Schwolop

They weigh 5g. A tonne of them is two hundred million of them. I very much doubt that many will be e-waste.

I'm in Australia, with Globird, and have their 3hrs free plus they pay $1 on days I don't use any grid power between the 6-8pm peak, and another $1.50 if I send them back 10kWh of the energy I was given for free during the day, during that peak. In winter, with bugger-all solar (maybe 5kWh generation if I'm lucky) I pull 10kW/hr into a 40kWh battery for those 3hrs each and every day, while also running the heating as high as possible to gain some thermal battery effect too. That 30kWh of battery charge is used up by late evening or middle of the night by fully-electric heating (RCAC split systems and a large ducted RCAC system), so the battery goes down to 5% where I stop using it except in the case of grid failure, and back up to ~75% each day. The idea that no one uses more than 24kWh of electricity each day is absurd - not only will I pull 30kWh to charge a battery, I'll also pull another ~30 or so just to keep warm. My house could easily use 100kWh per day if we heated it to a pleasant level instead of a warm-enough level.

The main problem, as Australians are no doubt aware, is that our houses are large and poorly insulated. I've done everything sensible already (ceiling + floor insulation, draft sealing, honeycomb blinds, etc) except paying $100,000 to double-glaze all windows, and it still feels like a tent.

Despite all this ranting, electricity is now effectively free in summer for me, and ~$5-8 per day in winter. Pre-battery it was in the ballpark of $10-25 per day. The battery should have a payback period of 4 years, but was heavily subsidized by the government. Due to how I'm charging and discharging it so regularly, I'm expected it might only have a 10yr lifetime.

That is hilarious. HackerNews was also the source of my blog's highest day of traffic. IIRC I quit a job and wrote about it and somehow a lot of people read it.

I often feel I _should_ blog more, but then I don't. And every now and again I go and read something I wrote ten years ago and feel a little embarrassed by my past self. But every so often I read something that makes me feel that I _did_ know a few things, or did some cool things, and even if no one else ever read about them it made me feel better ten years in the future and _that_ alone is worth it.

Also, my name is Tom and I'm also a juggler. Weird coincidence to be replying to your username... :-)

> Protection from what exactly?

I think jacquesm is advocating that you have multiple sources of income (clients) to protect from the possibility that you lose your one and only client and suddenly have zero income.

I take a different approach to my consulting. It sounds like you do too. I typically have just one client, but I charge them a metric shitload and tell them quite specifically that I do that in part to protect myself should I need to go months and months without a replacement client. Obviously there are limits to this and I'd have zero clients if I charged too much, but between that and a savings buffer built up from previous clients, I don't feel like this is a precarious situation at all.

But I also have to admit/concede that I do not think my advice is replicable. I only started being so aggressive about my rates once I already had the privilege of being able to survive for years without any income. For someone who _needs_ reliable income, jacquesm's advice is probably more useful than mine.

I'm a self-employed consultant, generally either CTO-style "make your company run better and build better software" stuff or, less often, specific robotics and automation stuff where I'm legitimately something of an expert. I have a PhD in decision theory / optimisation / meta-computing - and it was all applied to autonomous vehicles. A recent client I've picked up in the mining industry is paying me something like 300% of the highest salary I ever earned before setting out on my own.

In addition, I co-founded a company that makes Escape Rooms. We sold 13 turn-key rooms to other operators, then eventually invested in our own venue. We were the only company in the southern hemisphere to win a prestigious TERPECA award this year, so it's not a stretch to say our venue is probably the best in Australia. I've never earned a cent from this in eight years... But, this year is the one. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully?!?

Please tell me your employees are known as Mother Duckers...

I'm consulting with an Australian group called Control Bionics. They have a US company & office, with CTO and sales team in Ohio, but software engineering is done in AU. Their primary product is an electromyography and accelerometer hardware device to detect muscle activations or movements, and then most commonly used as a mouse-click substitute in conjunction with third-party eye-gaze hardware proving the cursor. (I've also designed them an autonomous wheelchair module, but that's another story...)

