Electronics is usually photographed in lightboxes with soft lighting all around, which can be somewhat achieved with LED strips around the front side of the display area; however you’d need to add bezels so that viewers aren’t bothered by the lights. Based on the brown, red and gold features of the objects, I would pick a warm white color but that depends on other lights in the room and it would clash with the blue wall (not that the radios don’t already). If you want a museum-like display rather than atmospheric, I’d go for neutral white and keep that consistent across the room.

Two or three antique-incandescent-imitating LEDs. They didn’t have fluorescent lamps at home back then.

Don’t be that pessimistic, most user had to install the Twitter and TikTok apps. The fediverse experience is already quite OK if you have a dedicated client but the problem is that not everyone does, which is why we need browser support; people are tired of “wOrKs bEtTeR iN ThE aPp” even if it’s true this time. A dedicated URL scheme will automatically associate Fediverse links with the aporopriate app. There are still other issues such as hit-and-miss cross-platform compatibility, no API for retrieving the list of federated instances and lack of errors if the source and/or destination instance block each other.

They do, and I like how seamlessly mailto: links on websites work with web and local apps: your browser will give you a choice and either will work because email servers network with one another (obviously). Perhaps we could do this with linking to content across the Fediverse, with a custom URL scheme such as apub:@Blaze@reddthat.com. I explore this in my other comment at apub:post/20744080/[email protected].

Ironically, the thing that would allow people to use one “twitgramface” account across all the various platforms is federation. But the only way I can imagine it being seamless enough for normies is native browser integration for ActivityPub, perhaps with a new URL scheme like apub://.... Basically, save a Fediverse account in your browser, and when you open a foreign-instance link someone sends you, you’ll see a prompt:

How do you want to open this link (apub:)?

You can browse this content via your instance and interact with it with one of your saved Fediverse accounts, or choose an app you have installed:

☐ Remember my choice for feddit.nl
☐ Remember my choice across all instances

ⓘ Why am I seeing this?    ︿

This content is on feddit.nl, which is an ActivityPub instance that 3 of your saved Fediverse accounts federate with. To use your account, open this link via your instance, or select Decline to use feddit.nl’s default web interface.

So far, only browser extensions can do this, and not very well at that. Of course, all ActivityPub instances and clients would need to adopt this URL scheme whenever a link is shared between users, and the downside is that Reddit, Instagram, Twitter etc. will never recognize apub: links. Do you think something like this can ever happen?

Absolutely hilarious but technocally the term is correct as we have 1 natural satellite.

I wouldn’t go on a 30-minute crime spree yet, there might be a better deal soon.

Trump says he’s going to be a one-day dictator if elected. If he gets his way and does not get punished afterwards, we have a strong legal precedent that everyone gets their personal Purge once in their lifetime.

When the classic MIDI track you want to perform uses instrument #128

Still, easier than coordinating the helicopter to fly over at the right time.

I think you might have it in the US but not for residential customers.

No, frequency-modulating the 50/60 Hz is not technically feasible, that would mean speeding up/slowing down lots of synchronous motors quickly. Instead, a higher-frequency low-voltage generator is connected in series or in parallel (via a capacitor) to the secondary of a grid transformer, overlaying some 3V sine wave at 216⅔ Hz (or other frequency thereabouts) on top of the 230V 50Hz mains. This does not propagate beyond 50 km or so (and higher frequencies (red on map) even worse) so multiple transmitters are required for coverage. The country’s grid is divided into districts and each gets their own RCS signal, and signal traps (low pass or band stop fiters) are used to divide them.

Oh boy, you just triggered my nerd infodump mode. Brace yourself.

Disclaimer: I only researched the practical applications in the Czech Republic. I’d guess Slovakia’s situation is 99% similar, the neighboring Germany is 95% similar (just with more solar and no nuclear power) and most of Europe is 80% similar (with varying energy mixes). Similarly to Teletext, I am pretty sure Alec from Technology Connections (YouTuber from Chicago) would have made a video on this if it was widespread where he lives.

Basically yes. Residential boilers in Germany are part of load management.

