In this previous post, we looked at  how much of the current electricity demand could be met directly if the entire production were based on solar and wind. The observation was that dep… Read More

Most cars stand around most of the time.The average driving distance per car is 30-40 km - even in the US and trips over 100km are quite rare (less than 4%). Assuming, some number of heavily… Read More

For a hypothetical future power grid where production is dominated by variable renewable sources like PV and wind, the challenge of balancing supply and demand at all times is well know. Usi… Read More

While there is no technological silver-bullet to combat climate change, electrification is about as good as it gets - maybe at least a silver spoon to help keep the monsters at bay...Today a… Read More

 For this previous post, we have built a very simplistic LP model to determine the optimal resource allocation for a power grid that is based on wind, solar and storage.This model has s… Read More

In the previous post, we made some back of the envelope estimation of what an optimal solar, wind & storage based power grid could look like. For the analysis we were using a standard li… Read More

As wind and solar electricity production is reaching significant double-digit contributions in many power grids, the focus is increasingly shifting to storage with the goal of providing low… Read More

In the previous post, we tried to estimate the opportunity for storage based arbitrage in a variety of European day-ahead electricity markets. For that we have used a "fast & efficient"… Read More

As more and more solar and wind generation capacity is integrated into a power grid without sufficient storage, the intra-day eleectricity market prices tend to fluctuate between around zero… Read More

For most privately owned cars, the most common answers are: at home, at work or somewhere on the road.But why does this matter?The increased installation of solar panels is leading to a more… Read More

With an energy crisis looming across Europe, some people were joking that those who believe in the American Santa Claus should rather be naughty than nice, because coal would be more valuabl… Read More

Generative AI seems to have entered the mainstream hype cycle with the recent release of ChatGPT becoming the fastest growing website to reach more than 100 million users, generating a lot o… Read More

The organisation of Europe's power grid operators (ENTSO-E) is providing an open-data transparency platform with a lot of interesting data about the state of the  power grid in its vari… Read More

In several of the major European power grids, the penetration of variable renewable energy sources (VRES) has reached a level where their variability can no longer be as easily absorbed… Read More

Wright's Law, a the lesser known cousin of Moore's Law, states, that in most industries, unit-costs decrease by X percent for any doubling of the production volume. In addition, a growing am… Read More

Historically the service provided by electrical utilities has been that of 24/7 instant power, available at the flip of a switch. The keys to providing such a service are power sources which… Read More

De-carbonization will require in particular a radical transformation of the energy and transportation sectors over the next few decades. Many people find this daunting or fear that it might… Read More

The recent pandemic has provided a lot of insights into how societies and governments around the world respond to a collective crisis, where the potential cost or harm faced by each member o… Read More

The trolley problem is a famous thought experiment to illustrate an ethical dilemma where the needs of the many may outweigh the needs of the few : a trolley is assumed to be barre… Read More

Liebe Lesys,Ich möchte auch auf Deutsch gerne inklusiv schreiben, ohne dass jeder Satz nach identitätspolitischem Kulturkampf schreit. Mein Vorzug wäre ein grammatisches Neutr… Read More

As part of the yearly performance review process, we are supposed to describe what we do and how we add value to the organization.I am a software engineer by training and once prided myself… Read More

What I still miss the most after moving from G+ to Diaspora* for a my casual public social network posting is a well integrated mobile app for posting on the go.The main use-case for me is p… Read More

Photos exported from digital cameras often contain meta-data in Exif format (Exchangeable Image File Format). For images taken with cellphone cameras, this info typically also includes (GPS)… Read More

I have recently been looking for an alternative social media platform and started using Diaspora* via the diasporing.ch pod. Not unlike the cryptocurrency community, the proponents of the va… Read More

The last stage of the process is to finally export the converted posts to Diaspora* the chosen target system. As we want these post to appear slowly and close to their original post date ann… Read More

We are now ready to put all the pieces together for exporting to Diaspora*, the new target platform.If we had some sort of "Minitrue" permissions to rewrite history on the target system, the… Read More

Before we focus on putting all the pieces together, here a small, optional excursion into how to make use of location information contained in G+ posts.We should consider carefully if and ho… Read More

Google+ has always been rather good at dealing with photos - the photo functions were built on the foundation of Picasa and later spun out as Google Photos. Not surprising that the platform… Read More

Circles and with them the ability to share different content with different sets of people was one of the big differentiators of Google+ over other platforms at the time, which typically had… Read More

After we have had a look at the structure of the takeout archive, we can build some scripts to translate the content of the JSON post description into a format that is suitable for import in… Read More

Part I: TakeoutOnce we the takeout archive has been successfully generated we can download and unarchive/extract it to our local disks. At that point we should find a new directory called Ta… Read More

