Albany County (/ΛΙΛlbΙniΛ/ awl-bΙ-nee) is a county located in the U.S. state of New York, and is part of the Albany-Schenectady-Troy Metropolitan Statistical Area. The name is from the title of the Duke of York and Albany, who became James II of England (James VII of Scotland). As of the 2010 census, the population was 304,204.[1] As originally established, Albany County had an indefinite amount of land, but has only 530 square miles (1,400 km2) as of March 3, 1888. The county seat is Albany, the state capital.
Driving past the Old Homestead Stanton Farm in Westerlo, a few miles away from my parents house around dusk. The dairy cattle once milked in the barn have been replaced with a handful of beef cattle that graze on hay during these winter months. I remember years ago when I was in High School and the cows got loose and were blocking traffic on NY 32.
For simple rugged power distribution it's hard to beat these rugged Ceeform connectors. They're available in a range of current and voltage ratings with suitable colour coding and keying. They're so common that they literally only cost a few pounds each in quantity for the basic blue/yellow 16A plugs/sockets.
They can be dropped from height, dragged across rubble and left out in arduous weather conditions without too many problems. The fact they're made of resilient plastic with long overlapping lips means that they can be handled relatively safely in wet conditions.
One thing I didn't mention was that the black bodied connector is specifically designed for the entertainment industry where it blends in better than coloured connectors.
I love these connectors. Easy to wire and super-rugged. The most common problems I have with them are broken wires or very rarely a welded contact on higher current connectors. They're cheap and common, so easy to keep spares in stock. Swap or reterminate and they're back in action.
I have seen these in the Empire Plaza and was wondering how they worked and the benefits of them for connecting and disconnecting high voltage, high current loads.
Clarksville South Road (CR 312) and Newry Road (CR 411), the road I grew up on in Dormansville. While the light wasn't perfect, it does show the neighborhood I grew up in rural Albany County.
Oodi, the new Helsinki Library, has robots to help reshelve books. They get a lot of press attention. But they're not the important part of the library: here's why.
It's often okay when building small electronic projects to use inexpensive Chinese-manufactured microprocessors and electronic components. If they go bad, especially in self-build projects, you can replace them. But you should never cheap out on power supplies, as the built in isolation of the power supplies is what keeps you safe from fire and potentially deadly shock. Good quality USB phone chargers aren't that expensive, and buying them a reputable source like a big box store is much safer then getting them over the internet.
High voltage direct current is superior in many ways to alternating current, as it has no losses from impedance, but the arcing problem is a severe one -- high voltage DC has no "zero crossing point" -- so ultra-hot plasma arcs can be hard to extinguish with a poor connections. Normally, when you break alternating current, every 1/120th of a second the voltage drops to zero, which means plasma arcs are not sustained for long in a broken connection with an air gap. But that doesn't happen with direct current. Of course the fault could have been purely resistivity without plasma arcing -- a poor connection could have increased resistance in the line and created heat, and that can happen with both AC and DC.
Mechanical DC switches -- even at low voltage -- have to be built quite a bit thicker and have wider gaps to extinguish plasma arcs compared to similar AC switches. Transistors are much better at breaking DC arcs. The bad thing with transistors is they have a voltage loss, which means electricity is wasted as heat. The 200 amp DC relay in my truck between the batteries makes one hell of a clunk when you disconnect the load. It has to disconnect and connect quickly, and over a decent sized gap to minimize the time the plasma is burning the contacts. And that's only at 12-15 volts DC, where the amount of arcing is limited. This Technology Connections video does a good explaining why switches go "click" and why it's good thing -- you want switches to open and close quickly to break the connection fast and extinguish plasma arcs that burn the metal in the contacts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrMiqEkSk48
