Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

Noodles

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I think that is basically the worry. Unlike a traditional system which requires constuction and probably contractors to install, it seems like anyone could just order these and plug them in. No one checking up on transfer switches or when they get used.

The article mentions these produce enough power for like, 1-2 appliances, maybe. So its fairly low output and not a whole house solution, until someone decides to buy 20 of them and scatter them all over.
 

Sheera Khan

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The way solar panels and the associate inverters work they can only provide power if they are sensing the phase of the mains connection. Even here in overly regulated old Germany those are allowed to be used with a what you called a suicide connector because they are intrinsically safe. I have some at my home and they work great.
 
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Argent Stonecutter

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Interesting, so they wouldn't actually be useful during an outage?
 

Casey Pelous

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Interesting, so they wouldn't actually be useful during an outage?
They would, assuming the sun is out. They just would not feed anything back onto the grid. The DC from the solar panels has to be converted into AC for practical household use, and definitely for feeding back into the grid; trying to feed DC into a live grid would just result in a brief but expensive bit of smoke, a bad smell, and possibly flame. The units aren't supposed to connect to the grid unless they can sense the phase of the grid. If the grid is down, there's no phase to sense. (Power company generators have to be synchronized to the grid before they are brought online, too. My dad worked for the power company, and I've watched him bring a generator online using manual water controls and a bank of instruments that could be right out of a steampunk movie set. See below. ) This is assuming what Sheera described is accurate and failsafe beyond the capabilities of Henry the Happy Homeowner to bypass everything that was meant to save his sorry life, and especially the lives of others. That fail-safing typically takes a moonshot level of engineering and product design, so, no offense, Sheera, but pardon me if I'm skeptical ...
 

Argent Stonecutter

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The units aren't supposed to connect to the grid unless they can sense the phase of the grid. If the grid is down, there's no phase to sense. (Power company generators have to be synchronized to the grid before they are brought online, too. My dad worked for the power company, and I've watched him bring a generator online using manual water controls and a bank of instruments that could be right out of a steampunk movie set. See below. )
I used to work on energy management systems. I spent Dec 31 1999 in our war room eating cold pizza and watching our products roll over to 2000 in Australia and so on, ready to try and do something if anything went wrong and New South Wales lost power or something.

What I mean is, if the only connection from the panel/generator to the home wiring is a suicide cable, they don't have the ability to choose to connect to the grid or not. With a transfer switch or something similar under the control of the generator upstream of the house, they can provide AC to the house safely, but what was described doesn't seem to be that.
 

Sheera Khan

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During a power outage those panels are absolutely useless. If the connector of the inverter isn't attached to a working grid it can't sense the phase and so it can't provide any power. It shuts down within some milliseconds after loosing contact and only comes up after a period of synchronizing to a grid. The aim of that setup isn't providing power in case of an outage (it doesn't) but to take the load of all the small power adapters and devices plugged in 24/7 which adds up quite a bit.
For providing power to your house in case of a power outage you need a bigger collecting area and an accumulator in what we call an island configuration. Basically a grid of your own. That is possible via a solar powerstation (sounds mightier than they are...).

Edit: For clarity I added "in case of a power outage"
 
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Free

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Caete

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So can anyone in the UK confirm or deny this?

 

Noodles

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> Workers

So what does it actually cost to run one of these instead of wordpress? Where does the data sit? Can I run it on my current VPS? I looked into EC2 once and decided it would not actually save any money over what I have now and might even cost more.
 
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> Workers

So what does it actually cost to run one of these instead of wordpress? Where does the data sit? Can I run it on my current VPS? I looked into EC2 once and decided it would not actually save any money over what I have now and might even cost more.
They say, "It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. " They say "You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta: ". They also give the link to a sample fully writable admin interface. It looks a lot like wordpress. "Also, it is licensed under the MIT license meaning you can clone it for free or do as you wish.

I don't know anything about what is going on here except for this short article but for me it bears watching.
 
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Noodles

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They say, "It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. " They say "You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta: ". They also give the link to a sample fully writable admin interface. It looks a lot like wordpress. "Also, it is licensed under the MIT license meaning you can clone it for free or do as you wish.

I don't know anything about what is going on here except for this short article but for me it bears watching.
Then the Github page says something about needing workers which requires some sort of premium plan.

Edit: I don't expect you to habe answers BTW. And I will make a lomger reply but I needed to get in the shower. Which made the longer reply longer because well, I started thinking about it while in the shower
 
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Noodles

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Ok.

I don't really expect any answers here and I just need to look into it more myself.

I like this. Wordpress is old, it feels bloated and clunky. I am increasingly disatisfied with the company, especially its CEO, especially after all that drama with the large hosting company recently. I can't even remeber the hosting company's name, which is ironic since the drama was, over the namd.

The way this reads, its basically drop in as a Wordpress replacement, which is great. No hassle with import export and formatting blah blah bkah. It also kind of sounds like it runs WP plug ins, which is also good, since its new and it probably has no plig in ecosystem.

I keep threatening to move to some modern markdown based static site generator stylen system. I even tried building a few with Claude.

My problem is cost, which is... vague. The article implies its all open source and free etc. But the Github says something about Apollo and $5/month premium plans with workers.

I don't know what that means, though. $5 is pretty cheap, I currently pay $12/mo for my VPS. I probably will bump it up to a slightly higher tier like $15 or so soon though.

But is that $5 per blog? If at all? Can it run without that? I have 3 WP blogs running. Is that $5 per worker/plug in? This could all get expensive fsst.

It also says "serverless". And oh I hate that, because the data has to come from somewhere. And its part of why I rulled out moving to Amazon and some.EC2 stuff. Because "serverless" means "service-ful" which usually means some "pay as you go, oh hey some AI scraped your blog and now the traffic spike means you get billed $300 this month" nonsense.

Like I am sure this sort of system is great for some medium to large entity, but I just want to run my couple of blogs no one reads and be happy.

Also, related to serverless, I also have NON Wordpress stuff therr. Where does that go? Or would that be another Worker agent for another $5 to run a python script once an hour to do some remote tasks?
 

Noodles

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Hey, I found, basically the real answer.


"Don't switch, but keep an eye on it, maybe."

Honestly, I think I will just keep looking for Markdown based solutions.
 

Noodles

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I don't really know where else to throw this and it doesn't really need a category of its own.

I stumbled upon something amusing with Pornhub.

Because I always have a VPN on my phome, and because I am in the middle of Illinois, I get to battle sometimes with the output tunnel being Chicago or St Louis.

Until very recently, outputting to St Louis, meant the site was blocked because of age verificstion laws. Going to Chicago fixed this.

But now, outputting to St Louis, works. But it only shows "non porn content.". On Pornhub. Lots of, interviews and such with Pornstar folks, but its all, SFW content.
 
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