For the last 7 years, I have been using Google+ as my primary social sharing site - with automated link-sharing to Twitter. With Google+ going away, I am looking to migrate my public posting… Read More

During the summer month, our offices are buzzing with young, enthusiastic people from all over the world - a sign that it's intern season.Internships are the closest that academic profession… Read More

Since the term was coined a few years ago, unicorns have become the mythical creature of the venture capital industry: privately held (tech) startups with a valuation of more than a billion… Read More

In the previous two episodes about IP networking, we have seen a lot about raw addresses and port-numbers, because that is how the networking stack operates internally. But this is not how w… Read More

Linux is a multi-user, multi-tasking based system, which means that even a computer as small as the Raspberry Pi, can be used by multiple users simultaneously and there can be multiple proce… Read More

In the previous two episodes about IP networking, we have seen a lot about raw addresses and port-numbers, because that is how the networking stack operates internally. But this is not how w… Read More

Today, we are taking a look at the TCP/IP Internet protocols by using a few commands which allow us to see what is going on in the Linux kernel, all the way down to the Ethernet wire.For exa… Read More

The Linux command line has a rich set of powerful tools. Today we are looking at some examples of commands which allow us to troubleshoot networking issues.Let’s picture a situation wh… Read More

The first Linux command-line command which a user might encounter, would typically be bash, the default Linux command-line interpreter itself.For many newcomers, the Linux command-line inter… Read More

<- Raspberry Pi as Classroom Server and Digital PetEncouraged by the performance of running a basic wiki engine on the new Raspberry Pi 3, we can try a more resource intensive service. Ow… Read More

With the new Raspberry Pi 3 just out and presumably much faster than the original, I wanted to try again how well it would hold up as a really small scale server for hosting web applications… Read More

On Feb 29, the Raspberry Pi foundation launched the sales of a $25 credit-card sized computer, which sold out in minutes. The goal of the Raspberry Pi is to stimulate computer literacy educa… Read More

If your Internet access is down and you are not watching, is it really down? For most people the answer is most likely - who cares!Since our Internet connection had recently been down a few… Read More

About 3 years ago, I speculated in this post, that "user curated content" would become the next logical step to the "user generated content" wave unleashed by the interactivity of web 2.0. B… Read More

The management edict to ban telecommuting a Yahoo has stirred up quite a controversy. It seems a bit ironic for an Internet company to admit that telecommuting isn't working for them. Kind… Read More

 After some initial experiments with using a Raspberry Pi as a home server, I wanted to try out some configurations  useful to the intended purpose of the Raspberry Pi: p… Read More

Bluetooth is a relatively low-powered short-range wireless technology, which can among others provide a networking connection between devices and is widely supported in portable devices like… Read More

Looking for low-cost linux hardware, I had come across the Raspberry Pi project a few months ago and been hopefully intrigued by its goals to promote "computer literacy" (whatever that means… Read More

With the Raspberry Pi board now up and running on the network, I needed something "reasonable" for it to do. Maybe an homage to the famous Trojan room coffe pot camera - 20 years later, at a… Read More

In the tradition of modular and object oriented programming, we have long learned to design software by hierarchical decomposition - divide and conquer engineering, where each modu… Read More

It's been about a year since Google+ launched with great fanfare and even greater anticipation in the tech media. Being late to the party of the currently much hyped "social networking" spac… Read More

The most widely and commercially used languages today are largely based on the imperative and structured programming paradigms and many have a direct and strong roots in the C language of th… Read More

<- Part I: HardwareIn the previous part of this tutorial, we looked at how to connect a few DS18B20 digital temperature sensors to a Raspberry Pi and read their values.The next part of th… Read More

<- Part II: Data CollectionOnce we have accumulated some data in the RRD database, we can start generating some plots with the RRDTools built-in graph function. The graph above shows the… Read More

The Raspberry Pi seems ideal for all kinds of "physical computing" applications, as it is small, cheap, low-powered and yet more powerful and feature rich than a traditional micro-controller… Read More

One of the most conspicuously absent standard interfaces on the Raspberry Pi is built-in support for 802.11 WiFi wireless LAN networking.A low-cost, low-power way to remedy this is for examp… Read More

Even at the hight of the digital revolution, schools all over the world seem to be struggling with what computer literacy should mean for them.The most technophile view is that everybody sho… Read More

Many people, specially outside the technology industry are surprised that something like open-source software could exist, specially at the scale and sophistication it quite obviously does… Read More

When looking for a platform to learn Linux and Python programming, Raspberry Pi would be on top of most peoples mind today.The success of the Raspberry Pi brand has created an active and nov… Read More