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

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  • 334 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

    Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

    Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.




  • Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

    A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

    It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

    Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.




  • Look at the averages on that chart. Eyeballing it, the average should be around 70 kJ/cm2, currently it’s about 85.

    So it’s about 20 percent more energy.

    It doesn’t translate directly to temperatures as the values represent how much energy is in a column of water that is 1cm2 at the top, and that column extends down until the water temperature drops below 26 degrees Celsius.

    So it could be that the top of the column of warm water is mostly the same temperature as before but extends deeper, as opposed to the top of the column being a lot hotter than usual.

    When the column is shorter, a hurricane will mix it with cooler water lower down via wave action, reducing the amount of energy available after it passes by. This year the column of water is deeper than usual, which allows two hurricanes to develop over the same patch of ocean in quick succession.




  • You can get smart meters in Aus now with time of use metering. What needs to happen now is that those meters get a simple, non-cloud-connected way to let your appliances know when is a good time to start up.

    So for hard wired devices like your hot water heater or your pool pump you could have a simple relay-like device in your fusebox that can be set to “turn on below X cents per kWh” and it will switch them as needed.

    Your air conditioner could have a linked IR remote that turns it on early in the day of power is cheap and chills the house for the afternoon heat or runs it a bit cooler than usual if it is already running.

    Your fridge or freezer could have an “extra chill” setting.

    Your washing machine and dryer could have simple “start now” “pause now” interfaces and they could just operate during the day whenever.

    All this could be done with some newer version of the X10 protocol, and it would be great to get something like that standardised and widespread.








  • Blu-Ray USB drive and M-Discs is about the best you can get at present. Keep the drive unplugged when not in use, it’ll probably last 10-20 years in storage.

    Seeing as there hasn’t been much advance past Blu-ray, keep an eye out for something useful to replace it in the future, or at least get another drive when you notice them becoming scarce.