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• Chris says that there is still lots of time to enter The Hackaday Prize. Don’t Panic.
  
• Dave recently did a judge interview.
  
• Need to connect your project? Chris got his Electric Imp working in about 10 minutes using their getting started guide.
  
• Dave recently had to declare email bankruptcy. Chris was listening to a podcast about someone who had to do the same with nearly 10,000 unread emails.
  
• Sometimes we get used to the reminders we set for ourselves. Chris either needs a speaker in his house that announces meetings or a shock collar that punishes for not getting something done.
  
• Dave recently made a video debunking the solar roadways we discussed a few weeks back.
  
• Elon Musk (via SolarCity) recently bought a solar manufacturing company. They will be opening a new plant in Western New York near Chris’s hometown.
  
• They will also use the abundant power from Niagara Falls to help power the plant. Chris took pictures with a Nikola Tesla statue up there when he was younger.
  
• Germany now gets 50% of its power from renewable sources.
  
• Martin Lorton is installing solar panels on his house in Cleveland. Even with cloudy cities like Cleveland (and some in Germany), they can still output significant power.
  
• Dave says there are now 1 million homes with solar in Australia.
  
• Chris reveals that he used to design instrumentation at ABB.
  
• The exciting stuff coming from ABB in the past few years have been around  HVDC, specifically with an eye towards long distance transmission of massive amounts of power (think gigawatts).
  
• Another exciting piece is the DC Breaker that can switch the large amounts of power in less than 20 ms.
  
• They also look amazing, the standoffs required for 800kV is significant.
  
• The Diagrammer by Mergenthaler was a badass piece of industrial equipment for making schematics. Think there are any still around?
  
• Rhode & Schwarz stopped branding products in the Hameg product line as Hameg (with the associated logo).
  
• Someone made a compilation video of Dave saying America
  
  
  
• Our buddy Mike Ossmann has been working on the NSA playset, a replication of the hardware shown in the catalog of gadgets to order. He will be showing it off DefCon.
  
• Chris will also be traveling to Detroit in two weekends to hang out with the Hackaday guys and film the Red Bull Create competition.
  
• Dave has been duking it out in the harsh Aussie winter by competing in the Tough Bloke competition.
  

Image is courtesy of ABB