Not at all a wild bet. German electricity prices *routinely* swing by over 150€/MWh on a daily basis year round. That's a massive spread to make money off of.
For a good chunk of the year (April through to October), the prices even go negative at mid-day most days of the week. This will pay itself off very quickly
This installation is actually also co-located with renewables:
> It cooperates with a 53-hectare ground-mounted PV system operated by Solizer in direct proximity, which is supposed to deliver a peak output of 72 MW (MWp). Due to changes in tender conditions, large solar power projects and battery storage systems are increasingly being planned together.
___________
As obliquely referenced with the "changes in tender conditions", solar overproduction now causes negative midday electricity prices on a near daily basis in Germany from April through to October so long as it's not super cloudy.
Therefore, anyone with a solar installation that doesn't get a special constant feed-in rate for their electricity (no longer available for commercial entities) would actually pay money to feed their solar into the grid.
Therefore it's absolutely vital for new solar in Germany to have batteries on-site so they can sell later in the day, otherwise they're simply unprofitable.
My problem is that all these alternatives require the devices to be on the same local network.
One beauty of Airdrop is that it creates and handles that local network automatically under the hood (as far as I understand). So you could be out on a hike with friends and Airdrop something.
The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.
Creates QR codes for each device to scan for webrtc. Android to android will do an audible chirp that lets the devices know to switch from qr code mode to opening the camera to scan each others codes. Tested android to apple and working, the audio chirp doesn't get caught by apple. Just wait and eventually the qr code will dissolve to allow scanning step.
Just threw this together. I was playing with audio handshake using bird-like chirp "songs" or old school modem between smartphones. Fun putting phones together as they send audio frames and confirm to start transfer, but unreliable and slow to handshake. I would like to cleanup the flow to improve. I've started using it for sending files between iphone/android/pc without having to deal with apps, emails, accounts, etc. blah.
This is using webrtc and speeds are slower than a physical USB I get 3-4MB/s instead of local network speed of 30MB/s due to browser browser implementation bottlenecks. I needed fast local network sharing of files over 5GB and tried a lot of approaches and speed doesn't budge more than 6-7MB/s .
Also you don't even need a server atleast for now in chrome webrtc transfer can work over a file:// in firefox it doesn't. For signaling you could even use free peerjs tunnel or other when user is connected to internet and otherwise fallback to this QR or offer code sharing. This will become so useful if browsers eliminate those bottlenecks.
also even in localsend speeds are limited usually to my internet speed for some reason.
Whenever I need to use something like this it's because the device isn't mine, which makes this so much better than an app. Would be cool if there was a text message option, and a bit of server so the second scan wouldn't be required. Pretty funny how simple the concept is though.
Doesn't seem to work for sending files from my Mac to my Android - I scan the code on the phone and....nothing happens? I tried sending via FF/Safari/Brave and receiving on FF/DDG. No idea what am I doing wrong.
Right, the first two steps are what make AirDrop, "AirDrop". This isn't an alternative at all if it requires both devices to already be connected to the same WiFi.
AirDrop is fantastic for sharing files with people you don't know/just met - if we have to find and agree to join the same wifi before we interact we are no longer talking about the same feature.
If Apple's AirDrop implementation had required people to join the same WiFi first, the feature would never have taken off the way it has among non-techy users. I'm still today mildly surprised I can use AirDrop as a verb in conversation and most of the time the other party knows what I mean.
Airdrop is also pretty weird: sometimes it can’t find other phones (probably when a previous transfer failed silently in the background). Also, it had some issues searching for contacts when there was no mobile/Wi-Fi connection (tried to send photos to another phone in the mountains). Sometimes it could just freeze and not work… Apple magic here isn’t really useful.
Not only that, but with iOS 17.1 or later, AirDrop transfers will continue to work if you go out of Wi-Fi range during the transfer. It seamlessly switches to an Internet-based relay.
Which, in my view, significantly decreases the value proposition, as there is no way to deactivate this feature to my knowledge (at least not without also opting out of other useful features under the "Handoff" umbrella).
A typical Apple feature, dreamed up by engineers that are presumably not aware of the existence of metered data plans...
Settings > General > AirDrop > turn off Use Cellular Data
That said, I don’t really see why you would disable that. It’s only a backup method for when the peer-to-peer connection fails. Unless you are sending huge files on a regular basis, I wouldn’t expect it to be worth disabling. Also, most metered plans I’ve encountered just cause your connection to be very slow after you hit the data cap.
If you are on a plan that automatically charges you excessive overage fees without warning and there is no other choice, then my condolences.
