I don’t have much in the way of links, but I can give you an overview.
We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from.
This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered.
The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water.
We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility.
There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use.
The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol.
"Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more! - Dave explores the IBM z16 mainframe from design to assembly and testing. What's inside a modern IBM z16 mainframe that makes it relevant today?" - by Dave Plummer.
This is an amazing 23-minute video by the Microsoft programmer who developed the Windows NT Task Manager, among other things. He visits IBM and talks to engineers about the Telum chip architecture (Hot Chips 2023), used in the z16 mainframe. Special attention is paid to the cache.
Lovely article, though honestly getting those prerequisites also takes a lot of time, effort and either motivation or discipline in ample amounts.
As someone who was the “smart kid” growing up, going to the university without good work ethic was pretty eye opening, no longer being able to coast on intuitively getting subjects, but rather either having to put in a bunch of effort while feeling both humbled and dumb at times, or just having to sink academically.
Even after getting through that more or less successfully and having an okay career so far, I still definitely struggle with both physical health and mental health, both of which make the process of learning new things harder and slower than just drinking a caffeinated beverage of choice and grokking a subject over a long weekend. Sometimes it feels like trying to push a rock up a muddy slope.
And if I’m struggling, as someone who’s not burdened by having children to take care of or even not having the most demanding job or hours to make ends meet, I have no idea how others manage to have a curious mind and succeed the way they do.
Admittedly, some people just feel like they’re built different. Even if I didn’t have those things slowing me down as much (working on it), I’d still be nowhere near as cool as people who dive headfirst into low level programming, electrical engineering, write their own simulations, rendering or even whole game engines and such. Maybe I’m just exposed to what some brilliant people can do thanks to the Internet, but some just manage to do amazing things.
> Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically).
It has much to say on all kinds of other password nonsense:
> Verifiers SHOULD permit subscriber-chosen memorized secrets at least 64 characters in length. All printing ASCII [RFC 20] characters as well as the space character SHOULD be acceptable in memorized secrets. Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters SHOULD be accepted as well.
> Truncation of the secret SHALL NOT be performed.
> Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use “paste” functionality when entering a memorized secret.
> In order to assist the claimant in successfully entering a memorized secret, the verifier SHOULD offer an option to display the secret — rather than a series of dots or asterisks — until it is entered.
We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from.
This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered.
The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water.
We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility.
There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use.
The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol.
Anyway, that’s the view from space.