Speaking of cold weather and warming up computers... I've had my fair share of long bicycle commutes during cold winters and I always wondered whether booting up the laptop right after arriving has any effect on the long-term reliability? Like, are there any components which suffer from being activated when they're really cold?
It increases the chance of solder cracks, which is one major cause of failure. Thermal cycles in general will do that, however, and home computers are designed to survive a lot of them.
Sure, visibility would be worse than on a normal truck, but no worse than a low sportscar (which is also road legal and no problem to drive). I don't think it would have been much of an issue.
It's a bigger issue than one of legality. The high seat in a standard truck cab offsets two of the biggest challenges with driving a truck: it takes ages to get up to speed, and a very long distance to stop. High visibility gives better sight lines for further so the driver can plan. That helps to improve fuel efficiency by better anticipating traffic and planning acceleration accordingly. It's absolutely vital for safety because the driver needs to brake for what's happening a huge distance up the road. If you don't have that line of sight, they'd have to drive so defensively ("stop in the distance you can see to be clear") that any efficiency gains from the aero would be completely swallowed by all the accelerating and braking.
A sports car of course can stop in a heartbeat and the excess power means it can easily manage its flow in traffic. They'd perhaps not even be legal if they took as much road to stop as a loaded truck. It's four times the distance - 150ft for a decent sports car at 70mph; 600+ for a semi.
I recently took the first direct train from Prague to Copenhagen which was expected to take 13 hours from PRG to CPH (normally it should be 11 but there is a construction on the high speed line between Berlin and Hamburg so we had to take a detour through Uelzen).
The train left the Czech Republic with 0 minutes delay. Long story short, we crossed the German-Danish border more than FIVE hours later than the original plan. And it wasn't even in the same physical train, the original one got cancelled from Hamburg because of the huge delay we already had.
As for the reason of the delay, at first it was just German "normal" state of things, we left Bad Schandau (the first German station) on time, got to Dresden with 5 minutes (still "on time" according to DB), then without any visible reason got 20 minutes on approach to Berlin where there were so many people on the platform that it took some other twenty minutes for the passengers to get on and off.
When we arrived to Luneburg, the train stopped and after an hour or so the crew said that there is a problem on the line to Hamburg so we'd have to take another detour (from a detour!) and go through Hannover which added several hours to our delay. On approach to Hamburg we already knew that we'd have to transfer to a Danish train there, which thankfully went pretty fast and we left for Schleswig, where our train stopped again, this time because of a "fire in the vicinity of the tracks". After another two or three hours that it took the firefighters to realize that nothing was actually burning, we finally left Germany and the rest of the trip went just fine and we did not gather any additional delay in Denmark, arriving to Copenhagen in the middle of the night (instead of the original 7:30pm).
TL;DR: Sänk ju for trävelin wiß Deutsche Bahn!
Czech media even wrote[1] about how the train failed to get to its destination.
Great, I live in coastal northern Europe, so the question will be whether I'll freeze to death from AMOC shutting down, or drown from the rising sea levels. Maybe I should move to Switzerland or something.
It's a shame that it never went into production, but I guess at that time Optima already saw the writing on the wall that two-wheel recumbents wouldn't be profitable for much longer.
I'm particularly delighted that the fold is unique; I've never seen anything similar. Thanks for sharing; this is the sort of thing I look for on the Internet.
Funny; for me, a backlit keyboard is one of the most unnecessary features I can think of. Even for those who can't touch type, the keyboard is just inches away from the bright screen which sort of illuminates them.
Yeah, not to mention that you even needed to connect to their servers to play the fucking single player campaign. I hated that so much, and then it more or less became the standard for many AAA single player games to come...
I refused to purchase any Blizzard game or product after Legacy of the Void, until I made the mistake of getting Diablo 4 on the PS5, just because I wanted to play a polished overhead hack-&-slash with a gamepad, but it was so meh I have no interest in the D4 expansion or anything else by Blizzard again.
