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3 yr. ago

I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

  • There’s a cost to maintaining the grid and it was easy to just charge a delivery or grid fee per kWh but with battery that doesn’t work, not unlike fuel taxes supporting roads (in theory).

    In Australia, there is a split between generation and sales. You have generation-and-electrical-distribution companies, and then you have retailers who purchase MWh in bulk from those companies to resell to consumers. There is a market for electricity where the spot price varies wildly depending on what supply dominates at any particular time.

    For the consumer this boils down to an infrastructure fee of approximately AUD 1.10 to 1.50 a day, and then metering is usually anywhere between 0 to 50 cents per kWh, both depending on your plan and the time of day.

    So I can get plans where electricity costs me nothing at certain times of the day, but then costs me 60c/kWh from 4-9pm, so I set my EV to charge during the day and stop during that peak period. I can go and buy a battery and hand over control of it to the retailer, who can use it to balance their MWh purchases from generation. Then sometimes you can get $30 in a few hours during peak evening time from your retailer when "cheap bulk electricity" is absent and they can sell your battery energy on the spot market for $$$.

    The whole system gives a lot of options, and while it's no doubt not the best solution, it's something workable for the future.

  • Best I can do is a single t-intersection on a 80km/hr road with no traffic lights to gain access to the whole suburb and roads so winding and narrow inside the suburb that you couldn't fit a bus in there even if you wanted to.

    But I will throw in a bus stop (sign) on the other side of that entrance for that bus that only runs three times a day to the CBD at 9.15am, 12.25pm and 6.25pm, how about that?

    • what happens if your internet connection is lost while someone sends you an email?

    On this point, mail servers will retry for a period, usually 24 hours, before reporting back to the sender that they couldn't deliver.

  • You're a bit behind the times. adduser has been asking for your full name since the dawn of Unix.

    Edit: and if you don't put in your full name, how will people know who they're fingering?!

  • The beamwidth of Voyager 1's antenna is about 0.5 degrees. In practical terms, that's very narrow, about an 8 metre wide beam at a kilometre distance.

    At its current distance, by the time the beam reaches Earth it is 224 million kilometres wide, 1.5x the distance from the Earth to the sun.

    Now imagine the light from a car's taillights lighting up the back wall of a garage as it reverses in. Then spread that same amount of light out over that 224 million km wide beamwidth. That's what Voyager is putting out and what the Deep Space Network dishes have to listen for.

  • There used to be a place at a local shopping center that was all glass and mirrors and was staffed by very serious young Asian men in sharp suits.

    They sold - and only sold - boutique toffee apples.

  • Do not remove my spam

    If I want to find something, I'll look for it.

    Don't dump a truckload of unsolicited information in my inbox/workflow/field of view.

    Otherwise you're as bad as door to door religious folks. Oh yes, I've heard about Jesus, thanks. Now let me get back to what I was actually doing a few minutes ago before you begged for my attention.

  • "508 Resource Limit Is Reached"

    How apt

  • I have MX Linux on a 14 year old Dell Laptop.

    Works great because it's got a lightweight desktop, and it has a tool (a GUI tool even!) that seamlessly merges the last available Nvidia 340 drivers for my GPU into the latest kernel. Parked at the desktop with no desktop apps running, it uses about 800MB of ram, leaving 15 GB left for whatever I need to run. Which I have found is plenty for my use case, I've never seen swap in use.

    The MX tools are good, like everyone else has been saying here. They take away a lot of the fiddly business associated with the average "sysadmin" things that an end user needs to do.

  • That's a phase change triggered by a seed crystal (generated from a physical shock from the 'clicker') where the transition from liquid to solid phases returns the latent heat that was previously added to turn it from solid to liquid.

    There is no phase change in this material, it remains a solid and changes temperature depending on how much pressure is applied to it.

  • Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It's a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you're a few years old - it's completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

    And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious "monkey-click-button" process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

    I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn't be required to look at and then parse a 'flat' UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You're burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that's why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.

  • Have you seen some of the stuff at Adafruit?

    A lot more DIY but a wide variety of stuff. I had a MagTag unit from them that ran for a few months at a time off a 1000mAh battery with hourly display updates over wifi.

  • "If these trends continue..... Eyyyyy!"

  • BYD vehicles all rate 5 stars in the Australian ANCAP ratings as well.

    The "Chinese vehicles aren't safe" thing is just fear mongering these days or, more generously, a misapplication of their micro vehicle standards for low speed urban use to ordinary passenger vehicles.

  • How

    the FUCK

    can a single datacentre cost

    TWENTY SEVEN BILLION

    dollars?

  • The nighttime sky is not the same. You see different constellations in summer than you do in winter.

    The stars appear above the horizon about 4 minutes later each day. There are stars at your particular latitude that are always visible (they never set), and they appear to rotate around the celestial pole. If you took note of their positions carefully at a particular time of night, you would see that they end up being 180 degrees opposite where they were 6 months previous.

    If you're talking about the pattern of stars shifting against the more distant background of stars (star parallax), when the earth is at opposite sides of the sun, this is measurable by observatories for stars within a hundred light years or so but the angular change quickly becomes very small and the universe is very big.

  • In litres and MJ because SI units make it easy:

    Approximately 34 megajoules per litre for petrol/gasoline.

    50 litres filling up in 4 minutes = 1.25 litres/second pumping rate. lol don't do calculations before coffee, let's just say you've got a hi-flow pump doing 1l/sec.

    1 litre/second x 34MJ per litre = 34 MJ/second.

    1 watt = 1 joule per second, so:

    An average fill up runs at about 34 megawatts.

  • I flew out this morning for work and I was wondering what that brown haze was over the city.