Cray (the company) often had interesting designs that probably ended up influencing a lot of sci-fi. CDC (control data corporation) had interesting designs as well, prior to that, and Cray (the person) worked there before founding his own company.

One other supercomputer line with iconic looks is Connection Machines which are IMO some of the coolest looking computers ever made.

I could say precisely the same about standard pencils – you have to constantly be sharpening it if you want properly dense handwriting. Mechanical with .2 or .3 and you don’t even have to rotate it to get a sharp edge.

1st one, with either .2 or .3 lead. That also happens to be what I main for writing already.

I find it funny how whoever originally created this meme somehow ended up using a picture of Macintosh II (or IIx, IIfx) to represent a computer. An over 30 yo mahcine, which while capable of speech synthesis is not going to talk to you without being requested, unless you’ve configured something very incorrectly.

Feels a bit like a floppy disk still being the save icon; computers are still being presented with floppy drives and a CRT monitor in clip-art and such.

Well, the example was with a tent which is a single layer of cotton between you and the environment, and by no means resembles anything even remotely insulated. That’s why it needs a relatively powerful heater to stay comfortably warm. In normal use you have quite a lot of control over the temperature of the heater, mainly with the size and amount of firewood -> effective surface area of the fire.

For static buildings the situation is different, with enough insulation you can get by with almost no heating. Zero-energy building is a thing in Finland as well, and although it has its challenges, it’s still possible to keep your home warm with only your body heat in e.g. -40. The main difficulty you’ll encounter there is getting rid of the moisture in air, since being that energy-efficient will require having your home almost fully enclosed. You’ll also need to be careful to properly limit the moisture getting out from the house, as the dew point will be inside the insulation and any moisture getting out will condense inside, eventually leading to mold.

I haven’t actually reached the end game in Frostpunk 1, but at a glance it would require some efficiency improvements and better insulation – and given enough insulation and heating anything is possible. If your people are sleeping under the sky hugging the generator, I’d assume you won’t get past the end game. A real-world example that somewhat resembles the Frostpunk world would be people living in Yakutsk, Russia, where they have more of a brute-force approach to the -60 °C temperatures – just burn enough gas to keep your log cabin warm. Surviving outside at those temperatures without protective equipment would be difficult though, especially since most materials won’t stay flexible at -120 °C or -140 °C. You’d find it pretty difficult to move around.

Edit: But also, a mandatory “don’t quote me on this”, as building is my hobby, not my job. I’ve some knowledge, and some experience, but by no means am I a professional.

It’s safe enough, in the Finnish army we occasionally get the tent heater red hot, and as long as nothing flammable touches it or is too close, it’s fine. It will radiate heat quite well when that hot, but won’t be anywhere close to dangerous if you know what you’re doing. In the tent we of course have some water nearby to extinguish the possible flames but still.

You basically need to have it glowing red if you’re to keep the tent warm in -15 °C or lower. - 30°C needs something closely resembling the picture posted.

Here’s an example, unfortunately hosted on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fjiquty6qz7s51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De4b8083400858eccc1786d7b32b94b759b2bc6c2

If you’re using powdered detergent, make sure yours doesn’t have zeolite as the water softening agent. It will deposit in the machine, and starts eventually covering the fabrics with a talcum-like powdery substance. It gets especially bad if you either have to use a lot of detergent because of hard water, or are overusing the detergent.

Zeolite was brought in to replace phosphates due to environmental concerns, but it has its own problems with the washing results.

One other thing that often ruins the freshness of clothes for me is overly scented/perfumed detergent. The smell can get quite overwhelming, and contribute to a chemical-y smell and feel.

Just in case someone misreads this, add the vinegar as the softener, so it’s not in the first load that contains the detergent. The detergent is a base, and relies upon that fact to get rid of some of the stains, and vinegar as an acid will neutralize that. Vinegar is meant to be in the rinse cycle when washing laundry, where it can help get rid of any extra detergent by neutralizing it and do any other magic it does.

Also, though I don’t usually encounter them often, do note that vinegar can wash away zinc and silver oxides used for some sterile clothing, and can supposedly damage lyocell.

But overall I second these suggestions. Most times the amounts listed for detergent are far too big, and you can often get by with less.

A mercury arc rectifier. The mercury vapor is ionized, and used for increasing the current carrying capacity of the component – compared to how much a traditional valve design with complete vacuum would work.

In short, it makes DC out of AC.

And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.

Context will tell which one it is.