Technically, the electric water heaters themselves are not “smart” in any way, they are just resistors and thermostats in a water tank. The “smartest” units you’ll find use a decades-old trick with two thermostats and heating filaments to achieve a larger virtual tank size. Turn them on, and they’ll do their best to maintain a steady 70 °C (or whatever) at the output. Similarly, gas furnaces are all rather dumb too. There are two contacts on the units; bridge them to allow at most 100 mA to flow, which will energize a contactor (big relay) to switch the heating element or signal to the furnace electronics to go through the ignition routine. Air conditioners typically have another contact for cooling.
This is great: the protocol basically every heater uses could not be simpler and that allows anyone to build a thermostat, so available products range from the most basic bimetallic units (temperature knob and manual day (T)/night (T–5°C)/off switch) to AI Smart Home Automation IoT Buzzword Salad™ devices. The most common kind nowadays has two AA cells, a thermistor, a simple LCD display, rubber buttons to temporarily adjust the temperature manually, and a flap to reveal more buttons that set the time and weekday, create the weekly temperature schedule, adjust hysteresis, start Vacation Mode etc. There is either a set of wired contacts and a latching relay for the aforementioned wired “protocol”, or a wireless transmitter that controls a wall-plug-based receiver close to the furnace.

However, a ripple control system receiver can be connected in series to the thermostat, only allowing heating at certain times set in your energy contract. Or more often, people hook it up to the boiler. All energy you consume at these times is metered separately and up to 2x cheaper so the system saves you money at rare discomfort, you can use a switch to override it at any time if you accept the extra cost.

Various companies use ripple control system receivers for energy intensive, time-independent operations, such as

• water tower pumps
• baking, annealing furnaces
• computationally heavy tasks (rendering)
• heating water for swimming pools
• charging electric vehicles

All such uses have different tariffs, hours (pltheirntractual limits to unscheduled switches) and thus need different RCS channels. Also, RCS receivers can control municipal lighting etc., and at higher frequencies that don’t propagate too far, power plants would call each other but that’s obsolete, now we use that band for smart city LAN (traffic lights, various sensors, parking ticket vending machines). This is called Power Line Communication (PLC) and the railway uses it too. I’ve seen a claim that such system caused an aircraft (Invicta International Flight 405 on 1973-04-10) to crash into the Alps after misinterpreting it as a radio beacon at Basel Airport but that person did not cite sources (interference was likely involved but nobody else claimed it was from PLC).

First dual-tariff systems used switching clocks inside the tamper-proof electric meters. This did not allow for regulation so a simple device with mechanical logic (rotary decoder of series signal) was introduced, with a starting tone (3 seconds of an approx. 250 Hz “tone” on top of the mains voltage) followed by a series of 44 gaps or tones (1 second long, 0.5 s apart) that signalled on/off states for each of the 44 channels. This was later revised into a “1 of 4” + “1 of 8” coding for 32 device groups, each then having 16 channels controlled by 2 bits each, with “10” meaning ON, “01” meaning OFF, any other means ERROR; ABORT RECEPTION. This division of the 44 pulses into groups of 4+8+2x16 allowed for 512 channels and more robustness. This protocol from the 1980s is used to this day, and so is a similar one in Germany called DECABIT. The later VERSACOM, used in both countries, then uses proprietary licensed data schemes with up to 128 bits and allows addressing individual customers. It always starts with 4 “1” bits so that dumb receivers expecting their “1 of 4” code (0001, 0010, 0100 or 1000) abort reception. VERSACOM receivers have clocks synced by special transmissions and keep a regularly broadcast weekly schedule in memory so that the bandwidth is free for the old protocol commands at switching times. Every household is assigned one of the 512+ channels and these groups switch minutes apart to prevent jumps in mains load. For some reason, frequencies used to send this signal sometimes differ between or even within control regions and sometimes not, and include 🟪183⅓ Hz, 🟨191 Hz, 🟩216⅔ Hz, 🟦283⅓ Hz, 🟥760 & 1060 Hz (no, the image doesn’t exist in better quality other than cropped versions, I’ve looked everywhere).

If you want to look up info for Germany, the keyword is Rundsteuersystem; for Czech Republic and Slovakia it’s Hromadné dálkové ovládání.

