Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain's record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs. The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity.

Many suppliers already offer more than 2 million households the opportunity to pay lower rates for electricity used during off-peak hours but this will be the first time that the system operator will use this tool to help balance the grid. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) hopes that by issuing a market notice to call on energy users to increase their consumption it can avoid making hefty payments to turn wind and solar farms off when demand for electricity is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills.

Yeah, there's some tired tropes and some of the plots are formulaic (now, anyway), but the humor and wit is absolutely on point.

Any other older shows that hold up this well today?

I was going to post this in !80s_tv@lemmy.sdf.org but the home instance seems to be down still. What's it been? 2, 3 weeks now? Pour one out for our lemmy.sdf.org homies.

The graph is from the electric company website showing my usage for a single day last week. It was sunny all last week, so pretty much every day's usage looks like that graph. The little peaks around 1pm are when I made lunch since I can't run the electric range from the power station. I could have run things for about 3-4 more hours from the power station, but I like to end the day with it charged to at least 90% in case I need to use it for a power outage.

This is just my trial PV setup with 800W of PV on the south-facing side of the house and another 800W on the west-facing side so I get a pretty continuous 600W throughout the day. I'm currently using an Anker Power Station which is limited to 60V and 600 watts of input, so I'm not getting the most out of my PV panels.

Today I ordered two, big 16 KWh batteries and a 10KW inverter to finally start my "big boy" PV installation (for comparison, that's 32x the capacity of this power station and 5x the total wattage in addition to supporting 220v split-phase). That will let me take better advantage of the panels since I can put all 8 in series for less losses (partial shading notwithstanding).

I've been planning on building this out all winter and am finally seeing it through. Totally unrelated (/s), but my electric rate just got hiked another $0.01/KWh so I wanted to get this in place before A/C season kicks in.

I've been tasked with ensuring accessibility of various PDFs my org puts out. Acrobat has some accessibility checks, but I don't want to have to boot into Windows every time I need to check that staff correctly put in alt text and labeled their sections.

Is there a PDF viewer/editor for Linux that will let me run these kinds of checks or at least see various document properties?

i.e. A worse version of "have your people call my people"

This cover is officially blessed by Lady Gaga herself.

The caption’s note that “We have rebuilt the entire Robichaux Academy” suggests that the as-yet-unnamed season 13 will bring us right back to that fabled New Orleans school for witches. As for “The Supreme Rises,” as Entertainment Weekly reminds us, Apocalypse revealed that “[Billie] Lourde’s Mallory, an extremely powerful pupil at Robichaux Academy, is destined to surpass Cordelia as the next Supreme.”

Another much-anticipated American Horror Story return is Jessica Lange, as revealed earlier this week also on social media. She last appeared in Apocalypse. Not much is known about season 13’s plot beyond “witches,” so it’s not certain if she’ll be playing Constance Langdon, who Lange won an Emmy for playing in Murder House (and was nominated for playing in Apocalypse), Fiona Goode (who she won an Emmy for playing in Coven), or a different character.

The fact that Paulson is returning as Cordelia—Fiona’s daughter—is maybe a hint, but Fiona also died during the Coven season. So maybe not?

Although Star Trek‘s utopia might seem like a place where galactic powers would be beyond counterintelligence, the franchise has always loved spies. From loving pastiches to their role as a place to navigate shades of gray otherwise untouchable, spy work has long been a backbone of Star Trek storytelling—which means almost every galactic power has at least one spy agency.

In fact, a lot of them have two! Star Trek loves to split the difference between what it sees as honorable spycraft: counterintelligence agencies performing recon work to safeguard their powers’ interests and a second, even more secretive black-ops division that does all the dirty work in a way that can be sequestered and disavowed… depending on the power, of course. Sometimes the dirty work is all they have!

From Section 31 to the Obsidian Order, here’s a brief rundown of the agencies we’ve encountered across 60 years of Trek history so far.

Bought this power bank in 2009 and recently found it in my old hiking backpack. Once I found a USB mini cable to charge it (mini USB...that's how old this thing is), it's back in business.

It's only 2000 mAh so will only partially charge my phone but it works great with a USB lamp or topping up my Meshtastic node.