You could use Navit and use the extracted data from OSM. There is even a tool provided by Navit to download the map data you want.

Nice. Having been to a number of places that are a 1 it is great. Until recently my wife has never been to a place that is less than a 5 and until she was at the lake lot we recently bought she had never seen the Milky way, or watched satellites go trucking across the sky. We haven't been lucky enough to be up there and awake when the auroras where happening so she still hasn't seen them.

I was looking at their overall efficiency in lumens per watt and right now HPS and LED have a fair amount of overlap in their efficiency range. For future planning I would be looking at LED lighting given that there is likely improvements that will in short order make it the more efficient and cost effective choice.

There are just some people who aren't very forward thinking. The I only have a 84 mile range on a Leaf before needing to recharge complaint is just whining because it is the current starting point. These people also are the ones who will buy a big giant SUV because some day them might want to tow or haul something but in all likelihood will never do either. For me that would be cutting it very close in ideal cases for my daily commute, but for my wife that would likely be one charge a week. I have told my wife that when we replace her car we will get her an electric one since it makes sense. I will probably have to go through 2 additional cars before I get my first electric one as I buy good used vehicles so first they will need to make an electric car that meets my needs as a reasonable price, and they I will need to buy it second hand. This will probably happen in 15-20 years. As far as not fitting I'm 5'9 and 250 pounds (lots of power lifting) and I fit fine in my smaller sedan, a 2002 BMW 325i, even though I have pretty broad shoulders.

That still sounds like an American car thing. The fact that American car companies put little underpowered 4 bangers in shit box cars doesn't mean it is the case elsewhere. For a long time I drove a BMW 318ti with that nice little 1.9l inline 4. It would have been nice if the thing had leather seats but for its size it wasn't under powered and it was nice to sit in. I would likely still be driving that car if it hadn't been rear ended and sent into a fire hydrant.

These weren't replacements for the headlights as there really aren't any good LED replacements for the old H11 or H7 bulbs as the LED replacements for them are actually much dimmer. While I could go through and do an expensive silly upgrade to aftermarket LED headlight assemblies I don't want to sink about $1000 into something that provides no real value. I was talking about replacing the various tail and indicator lights which are small cheap, and won't blind people.

I looked into long life incandescent bulbs for my car since I hate replacing them (who has hands that dainty), then I just said fuck it and bought some LED ones as they last much longer than even the long life incandescent ones and are brighter than the regular incandescent ones.

I blame children. A couple of years ago mine discovered that if you flip the switch up and down fast you get a strobe effect. It sort of works with CFLs but it does end their life pretty quick. Previous to that I think I had replaced 1 CFL bulb in the bathroom in the previous 7 years. Also the quickest way for them to quit doing that is to make them pay for a new bulb and tell them they can do it some more but they get to keep buying bulbs.

I did once but that was like 12 years ago. I was troubleshooting an error with SQL Server and one Google link looked like it might be promising. What was shown in the little blob of text was the error code, and some description of it. So I clicked on it and found my self at a porn site. It just so happened the my boss walked by and asked what I was doing. I explained what happened and then hit the back button, showed her the link on Google that looked perfectly reasonable and then clicked it so show that this was inadvertent. That however has been the one and only time it has happened to me.

About 1/2 the energy of a .30-06 round. So likely closer to elephant with a bad case of explosive diarrhea but after consuming mostly Mexican food first.

Sounds about right. Having worked at a gas station while in highschool and college in the 90s the profit on a single gallon of gas was typically in the $0.00 to $0.03 range. It was all about the inside sales: pop, chips, overpriced milk, smokes, silly expensive 3.2 beer.

Considering that the ones in my city are all aluminum ones they are already valuable as scrap and no one seems to be stealing them I wouldn't worry too much.

As far as efficiency goes there doesn't look to be much difference at the moment between sodium vapor lights and LED lights. That said LED lights will probably become the clearly superior option in the future. As far as the solar panel I would suggest having it be large and have a reflective bottom (not shiny but brilliant white) so that the light that bounces back up to it will get reflected back down. This should help decrease the amount of light pollution and also make it so less light needs to be produced.

Man I which where I live was at a 5 on the Bortle Scale. It looks more like it is sitting at about a 7. Thankfully I own some land about 2 hours away that is a 3 on the Bortle Scale.