But mains beeping is not where the future lies. Our ripple control device is built into the meter and uses 2G, I imagine newer IoT protocols are being used too. People in the US have started opting into dynamic-pricing contracts and using smart thermostats that download info on quarter-hour prices 1 day ahead and switch accordingly. There are various settings that trade off comfort and cost but I think significant savings can be achieved with negligible discomfort. Some Americans would say that the utility controlling their meters feels like communism but participating in the free market and chasing discounts doesn’t, even though the result is the same. EV owners charging overnight will probably soon be able to choose between options like

⚪ charge ASAP (higher battery wear, estimated cost $3.11)
⚪ charge by ➖6 am➕, constant power (lowest battery wear, estimated cost $2.81)
🔘 charge by ➖6 am➕, lowest energy cost (higher battery wear, estimated cost $2.07)

Target state of charge: ➖90 %➕ (250 km, battery wear ▓▓▓░░)

☑️ Remember selection

Many Texans are installing battery backup solutions and maybe will realize they can make money off them by “renting” them to the utility company in seasons when blackouts are unlikely. Or will just save money by smart-charging them at the price dips, which has the same effect but with less “communism”.

You will be able to see the price graph in an app and decide what delay to use on a washing machine, dryer or dishwasher (provided they are far enough to not disrupt your sleep if the dip is at night). Maybe the machine will do it by itself, knowing when the most power-intensive part of the cycle is.

People with unused basements sometimes choose to install “sand batteries” that store heat (or “cold” in summer) from heat pumps, which can be retrieved at another time of day. These installations always come with dynamic power pricing.

German power plants communicate with each other and coal power can go to 50% capacity in 15 minutes, during which the excess power can be sucked up by pumped hydro, for <1 minute long deviations there is enough battery and flywheel storage too. And most people in Germany have utility-controlled tank water heaters, which can be turned on not just at fixed hours but also based on the grid status (this causes the meters to go into Low-Tariff mode too), and sometimes even smart thermostats, enabling remote load management.

In emergency power excess, solar can go off grid safely or brakes can be applied to wind turbines, which wastes power but is preferred to overheating transformers due to higher mains frequency (yes, power overproduction causes the frequency to go up, not so much the voltage).

But maybe the coal lobby keeps convincing the distributor that operating plants below 80% doesn’t do their workers justice, or some nonsense like that

You are right, this is BS.

I recently researched this and Germany’s grid is quite “smart” (the oldest technologies involved, such as DECABIT or VERSACOM over PLC, very much predate the term “smart grid” but whatever) and power plants and households are connected for production and load control. Power plants are required to participate but households can use a load management system for water tank heating (the basic premise is that specific frequency impulses are sent over the power grid for primitive (originally relay-based!) logic in DECABIT meters to switch depending on the assigned device group, and meters count in lower-price mode while the load is activated for a guaranteed number of hours each day; you can manually override the switch for expensive on-demand water heating) and/or HVAC (here, a smart thermostat is usually used that gets real-time energy prices and decides based on its temperature range settings if it saves money to run heating/cooling).
People in Texas apparently hate this (muh freedom), and look how reliable their grid is!
Anyway, solar, unlike coal or nuclear, is absolutely capable of going off-grid if necessary. There is an MPPT system in their inverters that usually works to operate the panels at the optimal voltage & current so that it can suck the most power out of them but it can be overridden to work at below 100% efficiency, or even 0%. This will cause the panels to run with no current draw and get about 20% hotter but they are designed to withstand this. Similarly, wind turbines can be braked, water can be passed outside turbine shafts and so can pressurized steam if you really need to cut production quickly. Still, this is an emergency condition, it is preferred to use pumped hydro (responds in 1 minute, limited capacity) or batteries (respond in seconds, very limited capacity) or lower coal/gas-based production (responds in 3-20 minutes for as long as you wish) or load-side management to regulate the grid, as it wastes no power.
The system is very complex and robust, the frequency (the variable most dependent on production/load balance) only dips below 49.8 Hz about once per a few years (the emergency value that was reached in February 2021 in Texas and can only be sustained for minutes before total blackout is -1% from nominal (49.5 or 59.4, respectively) and has never been touched in Europe’s modern history).
(You’d think it would be voltage what falls in case of too little power but it can be readjusted quite easily with switched transformer taps and, oddly enough, reactive power management (connecting a few capacitor/inductor banks to mains) when necessary, however frequency control is the difficult part.)

