Comments for loligo.com http://www.loligo.com/blog Practical, Technical, Theoretical Tue, 24 Mar 2015 21:24:20 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2 Comment on Onwards, to the past! Steam engine uncrating day by jtodd http://www.loligo.com/blog/onwards-to-the-past-steam-engine-uncrating-day/comment-page-1/#comment-47008 Tue, 24 Mar 2015 21:24:20 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=50#comment-47008 I haven’t yet installed it – getting a working, safe boiler is really the hold-up. I have several fire-tube boilers of varying vintage, and they’re large projects to get going on from a restoration standpoint (though one is ready to go on a small scale, but I have zero time these days to even think about it.) TinyTech sells a “Yarrow” style boiler (water tube) but I saw the video they have on their site and I think I’d rather have a local boilermaker build one for me to spec. The engines have little risk as far as death/injury is concerned – it’s the boilers that are the seriously dangerous part, and that’s where the money should be spent on any steam-based system in my opinion. If you’re looking for a hybrid solar system with generator, I’d say that a reciprocating engine is easily understood but a turbine is more efficient. If you’re doing reciprocating, you should consider pushing a belt drive system that goes to one or more DC generators since keeping constant RPMs for an AC head will be extremely difficult. If you have a solar charge controller it probably can also be the place where you dump your steam-generated DC and it will do the right thing for keeping your batteries topped up, or inverting to AC.

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Comment on Onwards, to the past! Steam engine uncrating day by Stuart Chignell http://www.loligo.com/blog/onwards-to-the-past-steam-engine-uncrating-day/comment-page-1/#comment-45357 Fri, 06 Feb 2015 23:10:09 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=50#comment-45357 I too have been looking at these engines but I’ve been concerned about buying something sight unseen from India (China is bad enough).

Have you got around to installing it yet?

I’m looking to build a hybrid solar, battery generator system and I have lots of woody wastes that I can feed into a boiler so I’m interested in steam.

I’d love to have the scale to go straight to a turbine but I don’t so reciprocating steam seems to be the next best thing.

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Comment on Onwards, to the past! Steam engine uncrating day by jtodd http://www.loligo.com/blog/onwards-to-the-past-steam-engine-uncrating-day/comment-page-1/#comment-39679 Thu, 10 Jan 2013 07:10:47 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=50#comment-39679 Update and answers: I’ve decided to probably keep the engine instead of selling it, because no serious offers have appeared in two years, and plus I now have some space where a boiler can be installed and this might get some use.

devnull: Eventually, I’d have this charging a 48v, 1000Ah array of batteries. So, yep, it’d be necessary to have a primary mover of this size. Plus, I might want to run a belt line on it some day for tools, if I ever got the interest. Lastly, it’s fairly easy (and only slightly inefficient) to run an engine at 50% capacity, but running an engine at 150% is inadvisable. So I always opt for a bigger solution not knowing what the future will hold.

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Comment on Onwards, to the past! Steam engine uncrating day by devnull http://www.loligo.com/blog/onwards-to-the-past-steam-engine-uncrating-day/comment-page-1/#comment-38192 Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:52:14 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=50#comment-38192 Interesting review, I was about to import the 2 or 5 HP model, and started to get information about customs and importation.
You made me change my mind :) and I think I’ll pay twice the price and get an engine from Mike Brown.
But why did you buy such a big engine to charge batteries ? Unless you wanted to charge UPS batteries for a server room, this seems very powerfull. What model is it ? 10 HP ?
Thanks!

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Comment on SSH over UDP: How to swallow an elephant by jtodd http://www.loligo.com/blog/ssh-over-udp-how-to-swallow-an-elephant/comment-page-1/#comment-22982 Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:33:27 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=104#comment-22982 Update on the HPN-SSH tests: we tried this at TED 2012, or at least Bog tried it. He was unable to get the kernel tuned with MacOS 10.7 in a way that moved files at greater than (IIRC) around 20mbps. Clearly, not a win, but this may have been due to MacOS 10.7 changing some of the parameters to rely upon each other in the kernel that previously had not. The instructions for MacOS were for an older version of the software, so this was not a big win and the Aspera software was used along with a 1gbps uplink provided by CENIC (thanks, CENIC!)

I have not had any time to really look at this in more detail, because I’m pretty much swamped with the day job. But still the question remains: why isn’t this part of SSH as a default? This would speed up transfers immensely. I have yet to hear anyone come up with a reason that would be suitably significant to block development on a project like this.

I’ve also come up with another idea, which I had while discussing this issue with a CDN vendor yesterday: why isn’t there any CDN that has created a “helper” app that would run on the local user’s computer and intercept packets destined for certain IP addresses, and then shim them through a UDP accelerator? This could run almost entirely transparently, and if it had appropriate fallback mechanisms it would work under any network conditions, even where UDP was blocked. (It wouldn’t be able to help where proxies were configured, but that’s an edge case.) For game or media delivery, this would be _amazing_. This would truly be a “viral” application, meaning that anyone who used that content network could encourage users to use the helper app, and they would get the amazing performance transparently. In the game industry, that kind of thing spreads like wildfire in the community – whoever gets better performance on the network, wins more. So why no magic from a CDN? Well, chalk this up to yet another idea of mine that will make someone else millions of dollars that I won’t have time to do – it’s a long and sad list. (It’s also an idea that I’m sure someone else has already had, but… I don’t see it on the market, nor have I ever seen it, so I’ll call it “mine”.)

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Comment on SSH over UDP: How to swallow an elephant by jtodd http://www.loligo.com/blog/ssh-over-udp-how-to-swallow-an-elephant/comment-page-1/#comment-18097 Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:53:44 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=104#comment-18097 Almost a year later, I’ve found another project which seems to fit the bill perfectly. It’s the “High Performance SSH” aka HPN-SSH project, run by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). It appears fairly well maintained. Why isn’t this code part of OpenSSH? It seems to be a no-brainer if it does what it says it does. Right now, I don’t have the time to test, but in the next week or so that may change.

http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/

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Comment on App for sale – factory fresh, great condition, low miles by jtodd http://www.loligo.com/blog/app-for-sale-factory-fresh-great-condition-low-miles/comment-page-1/#comment-15198 Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:32:42 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=136#comment-15198 (wow, sorry for long delay on this – life is busy) I’d be happy to do it purely on a very very small percentage of profit-sharing. Contact me via email, please.

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Comment on App for sale – factory fresh, great condition, low miles by jtodd http://www.loligo.com/blog/app-for-sale-factory-fresh-great-condition-low-miles/comment-page-1/#comment-15197 Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:30:54 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=136#comment-15197 No, it’s still in hibernation. I’ve dropped a line to Andrew.

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Comment on App for sale – factory fresh, great condition, low miles by John Gilmore http://www.loligo.com/blog/app-for-sale-factory-fresh-great-condition-low-miles/comment-page-1/#comment-14837 Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:03:49 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=136#comment-14837 Did you ever sell this app? If not, I suggest talking to Andrew Stone of Stone Design, who makes his living from writing and selling iphone apps. He’s a friend.

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Comment on App for sale – factory fresh, great condition, low miles by James Dudgeon http://www.loligo.com/blog/app-for-sale-factory-fresh-great-condition-low-miles/comment-page-1/#comment-4812 Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:54:12 +0000 http://www.loligo.com/blog/?p=136#comment-4812 I would be interested in the price you are asking for the app…..if it is still for sale.

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