1x42: The Tee-Remover Machine

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which the word "keynote" is officially declared to be meaningless, and:

  • 00:01:49 Tesla have released a new product, the Powerwall, a "home battery that charges using electricity generated from solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and powers your home in the evening". Elon Musk is happy to solve the world's energy problem by selling six billion of them to everyone; but is the Powerwall actually a useful thing? Can we all go solar now?
  • 00:18:37 LibreOffice have announced that they're working on an online version of their office suite, and have in the past announced that they're building a mobile version as well. But are LibreOffice falling behind on all their promises? Can we expect this to work?
  • 00:33:33 Amber Graner from the Open Compute Project talks to us about what OCP is all about, whether you need to use its stuff in your new datacentre, and how to fit twenty-one inches of rack in nineteen inches of space
  • 00:47:47 Jono reviews Zeetings, an online service which promises to add interactivity and audience participation to your presentations. We talk about whether the thing itself is useful, the art of public speaking, and their properly annoying introductory video

Download the show now!

newest ā€œefficientā€ solar power device: http://www.geek.com/science/most-efficient-solar-energy-dish-in-the-world-uses-engine-developed-in-1816-1622697/

Oh speaking of that I got youtube videos to open in this markup previewer.

GitHub - agateau/mup: A markup previewer I wish it had pyqt5 and python3 though.

I donā€™t know how many other people do this, but I often will listen to podcasts with only the right earbud, for two reasons:

  1. To be less antisocial when listening to podcasts
  2. When riding my bike so that I can hear cars out of my left ear
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This came up on IRC (mentioned by voldyman), but didnā€™t get a reply:

Why wasnā€™t Bryan on this show?

He got measles :slight_smile:

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That would be quite ironic, yes.
There was a post somewhere about doing a show with Bryan mutedā€¦ maybe they decided to put that in action and not tell anyone.

Though he was around for the LibreOffice segment, I would guess they just recorded them in separate sessions and had scheduling conflicts. Since itā€™s a prerecorded show they donā€™t have to stick to a specific schedule.

I think the show sounds fine as it is now.

Ah, ok. I havenā€™t listened to any substantial amount of this weekā€™s podcast yet; I was going by the beginning of the intro and the discussion on IRC.

Itā€™s good to hear that Bryan is on part of the show (although itā€™s still a little weird that his partial absence was unacknowledged by the team so far).

Given:

  1. The absence of Bryan from most of the show
  2. The lack of the usual banter when a team member is absent.
    3 .The absence of Stuart from the only segment where Bryan is present
  3. The final link where Jono says the three of them will be back in 2 weeks.

Is it fair to assume that Stuart and Brian have finally fallen-out big time and Bryan has chucked his toys out of the Pram?

Might [this][1] have something to do with it?

EDIT: Jono passive-affirmatively liked this post. Conspiracy confirmed. Maybe.

[1]: 1x40: Zero-Dollar Energy ā€œā€œwith @bryanlunduke mutedā€ā€

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My only doubt about the conspiracy is that, in Jono and Aqā€™s past shows, they were very forthcoming about people leaving.

Is this the thread to show support for ā€œStereo - recording/sā€ to be used ?

If it is - Iā€™m in favour of them :smile: ā™Ŗ~ į••(į›)į•—

#Battery low: 5% ā–ˆ Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ… Ģ²Ģ…]

My rockbox was low there for a while, oh well.

This Powerwall thingā€¦ I have a theory.

As is widely known, the electricity grids run at near capacity. The peak tends to be in the early evening as people get home, turn on the TV, maybe use air conā€¦ What about when they all buy electric cars?? The grid will not take it! Not to mention the need to have a large feed if you want a fast charge.

Or, with this wall mounted battery, it charges during the day in the ā€œtroughā€ of the daily usage. You then arrive home and plug inā€¦ 30 minutes later you have a full charge from a high amperage feed without increasing the demand on the grid at all.

