djhworld

4,479 karmajoined 16년 전

Developer in Nottingham, UK

https://djharper.dev

comments

5일 전discuss

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming.

I feel they kind of did in the Xbox 360 era. Maybe it was just down to luck because Sony dropped the ball in the early years of the PS3 and Microsoft got the jump on them a bit.

The 360 was amazing looking back on it, Xbox Live, trying out innovative ideas like 1vs100, attracting lots of publishers to the platform for games, Xbox Summer of Arcade.

I was a big OG Xbox fan but even then I knew deep down it was never going to catch up to Sony with the PS2. Then the 360 came out and it was brilliant.

Sadly they threw it all away with the Xbox One and while recovered some credibility somewhat with the Series X, it's definitely not the same as those golden years of the 360.

Maybe the 360 was an aberration in Microsoft's history and the years since then have just been a regression

10일 전discuss

I feel the physical disc died a long time ago, most games require heavy patching to fix bugs or download new content, or even in some cases download whole portions of the game, so they rely on PS servers to even function anyway. The only advantage they have is you can sell them or buy used.

I know there's a strong desire for physical media, but games are not the same as movies or music and haven't been for a long time.

3개월 전discuss

this whole saga is having ripple effects even in the second hand market. in 2020-2022 there was a glut of those 1L mini pcs on ebay and other resellers which were WAY better value than the RPi4 at the time which was in short supply due to COVID. these mini PCs were pretty affordable and could be upgraded with extra RAM, new SSD/NVMe drive etc to make perfectly good little home servers. I still have mine which has been running for a few years now, Intel 6th Gen CPU, Lenovo thinkcentre.

nowadays the price of these 2nd hand mini PCs has shot up, and even if you do get a chance to get one, upgrading it with more RAM is gonna be painful

3개월 전discuss

> That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me.

I've been on the tariff for 2 years now, at first I was looking at the prices every day, but over time you get used to how it works and the price watching starts to tail off. The rule of thumb is just to avoid high load stuff during the peak window (load shift) - sticking to those principles you generally come out of on top. Playing the averages is the key.

Nowadays I don't really look at the prices that much other than when it's windy as I might be tempted to charge the car.

That being said though, if current world events continue and the energy situation degrades further - causing my average unit rate to start creeping up, I might consider getting a home battery , solar etc to compensate, or leave the tariff entirely.

3개월 전discuss

I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power.

I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.

3개월 전discuss

Some chargers communicate directly with the energy supplier and charge at the cheaper rates.

You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.

3개월 전discuss

There is an element of truth in that if you go to the extremes, where it's almost definitely not worth it.

I don't sit in the dark during the peak times, during the week I'm working during that time anyway and I still have my monitors etc on. It's just I don't usage high-draw appliances like cookers during that time. I eat dinner after 7pm anyway.

Also I have an EV, but don't commute or travel long distances regularly, so I charge my car when opportunity strikes, especially when the prices go negative - this means I don't really spend that much on fuel really. The savings really start to come in if you have "bursty" high energy stuff that can take advantage of the cheapest periods like an EV or home battery. If you just have "baseload" stuff that runs all day like A/C or whatever then yeah you won't really see any significant savings.

3개월 전discuss

Exactly.

For me I'm happy to avoid big power draws during the peak times, as I'm 'compensated' for it outside of those periods with a little planning. Downside is when the wind is not blowing AND disruptions to global energy markets - I'm exposed to that, warts and all, there's definitely been an increase in prices over the past 4 weeks, although there has been a few days (including today) where the wind has basically made the energy free and my average unit rate is dropping again.

3개월 전discuss

Explained above, I WFH, single (no kids) and have an EV - but I don't use the car for commute etc so I can be choosy about when I charge the car and take advantage of the ultra cheap periods.

Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe.

Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.

I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc

3개월 전discuss

....that being said, when you see stuff like this page and news articles about cheap renewable power etc, there are A LOT of negative reactions to it (even evidenced by the comments on here!) because for most people in the UK they never really see any direct benefit - energy prices seem to keep going up and a lot of people are on contracts with fixed rates that rise often.

I'm not sure what the solution is, I know that the price of electricty is dictated by gas so maybe decoupling that will help - but that probably has complications with balancing the grid.

The tariff I'm on (Octopus Agile) suits me as I WFH, have an EV and it's just me living in the house, I can move my usage outside of hte peak periods quite easily and I built a website to help me find the cheapest charging periods for my car based on the prices for the next day. The other day my average unit rate was like 2p per/kWh and I dumped like 30kWh into my car lol

3개월 전discuss

I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day.

Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately.

On really windy days you definitely get to see the benefit where prices drop to zero or even negative, which is great if you have an EV or something to dump lots of power into. Looking at todays prices they're like 1-3p p/kWh!

But that doesn't last, as the wind dies things start to get back to normal.

The key with the tariff though is to just play the averages and generally avoid high power usage during the peak periods. My average for the last 2 years was around 30% cheaper (p/year) than what I would have paid if I was on a normal energy tariff.

It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues, especially with the state the world has suddenly been thrown into.

4개월 전discuss

I think stuff like this really crystalises how people misunderstand how much energy stuff uses.

My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.

Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.

6개월 전discuss

> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets. There is still no regulation that requires new build to get Ethernet wiring (as far as I know).

I think this is true in the sense of there's no regulation it's just up to the developer, but my house (new build, 2021) has an RJ45 patch panel downstairs with 4 ports that lead to 4 areas of the house.

This was actually a surprise to me when I got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...

But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.

6개월 전discuss

Awesome project & video, thanks for making it

Where did you learn all the PCB design stuff to make your circuit boards that controlled the filaments?

6개월 전discuss

I remember playing with Gentoo back in 2004-2005, going through the installation procedure from "stage 1" all the way through to the working system [1]

It looks like nowadays the handbook says just go from stage 3, which makes sense - compiling everything was kinda stupid :D

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041013055338/http://www.gentoo...

6개월 전discuss

A few years ago this product would have just been called an ML Accelerator and marketed as helping accelerate ML workloads like object detection in images

Hitching their wagon to the AI train comes with different expectations, leading to a mixed bag of reviews like this.

6개월 전discuss

https://djharper.dev

just a personal blog really

6개월 전discuss

ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years.

I just followed the documentation in here https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... - it gives you the general principles to follow and you can just pick it up from there.

6개월 전discuss

I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve.

Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while

I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes.

I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing.

It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.

6개월 전discuss

Nah not exposing the data to the LLM, just building the tools to help me manage the data, usually python scripts