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Another podcast player I quite enjoy discovering new shows is Breaker:

https://www.breaker.audio/

(though it can get a bit unstable at times…)


If someone wants a more interactive companion-book targeted more towards Python developers, check out "Probabilistic Programming & Bayesian Methods for Hackers":

http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming-...

Relevant quote:

> "I ... read this book ... I like it!" - Andrew Gelman


This is weirdly deliberately misquoted, maybe as a joke? full: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2013/07/21/bayes-rela...


It says above that quote: "These are satirical, but real"


Thanks, I was looking for a practical book like this!


Yes, definitely. I started doing something similar (though much more narrow in scope) while I was freelancing in Austria:

https://punkrockdev.com/accounting-austria

Ideally, we would have crowd-sourced instructions and spreadsheets with taxes, pension calculations etc. – like a Wikipedia for entrepreneurs.


"Alexa, how many children worked to build you?" :(


A 15% cost reduction – not bad.

Possibly interesting – I'm working on developing a similar battery - solar panel off-the-shelf system that would be suited for people who live in cities (e.g. if you want to put a solar panel on your balcony):

https://www.craftstrom.com/


15% sounds impressive but it's 60 GBP in absolute savings. That might just be enough to finance the hours it probably took to collect, compile and process all things necessary to make this calculation.


Yes, this is true.

However the UK has been running its power generation asset into the sand, we are increasingly reliant on things like https://ukpowerreserve.com/

So I expect that with the relentless push to smart metres (which is an optional EU directive, irony or ironies) we will see peak costs rise to battle the loss in cheap spare capacity.


That's a battery storage company? You seem to be suggesting its a bad thing??


the battery bits they have are less than 10% of their portfolio. In fact I would go so far as to say that their battery offering is mostly hot air, as they boast about its capacity in MW, not MW-hours

if you look at their asset page:

https://ukpowerreserve.com/assets/

its basically small polluting gas an diesel gennies.


Per year. And assumes electricity prices won't go up.

It took me half-an-hour to grab the CSV files from my monitoring, a write a scrap of Python to work out the difference in prices, then double-check my workings.

I'm happy with that ROI.


What would your advice be to someone with no electric car, no solar battery, no solar panels, and no subsidy available on them? Is the smart tariff still a good deal?


Depends on your usage patterns. If your job means you always get home after 7pm, or if you cook with gas, then it may still be worth it.


£60/yr would be a good saving for a supplier switch, the comparision and admin from which could easily add up an hour's work. A good ROI indeed!


What do you use for monitoring your mains supply?


The smart battery provides the monitoring. It is literally a clamp on the meter to monitor import and export, and one on the solar panel feed to measure generation. Small bit of Python to grab it ever 10 minutes.


Likely in future calculations like this will happen automatically through smart meters.


Wow, this is a cool "interactive whitepaper" website :)

https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/


If you’re interested in this topic I really recommend The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams (the director of animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit):

https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Willia...

Most of the points from the article seem to be derived from the stuff the book covers in more details.


Survival Kit is an advanced book that dives into the deep end, The Illusion Of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson [1] (two of the guys on a bunch of the early Disney features) and Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair [2] (countless MGM shorts) will give you a solid grounding in the basics.

The whole article focuses on expanding a list of principles of animation from Illusion.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Life-Disney-Animation/dp/078...

2: https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Animation-Collectors-Preston-...


Do you have any recommendations for someone who wants to learn to draw, but currently can't even scribble a decent stick figure?


These are really old, but I found them very helpful for beginning cartooning years ago: http://karmatoons.com/drawing/drawing.htm


Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. Learning to draw is actually mostly about learning to see; not seeing the objects as we usually do, but seeing the light and shadow that form them.


Drawabox has some great exercises and starts by teaching the mechanical skills necessary for drawing.

https://drawabox.com/


andrew loomis has really helped me, search on archive.org, the books are not in copyright anymore..


Check out the Traditional Drawing list here: https://www.ctrlpaint.com/library/


I suggest you check out this development in Responder then –released in v0.1.0 40 minutes ago :)

https://github.com/kennethreitz/responder/issues/53

I'll continue helping Kenneth with this, cause that's a pain point I also want to solve for myself.

On a related note, I tried to build something similar for Django in the past. (it worked, but it's somewhat under construction again due to changes in Django 2)

https://github.com/metakermit/django-spa


Looks really well written – the fun & practical examples look very inviting.


I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.


Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those are what are considered "legitimate."

Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.


distill.pub IS a legitimate journal.

From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.


Not according to European universities, at least for the purpose of judging faculty CVs when making hiring or tenure decisions.


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