@pg - If your friend has not tried adding a mouse-click via something they can activate other than eye-gaze, this would be worth a shot. We have a lot of MND patients who use our combination to great success. If they can twitch an eyebrow, wiggle a toe or a finger, or even flex their abdomen, we can put electrodes there and give them a way forward.

Also, my contact details are in my profile. I'd be happy to put you in touch with our CEO and I'm confident that offers of funding would be of interest. The company is listed on the Australian stock exchange, but could likely go much further with a direct injection of capital to bolster the engineering team.

Cheers, Tom

I just set up a computer for my own kids and used Ubuntu from the get-go. About the only two things that have led to a bit of frustration from the kids have been that we can't play my collection of 1990s games on CDs (KOTOR, Deus Ex, etc) because they're all for Windows only, and that Roblox doesn't have a linux version.

I'm OK with them not thinking Roblox is a good way to learn to make games. Also, Steam on Linux with its custom version of Wine is awesome. And most 1990s games seem to cost about $5 to purchase again and not have to faff around with CD-keys...

There's a web plugin too. It can issue GET requests. That's enough to probe a lot of interesting things, and I'll bet there's an endpoint somewhere on the web that will eval any other web request, so now you've opened up every web accessible API - again, all theoretical, but at least not too far removed from an exploit.

I'll just poke my head in to say hello and thank you for all your blog posts and pod/vid-casts. I've learned a lot about the tabletop ecosystem from you, and I hope to pitch my "big project" game to your company when I get it back out my head and onto the table again. Your description about wanting to publish the "main event" type of games resonated with me, and unlike some of my other games, the one I'm thinking of here really nails that brief. Best wishes, Jamey!

I worked in a product development consultancy and a few of us decided to build our own escape room as an entry into the company's "startup accelerator". The company was thoroughly unimpressed with that as a money-making prospect and refused to fund it, but by that time we'd gone and tried a couple of local escape rooms ourselves. We found them to be fun but so undeniably crap that we were immediately convinced we could build something ten times more exciting.

Without much more thought than that, we did. One of the older and more financially capable of us decided he could use a bigger shed anyway, and rented a warehouse where we built our first game. We convinced ourselves the route to money making was to automate everything and thus never have to pay game-masters to run things, so I wrote a heap of python to network raspberry pis together and have them listen to and actuate hardware in the rooms. I wrote a DSL so that we could write more or less plain-english "stories" that would make the hardware do things when the players did things, accounting for there being multiple players and the potential for out-of-expected-order actions. We did all of this in a couple of evenings a week over the course of a year or so. We expected to then find the right venue and build this game and a few more there.

I don't entirely remember how but I bumped into someone at a gaming expo who led me to my country's largest entertainment venue company, and they sent a bizdev guy to check us out. Within a couple of years we'd sold them over a dozen rooms and became responsible for a decent percentage of their total revenue, all while taking a reasonable cut. I think I worked a two month period at about three days a week to get our first venue operating, but other than that I held a different full-time job the whole time.

Fast forward another few years and we've survived COVID and have opened our own venue with what is probably the best escape room in the world. Definitely in the top-ten. My co-founder works on the business full-time, along with a few others now. We're still entirely self-funded and are profitable with just this first room. Our next rooms in the venue go pretty-much straight to the bottom line.

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So to answer the actual question - we just built something that people wanted. And that we wanted to see exist. The first part is bog-standard Paul Graham advice, but the second part is important too. We wanted it to exist so we were motivated to keep at it until it worked. Paraphrasing the common cliché; it's taken us seven-ish years to become an overnight success.

It might be worth reminding Australians in the audience that possession of pornographic drawings or cartoons of figures deemed to be "childlike" is considered equivalent to possession of actual child pornography, in this country. As a result I suspect this kind of site and the diffusion model tech is dangerous for Australians to use until there are more deliberate guarantees against the creation of such images. Our laws will lag technology for many years, but the result here is a chilling effect whereby I'm not willing to even explore it much for fear of potential unintended consequences.