Others already addressed battery cost, so I will address charging time:

For modern EVs, charging time is basically a non-issue outside of longer road trips. Most EV owners utilize a slower (level 1 or level 2) charging station at home, which allows them to charge the car while they are at home/sleeping. EV owners can also use charging stations near/at their destination to charge while they are doing other things anyway. And assuming your daily commute isn’t like 100 miles/160 km, you really don’t need to stop at charging stations at all besides the one at home, which is cheaper. Obviously this does not apply if you rent a house or live in an apartment, etc.

Even road trips aren’t so bad assuming the car has an 800 volt battery pack instead of a 400 volt (higher voltage at same current = more power to charge and faster charge time). It also helps a lot if you only charge to 80 percent instead of 100 because that last 20 percent almost doubles your charge time and is harder on the battery. A lot of new EV owners don’t understand this and get frustrated when they are sitting there for 40 minutes getting almost no additional range compared to waiting for 20 minutes.

Let’s assume Costco size hot dogs (1/4 lb, or 0.11 kg), with an internal temp increase from fridge temperatures (37 F, or 276 K) to 165 F (347 K). Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K. To heat up a single hot dog takes this much energy:

q=mc*deltaT => q=(0.11 kg)*(3000 J/kg*K)*(347K-276K)=23,430 J of energy.

The heat capacity here is 9GW. That is 9 gigajoules of energy per second, or 9 billion joules every second. Divide this by the number of joules to cook each hot dog gets us the number of hot dogs that could be cooked every second:

9,000,000,000/23,430=384,123 hot dogs/second

With this hot dogs per second figure, we can find how long this energy source would take to feed the entire US population a Costco hot dog.

342,000,000 people/384,123 hot dogs per sec=890 seconds

Converting this to minutes:

890/60=14.8 minutes

So, this source of energy could feed the entire population of the US a Costco hot dog in less than 15 minutes if properly harnessed.

Maybe, but it is pretty affordable (~$26 USD), the hardware and software is open source, and it is very portable due to the lack of a soldering station. It is also temp adjustable and has features like temp boost for heat sucking components like ground planes. For nerds, they have a risc-v devboard that you can use with the soldering iron’s CPU. So, there are reasons it has a CPU, but some would probably still prefer a regular dumb soldering iron.

Another happy owner of a pinecil here. For me it gets plenty hot and works great. There isn’t a battery though, you’re meant to use it wired with either USB C PD 65 Watts or 12V standard size barrel plug at similar wattage. More info on the pinecil wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinecil_Power_Supplies

Also, here’s some more general info about pinecil from their wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinecil

Didn’t even notice that bit lol. After reading lots of articles on the internet, one tends to skip all the BS in the intro. Can’t disagree with that paragraph more.

I still think the rest of the guide is very good though, it walked me through tons of complicated config I could not have figured out on my own. Turns out you have to configure the VM to have special VirtIO hardware and install the drivers for that hardware within the Windows VM, among other various tweaks.

Also, this setup 100% should be people’s last resort for running software on Linux. I would be using wine if I could, but the SolidWorks for Linux project has stalled in favor of the fusion360 for Linux project, so I had no choices other than installing Windows 11 on my old laptop or installing it in a VM.

I’ve gotten solidworks to work in a Windows 11 VM with decent performance. I use Virtual Machine Manager, which is a GUI that uses QEMU/KVM on the backend.

I used this guide for better performance, and it also resolved an issue where solidworks wouldn’t install because it could tell it was in a VM.

Similar story here, just with my dad’s SNES around that same time. Mainly played link to the past, as it was the only game we had for a bit, but we bought a couple others (super Mario world, where in the world is Carmen San Diego, ms pac man) on eBay later on. Both myself and my dad’s old save states are still on the cartridge last I checked.

Then we got a Wii around 2013 when my uncle was upgrading to Wii U, we got a PS2 slim from my grandparents (to play DDR with these terrible dance pads we never ended up using much), and I got a 3ds xl for my (12th?) birthday. That 3ds was the only console I got when it was even remotely new, and I have moved on to pc games ever since (at least for newer titles). My brother has continued collecting retro games, and has added an Atari 2600, a sega genesis, and my dad’s NES to the collection. Currently, the Wii, PS2, and 3DS have been softmodded and are still used fairly regularly.

It’s probably affected my taste in video games too - I get mostly old stuff or indie titles.