I've been experimenting with this idea too. The idea is to drive a fan, which blows on metal heatsink attached on the cool side of the TEC. The air stream further accelerates the fire, so this becomes a reinforcing circle. Directly wiring it is not enough, you need a battery to start, buffer, then you need a controllers, never had time for this
There is a company making beautiful camping stoves with TECs and fans: www.bioliteenergy.com
Langtool[1] is Open Source and can be either used with a subscription or selfhosted. Works well when used in combination with a few gb of n-grams [2]. There is also a Libreoffice plugin and most important also one for emacs.
I'm not sure if costs of cells are the dominating factor. My gut feeling would be that the power electronics/inverters and transformers are at least 50% off the cost off such a system. And inverter costs seem to be falling more quickly.
As a side note, since the article also mentions that:
Since 1/10 Austria and Germany are not in the same energy zone anymore, the pricing zone was split up. This was done because too much renewable power feeding in at near zero cost in Germany was flooding the markets and pushing too much strain on the grid. Heavily needed power lines weren't built because people were protesting.
So the first week has passed were the zones are actually split up and we can see that energy prices are way higher in Austria than in Germany, see [1]. Sure, a more definite answer would need to look at a longer time span. The highest difference actually was on 3/10, where baseload in Germany was 18.29 €/MWh compared to 60.40€/MWh. And peakload on 3/10 was 17.13 €/MWh in Germany compared to 65.83 €/Mwh in Austria. Solar generation on 3/10 in Germany was 12.5 GW!
So far good for Germany, since they anyway subsidize solar and wind heavily and now have the low prices more or less for them self (not totally because cross border capacities, [4])
I haven't looked so far in the costs of the auxiliary energy, really curious how they develop. Germany has in total probably around 385 MW in battery storage already [3] and lots of battery storage projected for 2019.
2) This is incorrect. Plants are not efficient, photosynthesis needs only a tiny part of the spectrum. Just he numbers, the efficiency of photosynthesis is 3-6% while the majority of the solar cells have around 16% efficiency or even higher. Hence it makes absolutely sense to cover everything with panels and use leds to produce the exact amount needed.
My 3 year old loves excavator and robot videos. Suddenly all this strange videos were recommended. Search "bad baby" to see what I mean. They also pop up in youtube for kids and they have thousands of views, unbelievable!
An alternativ would be that the weather "oracle" has something on stake, e.g. if it lies or is hacked, it looses a deposit. But then it goes further, maybe you need a voting mechanism, or other weather "oracles" participating in the vote ... in the end you need to get it game theorically right to incentivise honest "oracles" and punish dishonest.
In general I see two really hard challenges with smart contracts. Getting them bug free (i think formal verification which is worked on will help a lot) and getting the incentives right to punish dishonest behavior. (So far I haven't seen a lot work being done here, I also don't know how you could automise that, maybe some kind of simulation with AI based actors)
This is plain disgusting. My wifes employer (not Amazon) has a similar concept to reward bonuses for teams and this causes a lot of mobbing against her and her colleague (also mother). The reason less bonus got paid out were sick leaves, well they don't call it that way, but it boils down to that.
Reason for her/our sick leaves are not that we are sick, but kids < 4 years are just more often sick when going through all the various childhood diseases. Kindergarten will phone you and you have to pick up your sick kid within an hour. Then one of us has to stay at home and watch the sick kid until the doctor says it's ok to put them back in kindergarten.
Some concrete pain points I came accross in the last several weeks:
Better thermal management - Thermald should become the default, but it needs many improvements.
Zombie processes in containers - When somebody causes a Zombie in a lxd container which happens from time to time you have to reboot the machine, this should not be necessary
Mounting remote filesystems in containers - Fuse is possible if you allow it, but mounting SMB, NFS require a kernel module and cannot be mounted in a lxd container, so make fuse-smb or fuse-nfs.
DNS in Openstack - DNS in openstack is currently really painful to setup correctly. Create a new default module which lets you configure a subdomain for the cluster, a subdomain which is the projectname and then after you start an instance you should be able to simply ssh [email protected]
I have similar concerns. I really used Pocket a lot. Two times I got an e-mail at the end of the year that I'm in the top 1% of their users. That was nice!
I want distraction free reading which means no social recommendations, sharing and other stuff. Things I would really like is pdf support, x days of reading left, auto scrolling and detailed statistics about my reading. Also cool would be some garbage collection, e.g., news articles are useless to read in 2 weeks but a blog post may be still useful in a few years.
Ceph should get a separate network which is only used for re-replication in case something happens. Consider a node goes down.
Another thing I might recommend is a third network (just a simple 1GB and a quality switch) for consensus. Re-replication can max the network out and further cause consensus fails, causes more re-replication winding down everything ... If that's not possible, add firewall rules to prioritize all consensus related ports high.