Which battery technology are you referring to?

Lithium-ion has pretty big operational safety concerns (thermal runaway) and as far as I know we haven’t completely figured out the recycling either.

Pumped storage has massive environmental implications and is typically very difficult to get approved by local governments.

Flow batteries are still a very infant technology. There’s very big design differences between manufacturers that have very big tradeoffs. But I do believe these will “win” the storage race, eventually.

Flywheel and gravity storage don’t have the magnitude and duration requirements for grid-level storage solutions.

Major issue with spinning up turbines over night is the actual gas turbine unit ramp rates. Meaning how quickly they can go from cold and offline to hot and full output. Some units take upwards of 8 hours to get to their full output.

And the peak load of an average grid is right when the sun is setting and everyone is getting home from work, around 5 in the afternoon.

At that time, solar is dropping fast, and you don’t have time to start up your slow units, they’d have to already be online.

So utilities are often forced to leave their gas units online, even when solar is pumping out power, just to have them ready for the peak demand (and also have them for night).

Agreed, energy density isn’t really very relevant from a grid perspective; space is pretty abundant when you’re talking about an entire grid region.

I was definitely hinting at the dispatch-ability of PV in my other comments, but you totally have the idea.

And it’s going to be batteries totally. At the publicly owned power utility I work at, I actually was in the energy storage technology group for a small stint. Whole purpose of the group was just running feasibility analyses on installing utility-scale batteries.

The core issue is batteries at scale are a completely infant technology. We had proposals that were literally straight out of graduate research. That’s great and all for the technology development, but my company only cares about reliability, dispatch-ability, and competitive rates. We’re not interested in prototypes.

I’d keep a close eye on molten salt batteries and flow batteries. I think those are the most developed. Especially flow batteries, companies like Sumitomo are making pretty big progress in Japan, and starting to move over to the US.

But again, issue is scale. A useful battery for a medium-sized utility is something like 50MW at 4 hours duration (equivalent to something like a peaker unit, though not all that useful for nighttime baseload). And this battery would be something in the range of like $250M. And a comparable gas peaker unit, about $80M, and that unit can run 24/7.

So the economics at utility scale are getting there, but we’re not there yet.

I do look forward to a 99% solar and battery grid though. With that 1% filled by emergency natural gas.

Solar can go in more diverse locations, absolutely. Especially advantageous because solar can be installed right on top of the buildings that need electricity. Lowers dependence on already-overloaded transmission lines.

Just from a utility perspective, it’s a lot simpler, easier to buy a plot of industrial zoned land, and stick a combined cycle on it. This is enough to power an entire medium city, 24/7.

Compared to logistically working with a massive number of private property owners to install solar on their property. And the result of all that work is enough to power the same city from 7 in the morning to 7 at night.

I used to be a hunt-and-peck typist. For me, first you have to build muscle memory for key fingerings, which key is pressed by what finger. Then you can start to get faster. Building a strong foundation first.

I would have this site open on one window: www.keybr.com

And this image on another for reference:

KeyBR has “levels” where you work on a specific set of letters first, until you’re fast enough and they give you the next set of letters, adding on to what you’ve already done.

Once you’ve completed all letters, you stop progressing and just type words with all letters.

For me, after my first completion of keyBR, I spent a day or so practicing at the “endgame.” After that, I’d restart the entire module from scratch, back to the individual letters. Rinse and repeat.

After about a month or two, I was already touch-typing.

Then I got really into monkeytype.com, and started typing faster and faster.

I think your local offerings can be a big factor. I grew up in scouts, loved my experience for the most part.

But talking with other people about their experiences can be a mixed bag. Each troop has its own priorities, the national Scouting organization gives troops a lot of flexibility on how they want to run their operation.

My troop, for example, was huge on outdoor activities. We had monthly camping trips, sometimes more than one a month. We did participate in organized “scouting events” as well with other troops, but that was sort of secondary.

Other troops are big on “scouting achievements” like merit badges, “scouting societies” like Order of the Arrow, medals and honors kinda thing, I felt like that would be a bit of a drag. But to each their own.

So Anthropic was requesting the DoW to include two (and only two) prohibited uses in their contract:

• Autonomous killing with no human involvement
• National, mass surveillance

My understanding was… that’s all Anthropic was asking for, any other use was acceptable. That’s why the deal wasn’t going through.

Now, Anthropic’s contract has ended, and the same day OpenAI is the DoW’s golden child?

Something tells me OpenAI’s contract does not have those prohibited uses in it.

Also using Booklore with 2 Kobos, works great!

Although annotation syncing isn’t supported yet, I believe there’s a pull request for it already.

I’d recommend setting up StremIO + Torrentio + Real Debrid (takes about a half hour to setup)

About $35/year, almost flawless streaming. Nearly all content available.

Reddit guide

You can PM for help on it if needed, I’ve set them up for tons of friends

I also use Frigate!

Piggybacking to also recommend Tailscale to OP for external access. Not 100% self hosted, but solves the DDNS issue. And works well with Frigate in my experience.

Hey I did exactly this a few years ago! Uses an optocoulper for isolation. I flashed ESPHome on it and connected it to my Home Assistant instance.

Works like a charm!

I also hard wired the ESP power pins to the PC via a spare USB header. Then I enabled a BIOS setting to keep USB ports powered when shut down, so it’s a super seamless install.

Only problem I’m having with it lately is since I run a dual boot system, my default GRUB option is Linux, but sometimes (unfortunately) I need to get into Windows. It’s a bit of a pain to have to update grub to change the default then restart again. I’d rather build in some sort of selection functionality the first time it boots.

I’ve been playing around with using another ESP32 as a filesystem USB device, then having grub read the content of a file on said ESP32, either “windows” or “linux”, then booting accordingly. That’s a work in progress tho