Pi-hole® (network-wide tracker/ad blocking) set up as a WiFi repeater/extender. This improves WiFi coverage, allows switching between the unfiltered/filtered connections and forces all traffic through the filter from devices that try to evade it.
I made a similar setup with Home Assistant running on a low power Raspberry Pi 3A+ connected to a Xiaomi Mijia Bluetooth Low Energy temperature and humidity sensor (model code LYWSDCGQ). It takes a single AAA battery and it's lasted almost a year on one.
I also have Volatile Organic Compounds / equivalent carbon dioxide (Sensirion SGP30) and Particulate Matter (Plantower PMS5003) sensors soldered up to a Raspberry Pi Zero W over I2C/UART for logging. It lasts quite a while on a USB battery so you can take it out and about. An ESP8266/ESP8285 would last longer but it's easy to log with a python script and the SD card gives you loads of storage.
I haven't written this up yet but will if anyone is interested?
> This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable. Building new solar would routinely be cheaper than operating already built fossil fuel plants, even in the world of ultra-cheap natural gas we live in now. This is what I’ve called the third phase of clean energy, where building new clean energy is cheaper than keeping fossil fuel plants running. Even in places like Northern Europe, by the later 2030s we’d see solar costs below the operating cost of fossil fuels, providing cheap electricity in summer months with their very long days in the high latitudes. These prices would be disruptive to a large fraction of already operating fossil fuel power plants – particularly coal power plants, that are far less able to ramp their power flexibly...
I predict a lot of fossil plants will convert to simply providing inertia for grid stabilisation and charge for the service. They won't burn anything any more and may even demolish their stacks and cooling towers. They will just keep their generators and turbines connected to the grid as a big virtual flywheel to dampen spikes in demand / supply and maintain the AC frequency within tolerance.
That's a very general statement, but solar plus lithium battery storage is now competitive with gas peaker plants and those can grid balance as an extra service.
Inertia is slightly different to supply response and most inverters use grid coupling for frequency and phase synchronisation so are not suitable. The slow response of old plants is an asset in this case and only a problem if they are generating rather than just providing inertia, which is instant.
Currently it would probably be better to generate hydrogen if there is excess power in the gridit would probably be a lot more economical than batteries though roughly 66% is lost in conversion
If anyone is interested in how to set up a network-wide tracker blocker then I've written some guides on how to configure Pi-hole as a router and Wi-Fi range extender. This means you can force all traffic through your custom DNS, even devices from Google and Amazon that don't respect DHCP.
It's still worth installing privacy add-ons to Firefox but this helps with some profiling intrusions in mobile apps and Chromecasts etc. It also helps protect your less technical family members a little, although it obviously can't keep them completely safe from surveillance. Education is an important aspect too.
Huxley 2 is a CORS enabled cross-platform JSON ReST proxy for the GB NRE LDB WCF SOAP XML API (called Darwin). It supports both the Public Version (PV) and the Staff Version (SV). It's built with ASP.NET Core LTS, C# 8.0 and lots of abbreviations!
V2 is a reimplementation on ASP.NET Core, allowing Huxley to run on Windows, macOS and Linux. You can now use Huxley on any platform (pun intended)!
I spent a while looking through the registered birth names data for about 5 years while we were naming our kids. Each year was in Excel sheets, which changed format repeatedly. It was really annoying.
Moving over to providing everything as well formatted CSVs is going to be so much nicer.
I think he means that the UK govt has mandated a particular CSV standard for tabular data, at the same time. I think you're right that OpenAPI has nothing to do with CSV.
Yes. CSV with the obvious extra conditions "UTF-8" and "one header row" is fairly interoperable, but note: "when you’re using Excel for Windows to load a file that is UTF-8 without a BOM, you can resolve the display of non-ASCII characters by using the ‘import text’ option". If a Windows user just clicks on the file then sometimes UTF-8 is interpreted as some 8-bit encoding and you get mojibake. Nevertheless, you shouldn't add a BOM because the standard doesn't permit that and it might cause all sorts of problems on other systems.
Is that true? Iirc Openapi lets you define schemata for csv payloads in POST body sections. Whether they are validated by the backends is another question...
Yes. The cost of action is dwarfed by the cost of inaction, but that cost is felt (not so) far in the future. It's a problem with short-term thinking creating a false economy and building up a huge debt.
Source (EUPL): https://github.com/jpsingleton/octoplot
Sample output (colour not shown):