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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.

    Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.


  • If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.

    A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)



  • That is not how it works.

    When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.

    You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.


  • This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.

    There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.

    Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.



  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.websitetoScience Memes@mander.xyzCoffee ☕
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    18 days ago

    You can/could also find Coffee HOWTO in your distro’s HOWTO package. (I found a reference back to v0.5 of the document in 1998.)

    Has simple schematics to get you started for the hardware, using the parallel port to toggle relays.

    It’s a very neat little document, and inspired me to write a simple kernel module so I could echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/whatever/coffee0 to turn pin 0 high on the parallel port. (This is silly, and it’s much easier to just do things in user space!)





  • Having trouble finding it but I swear my PNY Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) circa 2003 came with a Linux 3D desktop/launcher software that sounds like this. (X11 based I guess.)

    Not sure if it was bundled with the card, came with the Nvidia drivers, or what…but it worked just fine with Linux at the time (probably Slackware, not positive what I was running then).



  • Seems more analogous to clothes than housing — clothes can be “too big” in the sense that the extra size is detrimental to the function, which is somewhat different from houses.

    And it’s pretty common to have buy-nothing groups in cities or even at large companies. Got a loooot of hand-me-down clothes for my toddler from friends, family, and randos in the neighborhood.