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We have Amber Electric which pass through the 5 minute pricing, and I personally have a lot of automations on Home Assistant based on it. But TBH it doesn't make much difference and it may not even make sense. The price just doesn't move in the way you may find it useful.

For example, in an average sunny summer day, the midday price is usually close to free, and you can have you AC on for several hours. But the price starts rising from 3~4pm, but if you turn off the AC at this point, the room temperature would also start rising quickly at the hotest time in a day.

Also, in winter days (now), the price could be at a relatively high level for all day around almost every day in a week, but you still have to use it regardless.

It is the spring and autumn that most of day time has free electricity but it is also the time you need the least of power.

Really nice project, I'm looking forward to trying it!

Would it be possible to process songs on one device, and then use the result in another, or even multiple? Or would it be possible to run as separate server / client?

I ask mainly because the device I connect to my TV is definitely not the most powerful one, so it would be nice if I can preprocess the songs elsewhere.

I hope the author can specify a language for the page, like <html lang="en">. On a system using Chinese as the first language, all the curly quotes are rendered in full width, making sentences looking terrible.

Vite 8.0 Is Out 4 months ago

I contributed this change in Vite 8:

Wasm SSR support: .wasm?init imports now work in SSR environments, expanding Vite's WebAssembly feature to server-side rendering.

While the process was relatively slow, I really appreciate the extra effort that the team have put on even this minor feature add. They not only guided me towards more compatible and idiomatic approach, but also added docs and helped keeping the code up to date before merging.

I have quite different observations. IKEA's Zigbee devices are the least stable devices I own and with smaller feature set.

For example, I have more than a dozen Zigbee smart outlet around my home, and the IKEA one is the only one that ever hang and became uncontrollable, yet its also the only one without a physical button to toggle and without power monitoring.

One of IKEA's Zigbee remote controls I have also regularly drops connection and I have to remove its battery to reset it from time to time.

The ones I bought from AliExpress of unknown brands are, unfortunately, much cheaper, have more functionalities, and more reliable.

Not sure whether they are already doing this, but the fiber could simply connect to a relay rather than the operator themselves, that way the operator can still hide far from the connected system and use wireless outside jamming to control if that still makes sense.

This is true, but I only learnt about it after many years into this career, and to be honest I don't enjoy it very much. I still enjoy working with machines more than people.

I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.

This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.

But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.

[1] https://www.canva.com/help/download-flattened-pdf/

Now the question is, will I ever get any updates to Photo/Design/Publisher?

They answered the question in their FAQ:

Will my Affinity apps still get updates?

Yes! We have many free updates planned for V2, with a continued focus on improvements and the features you ask for.

If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.

They don't need to. They mentioned that in their FAQ:

We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.

"... Currently there are no plans for changes to our business model"

They mentioned exactly that in the FAQ:

Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?

There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase.

Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.

Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.

I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.

If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.

I was not saying we have to be all on renewable perfectly. We are too far from even reaching a reasonable level. Power generation at night is dominated by coal plants.

The linked article is interesting, and it kinda confirms what I was wondering that it is probably wind farms that we need way more, not solar.

Every time I saw this kind of discussions, my first question is, what happens when sun is not shining? Like in the night or when it's very cloudy?

In many places in Australia, we have so many solar panels installed that's enough to power everything in the day time, but when the sun sets, coal still has to be burnt regardless.

I'm quite skeptical to grid-scale battery projects. Every such project has a total capacity of like 2hrs, making them only useful at some short peak time in the day, rather than overnight or over a cloudy rainy week. The only power storage that makes a difference to me is pumped hydro like our Snowy 2.0. But it's constrained by its location, and it's taking a decade to build.

I'm not sure what's the way forward. Maybe more wind farms can complement solar, but I guess that probably means we should really be deploying more wind farms rather than solar at this point.

So there is nothing about being proprietary, but just about using IM?

I don't fully agree. IMs are a great place to discuss issues in a semi-synchronous way. Telecon or face-to-face meetings are sometimes better in velocity, but IMs have some edge on bringing random people happen to be online into the discussion. And it can also bring a different audience into the issue than bug reporting tools or mailing list.

When this issue was brought into the group, it just took several hours for curious people there to collaboratively find the conclusion. This is something unlikely to happen in any other form of discussions based on my experience.

But I agree that group chat is not a great way to record it, and that's why the findings are recorded on the GitHub issue, and group members also encouraged the author to write this up. Then it got posted on HN and on /r/rust by two different group members as well. (The author's initial posting on HN was mysteriously taken down, so the op here helped posting it again.)

Yes, they are proprietary, which is not great. But I don't buy the allegation that they are not indexed or searchable. There are very few IMs that provide builtin publicly accessable log indexed or searchable by default. Does every IRC server come with public log? What about Matrix groups? How do discussion there not get lost in timeline?

You can provide public log of them not because they are not proprietary, but that they have API to allow logging. Telegram also has such API, and FWIW our discussion group does have searchable log that you can access here: https://luoxu-web.vercel.app/#g=1264662201 It is not indexable publicly more for privacy concern, again not because the platform is proprietary.

The regulation applies in the opposite side as well. I think the highest bid allowed is like A$16.8/kWh or something like that.

It's not fully clear to me how the market work as a whole. I learnt that generators may have swap contracts with retailers and big users, which, based on my understanding, can distort the price to arbitrarily low, because generators get paid for the difference from the other side regardless of spot price, so they can set the lowest possible to ensure they can dump their power to the grid.

Also when it's predicted to be this low (or that high), there is likely some operations (market or not) behind the scenes to level the price. Usually when it gets to the time, the actual spot price has been in a reasonable range.