Not the whole world. According to the post, water only rose by about 60 m (to the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza + some 100 m (¾ of its height) compared to current sea level. This would flood most homes back then but less than 25% of land area, so the majority of displaced people would just survive as nomads in the highlands.

But still think its “geographic center” is on the surface, in Turkey of all places. Perhaps because it’s near the threshold of the 3 “old” continents, which is where the Mediterranean (“Mid-Earth-ean”) Sea got its name from?

Well, I think we’re not advanced enough to understand. We still use this primitive old technology called “cryptographic keys”, whereas the calculation provided documents a yet-unknown authentication technique for the future of man. Whoever is entombed in the Pyramids sure is authenticated af, which comes in handy because of the KYC laws Charon needs to follow.

But still think its “geographic center” is on the surface, in Turkey of all places. Perhaps because it’s near the threshold of the 3 old continents, which is where the Mediterranean (“Mid-Earth-ean”) Sea got its name from?

The Czech government has always had Israel bootlickers. It’s not hard to imagine why they’re the most vocal apologetics for the massacre.

Anyway, thankfully common Czechs showed a bit of reason for a change and don’t care about the issue while being very supportive and accomodating (most per capita) to Ukrainian refugees.

More info in my comment under a post about the shredder escapade last week

It’s not by me; Nayuki is a very cool person. She made a cool PNG chunk analyzer on her website too, and has some interesting blog posts.

As for the length: Well, I don’t actually mind some of the featured items but I find at least 3 particularly annoying.

Well, the capitalization is not as bad as the fact that it’s kWh (kilowatthours/Kilowattstunden), not kWh⁻¹ or kW/h (kilowatts per hour/Kilowatts pro Stunde). It’s a measure of energy so it goes up as power is consumed (or generated or whatever) over time, not the other way around!

The capitalization is not as important here but sometimes, it absolutely is - mΩ is 10⁻³ Ω while MΩ is 10⁶ Ω - a billion (Milliarde) times more, or data units like Mb (megabit) and MB (megabyte) where one is 8x larger than the other. Sometimes, the people inventing units made really stupid decision, like 1 Cal = 1 kcal = 1000 cal, with both “Cal” and “cal” being called “calorie”. It’s almost as bad as “a billion” (American, recently also British English) = 10⁹ vs. ein Billion (German) = 10¹².

However, I still think that capitalization is very important for all units, if only to show non-metric plebs the superior status of our standards. We have rules while they use MPH/mph and PSI/psi interchangeably.
This reminds me – they denote “per” as another letter (MPH = miles per hour) or, unacceptably, not at all (PSI = pound forces per square inch). We denote inverse relationships like mathematicians, with fractions (slashes) and exponents. The ridiculous aforementioned offenders should be written “mi/h” and “lbf/in²”. Just imagine atrocities like this in metric, how does “going 60 kph on a 50cc bike” feel instead of the correct “km/h” and “cm³”?

In short, we should be respectful to the people who made a better system than the alternative by following the good standards to ensure continued ease of use, error resilience and language independence of our system.

unit ÷ h

I thought Germans used the : symbol for division, like us Czechs.

Encore rant for all the upvotes:

All this kWh and Cal nonsense could have been avoided if we just used the SI unit “joule” and its multiples for all energy, which is one of my few metric system woes. Still, a factor of 3600 is better than 5280 feet in a mile, and imperial people have their own mess with energy units (kWh, Cal but also BTU, gallons-of-gasoline-equivalent and horsepowerdays or whatever). They can’t even get distance measurements to convert easily: you might remember 5280 but can you recall and apply the inverse logarithmic formula to convert between AWG and inches??

Are you being serious or just trying to trigger me in every way possible?

All the other mistakes that will make me explode in rage

The only person to ever make a UFO (unidentified flying object) other than Chuck Norris, who can use a single spinning roundhouse kick to turn anything into a homogenous mass in orbit.