The oil isn't boiling though, is it? Doesn't oil smoke before it boils... at least at 1 atm? Since it is hotter than 100C, anything with water in it (say food) added to the fryer 'boils' instantly though.

Since the oil is already much hotter than water's boiling point, I don't see any advantage to increasing the pressure? Except keeping the boiling water in the food item a tad longer, I guess...?

Sanders' isn't a deep fryer though, or at least it wasn't. The whole point is he didn't want the chicken to be deep fried, but pan fried (which was too bloody slow)... Hence the compromise of pressure-pan frying.

Never worked at a KFC, so I'm googling it, and it sure looks like a deep fryer, though...

Yeah, longer straight chain stuff should be pretty much harmless, but aromatics tend to be carcinogenic, irritant, stink, etc. (though it depends on the chemical in question, it's not a rule.)

Short alkanes aren't very good either, being very flammable and toxic, but aren't carcinogenic afaik. As the carbon chains get longer they become benign (with the greatest risk being that of getting them in your lungs - hard to get out, causing some sort of pneumonia like illness).

Normal kerosene (in north america, at least), is about 15-20% aromatics IIRC, which is why it has an odor. More refined variants for lanterns don't. Same deal with (pharmaceutical) mineral oil, or vaseline. harmless, but they come from the same stock as kerosene, and they are all 'petroleum distillates'.

There are some open CNC routers out there, but they will have trouble with things much harder than wood or lucite or nylon. Which is still pretty useful, I've been meaning to rig something eventually, myself.

To cut steel it really needs to be big and cast iron/steel, just too much flex otherwise. (not to mention you want a slow, heavy spindle, not a dremel..) So for that, you usually buy a ready-made ($500-1000) milling machine, and add stepper motors to make it CNC-able. Which still only gets you three axes, but...

I imagine there are some open CNC water/laser/plasma cutting designs out there too. Or at least writeups by people that DIY'd it.

I'm fairly convinced the only people whining about RoHS compliant solder are people that suck at soldering.

Electronics repair is my day job and I'm yet to see something fail from tin whiskers.

I still see a lot of lead solder in newer products here (outside of EU) so it doesn't have full weight either.

No Americans is a feature of laying on the beach in Varadero. If the US let it's citizens go, Cuba would lose that edge. ;-)

I got a kick out of a health store selling "organic" calcium, supposedly harvested from seaweed.

Apparently minerals derived from plants are better for you than minerals derived from... minerals.

Yep, the AVRs with hardware USB, like the 32U2, coupled with the lovely open source LUFA usb library, make it painfully easy. I like to make things show up as serial ports.

Though these days I've been using ARM cortex M3 (STM32) with the GPL libopencm3, as the tiny stm32's with hardware USB are cheaper and have more, well, everything. Kind overkill for blinking a couple LEDs, though.

Anyone paying $15 for $2 of parts is a sucker. Seems to be a lot of suckers in the DIY crowd, these days.

When a natural person steals a car, they go to jail.

When a company steals a car, they are forced to give back a tire, a bumper and a headlight, eventually, maybe.

Quite the punishment, they certainly won't be doing that again.

It isn't android, that's the whole point.

What do you mean? An African or European lump?

I've got one on the bench from the 40's, like this.

Daily driver is late 70s fluke, though. This one is mostly for fun. Love the style and the gigantic blind-man scale.

Not to mention that super mario bros fit on what.. a 4kB ROM? It's absolutely miniscule.

Maybe not 10kW, but a few. I've got an 800W electric heater in the car and it only keeps it maybe 15C over ambient or so.

I don't know how that scales, but when it's -30, and you want 15-25 inside, it's gotta use at least a couple kW, I'd think..?

Up here, at least. In the depths of winter I think you'd be using a lot more power for heating than for driving. Though, it would blow hot air right away, which would be nice.

I imagine battery performance would be seriously hurt by the cold as well. I don't know how bad NiMH and Li-ion drop off in cold, maybe not as much as lead acid but still quite a lot I imagine, being how chemistry works... Get a big battery blanket, I guess.

I'm yet to notice any EV rollin' around here, anyway.