alzymologist

Damn these translated abbriviations are tough. For me they were BRD and DDR

Wtf how Scandinavia and Japan are not on top?

Funny thing about Germany, after all these years, quality differs a lot between west and former ussr ghetto. Knowing this saves lots of cash.

DIY

Yeah, the "diversification" was - instead of few companies buying chinese cloth and sewing it together into masks, more companies did the same; and yet more multiplied simple resalers. I've been there, my boss at the time asked if we could mix hand sanitizer in our gear; why we could've, but resalers would've kicked our ass at the time.

Was thinking about this very topic, although I plan to catch wind.

So far the best ideas I've got are:

1. Scavenge old Toyota hybrid Ni batteries - those are surprisingly reliable long after they are not giving enough power for a car, and have quite good charge-discharge capacity
2. Build Fe-Ni base batteries - messy but cheap
3. Switch part of equipment to compressed air, run compressor for storage, spin generator with air on demand, possibly bubble air through some kind of bioreactor (kelp, mushrooms, etc.). Maybe same thing with vacuum line.
4. Electrochemical synthesis on spare power (pretty much open battery loop; just a little bit - by making materials to be used in non-rechargeable batteries - or completely - make something useful elsewhere like metal coatings; I could extract stuff from local minerals, or barrety broth, or some kind of local goblinite). Anyway, something that wouldn't care about random schedule, as opposed to, for example, greenhouse lighting or heating.

Home power storage is very hard to design. Ballpark-wise, I found that energy storage could be as profitable as renting space for living, normalized by square meter; thus it's bound to be at least about as expensive to run. If possible, you should consider making smart grid with neighbours.

You should also have a look at Polkadot Vault, internals of which were also done by me and my wife. The concept is very elegant, you can easily adopt this technology and use an old end of life smartphone as absolutely the best crypto storage device.

None of these are technically wallets though, but now that I'm not developing these I'm free to not be pedantic, yeee-haw.

Ledger does not opensource half of their gear, and it is kinda potentially vulnerable with their silent upgrade capabilities and "cloud secret storage" (and their secure storage chip does not seem to have PUF and could be better for all we know but that's not important really). I was terrified by that device when it just appeared long time ago, for upgrade-over-network is a potential for quite an attack; time proved that the company is mostly decent though and we haven't seen much issues (we've seen some, but those were technical and you should expect that at cutting edge, even if by "technical" I mean some human psychology hacks).

So after studying the market (which is not as large as I hoped at some point lol), I came up with reasonable (conspiracy) theory of Ledger's economy workings: there is no way those investments they've attracted would ever return really, there is just not enough adoption, even if they do have absolutely hats-off the best and most convenient software support for many, many currencies (yes, with its flaws, yes, sometimes tokens get stuck for months or years - but that's cold storage device mostly, and cutting edge technologies, with prioritization of profit over technological advancement or even usability, one should expect that). On the other hand, there are people who want extremely secure wallet to store loads of tokens comfortably (the best storage is acid-free paper with carbon ink seed phrase in sealed vial, but that's not enterprise nor comfortable and you can't exit markets fast). These people can pay some engineering shop to develop some storage device, but then they would just be vulnerable to this shop's potential backdoors. And device would be quite expensive, to cover the development costs.

So, to protect themselves, they could make lots of other people buy these devices too. Launch super aggressive marketing campaign, make device really cheap, add tutorials and very nice app, etc. Exactly what Ledger did - so indeed, these are very expensive devices for the investors, and thanks to their demand, quite cheap for the rest of us. Elegant solution, for once market working nicely.

I do not have a Ledger, I bought one when they just were released, played with it a bit, and gave it away to a friend who hoards crypto. This thing still does not feel right, but mostly, I do not hoard tokens, just use them for payment and research.

Have a look at Kampela, if you are looking to build. I made it, it's opensource, and it's quite easy to implement for Eth or BTC (I did Eth part halfway). DM me if you have any questions, I gave away that company to some "business dudes" to commercialize, but it doesn't look like they are having a good time lately. But it's opensource, feel free to do whatever as long as it stays toxic GPL3.

Crypto currencies as they exist now are indeed mostly scam, it was a fun task to complete though. They are good for large-distance international payments though (Australia, I mean you! I have to buy GammaSpectacular gear for BTC wtf are we civilized world or what? Damn lazy bankers!)

After hanging out with Veselago I'm not sure I can handle the concept of "reflective-only" elements.

I just shove wires into wax with some two-pronged hard implement (to push on the sides of cell ridge).

I've also tried using woodburning iron to melt a few spots of wax to the frame, it worked amazing (and cutting pretty honeycomb from the frame was never easier), but with one catch: if wether is hot and bees are slacking, it deforms faster then they reinforce it and wax rolls off. These frames survived my centrifuge too, the trick is to make syre bees attach it on all sides by, well, tack-soldering on all sides indeed. Will not work with op's casts and centrifuge though.

Was thinking for a year that casting flat wax and then rolling it with patterned roll press might be better idea. Anyone tried that?

Of all the marvelous implications of proof of origin of hotspot plumes, we have to resort to the dumbest greed inducing clickbait headline. What a sad time we live in

I got this vibe from fridge. One of the reasons I often put some frozen hornets in those, no packaging. Deters people from doing stupid things.