can't very well use a voltage multiplier under water. Oh, yeah, maybe pump ozone-rich air through a tube down to the bottom of a cylinder of water. Hmm, will have to try that.
Some engineer please explain to me why this doesn't work: single-piston pump, two check valves. Bottom of cylinder under water. Upstroke pulls a foot or two of water into the cylinder through one check valve, while the second check valve keeps the output column from coming back down. Down stroke pushes the foot of water around a 180-degree turn into the output column. 500 strokes and you've lifted the water 500 feet. Make the output side half the diameter and it only takes 125 strokes. Using my water displacement calculator, 500 feet of water in a 1 inch ID pipe only weighs 170 pounds. I need to fix the link from that page, grrr...
Riffing on the above: if the water table is dropping, mount a sawtoothed piece of metal to the bottom of the pump assembly, and rotate it while pumping. It should suck up the dirt and dump it out on the ground above. Once you've got it to the right depth, you'll have to wait for it to settle again before you get clean water.
I need a little sketch app for my old, jailbroken iPod Touch. Anybody know of one? Yeah, yeah, I can google it later. What I want to be able to do is to sketch out my ideas for inventions and post them to my Facebook page for comments.
last updated 2010-12-22 11:36:06. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com