Jono and Jeremy are right: this makes no sense as a cost saver. It helps the grid smooth out usage, but that doesnā€™t have a good enough draw for the home ownerā€¦ You either need to be generating, or you use it essentially as a capacitor for a fast discharge later.

Iā€™d also be interested what happens during a power outageā€¦ Does it feed into the grid? Do you suddenly power the street? What about fire fighters etc who are trying to isolate supply?

Lots of questions, but I guess these will be answered when itā€™s available to install :wink:

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Regarding @bryanlundukeā€™s comment about wanting LibreOffice for Android? If youā€™re willing to accept Apache Open Officeā€¦ itā€™s thereā€¦ search for AndroOpenOffice.

The downside? It starts an X server, and runs AOO in that. The font packs and dictionaries are separate and itā€™s not an awesome experience.

Butā€¦ if you want it, it is there.

@jonobacon, @sil and @jeremy, it would have been nice to nod to the fact that @bryanlunduke wasnā€™t going to be there for 3/4 of the show. It was only after it ran that I remembered that he said he was going off to a measles party or something, and would be offline until they rescusitated him (or something like thatā€¦ and I donā€™t mean my spelling issues - typing this in Firefox for Android, and Iā€™ve not got around to asking it to spellcheck for me)

Anywayā€¦ </waffle>

Zeetings sounds pointless tbh. Something @sil said ā€œAt least itā€™s not an iOS appā€ or something I donā€™t agree with. If you could just install an app and have the polls automatically pushed from the presenter to audience without having to type in a URL that would be a lot better. Where you could ask people to vote on their phones mid speech and it would just work at the touch of a button with 0 demands on the audience members, especially if it actually became successful and in a few years you could just assume everyone had it. Itā€™s a far harder goal to obtain but Iā€™m not convinced that Zeetings actually adds anything over having the presentation on Google Docs + having a strawpoll in there somewhere - or the mentioned legacy biological interaction methodologies.

Libreofficeā€¦ Online office suites are just more convenient for most people. I donā€™t think the libreoffice team are the people to produce the next generation of opensource office suites. I donā€™t know if I have ever even met someone who would have the first idea how to even start working on openoffice, meanwhile Iā€™m positively beating back Android/iOS, CoffeeScript and node.js developers with a broom like its some form of zombie apocalypse.

Libreoffice trying to shift the few developers they have towards this way of working is stupid imo, just make the best desktop suite you can and let HipsterOffice.io.irony fight Google and Microsoft when something like that exists - hopefully with a product with innovative usage of all the new web technologies and presumably involving Docker in there somewhere; not just doggedly pursuing MS office like open/libreoffice always has.

Donā€™t really care about the audio. Itā€™s not an FPS game or something I donā€™t need surround sound to react some someone creeping up behind me. Lugradio was fine with mono, Bad voltage is fine with stereo. If some listeners have a halfway decent reason to prefer mono do it in mono, donā€™t really care. Also based on the last hour long bad voltage and a random lugradio episode which were usually half an hour or so longer than bad voltage; the lugradio episode is half the size and sounds fine to me really and I assume thereā€™s plenty of compression etc on the lugradio file which wouldnā€™t be needed with modern internet connections.

Perhaps an argument could be made for non native english speakers preferring stereo, maybe that helps them understand when you talk over each other like on Lugradio - you had endless hatemail from people who found it difficult to understand when you talked over each other but as a native english speaker it was never challenging to understand really. Also you donā€™t talk over each other at all really on bad voltage.

PS
@bryanlunduke please convince the other presenters to allow you rant for the entire next episode about the Ubuntu Snappy stuff, cheers.

A lot of this audio stuff is making sense considering I usually listen to podcasts with just one earphone inā€¦

It may be more useful to, instead of choosing the audio setup that works best for the most people, create a designated player that allows anyone to customize the audio setup.

In this case, that would mean recording in stereo and adding a ā€œmono audioā€ switch on the site.