This. Localsend may be very useful for a set of devices you control or influence. The USP of Airdrop is ad hoc sharing with people you don't really know. Classic case is meeting strangers on holiday and you want to swap some photos of the trip you're on. One or both of you doesn't have data or time to install anything, or it's just too hard to persuade someone they should install random app. Pairing Bluetooth or setting up local networks is way too convoluted and time consuming.
With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity. It works great between iPhones and Pixel phones now they support it. It just needs support to spread to more Android devices.
> With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity.
Funny enough, I encounter so many problems trying to share things via AirDrop with friends, family, and even my own Apple devices that I just tell everyone to install LocalSend and I find that things work better.
I’m not sure why that is, because AirDrop used to work pretty well for me. But it’s been an exercise in frustration more often than not for me.
(Obviously, LocalSend works only as long as everyone is on the same network.)
I've found it very often falls back to sending over your internet connection even if your cell reception sucks. No idea why. People on a previous HN thread talked about solutions
True. But I mean these are photos (from strangers that you aren’t even willing to exchange phone numbers with?). It is a really non-essential feature anyway, so most likely everybody who doesn’t have an Apple device skips it.
The real choice though is between (a) buying an apple gizmo and not having to set up local networks; and (b) buying a non-apple gizmo and having to do that.
Speaking of ad-hoc communication channels that do not require shared infrastructure: I like the idea of https://github.com/divan/txqr which sends data using animated QR codes. An ultimate guarantee of physical proximity. The bandwidth is not comparable to WiFi 6, of course, but no OS support is required.
The better example for colored QRs is https://jabcode.org/ by by Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology. It is more recent and actively maintained.
This is what rquickshare documentation says: "Wi-Fi LAN only. Your devices need to be on the same network for this app to work." So no, it's not an AirDrop replacement.
I don’t think this article is actually accurate. It seems like Google just reverse engineered airdrop rather than Apple changing the tech they use. Because quickshare works with all airdrop devices now. Not just ones recently updated.
it's widely expected Apple will find some way to lock it out
I suppose that is "widely expected" from the usual group of anti-Apple internet griefers looking for a reason to moan in public, rather than actually doing some research or knowing things.
To quote a sibling comment:
"Apple contributed the core logic to the Wi-Fi Alliance to build Wi-Fi Aware, which they now also support."
Not generally, I just don't have that specific phone that has implemented the workaround, and so this isn't a solution for me.
Apple has consistently done everything it can to self-sabotage their implementations of stuff to comply with EU anti-trust legislation like the stuff with digital marketplaces, so I'm not holding my breath on this.
With Linux it's very easy as long as you're okay going offline - just make an ad hoc wifi network, have the other device connect to it, then you can do whatever (Localsend, host a local webserver on the linux machine, whatever.)
Iroh is a relay protocol for peer to peer transfers over the Internet so it doesn't have this problem, check out my other comment here about wrappers around the protocol for sending files, Sendme is the one I use.
Iroh's protocol can figure out if the devices are on the same LAN and avoid going over the internet. It can work without a discovery server too -- i.e. completely LAN.
Bluetooth is also very slow. Airdrop and Localsend achieve speed by using local wifi networks. The problem with Localsend is that the user themselves need to manage the creation of the local network.
I think the initial handshake for Airdrop is through bluetooth and then both devices peer through wifi. Not sure why there isn't a solution for Android, perhaps there are hardware limitations, I don't know the bluetooth stack.
If we would have good operating systems, perhaps this would be easier and more widely spread. Otherwise the solution has to come from the device manufacturer.
Airdrop has not felt reliable to me all the time, and completely fails on anything larger than a picture or short video. Especially if you are storing your files on iCloud and the pictures and videos don't live on your phone.
Been using Localsend to transfer bigger files between phone / laptops, never fails or has trouble finding a device, or stalling.
Yes exactly, that's why another RCE which will be found in Airdrop, if found by bad actor. Will be pretty fun to watch.
Last RCE in Airdrop, could be made into worm, it was found by whitehat, luckily for Apple there are still people, which are willing report exploits for little money, so billionaires can enjoy their life on yachts.
> The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.
I've recently started using blip, which works very similarly to airdrop after the initial pairing has happened. The devices do not need to be on the same network etc.
I'm honestly surprised that WiFi Hotspot doesn't isolate hosts, after companies like Meta have been caught running servers inside their apps and connecting to those to track users.
I was too when due to network problems at our last traditional LAN-party (WC3, CS1.6 etc.) we used the hotspot feature of one phone to get everyone on a local network. I was skeptical and assumed the PCs wouldnt be able to see each other but lo and behold: it worked flawlessly!
The protocol Apple uses under the hood is AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link), which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
That's the part that's hard to replicate. LocalSend and most alternatives need an existing shared network because they're just TCP/IP, they have no way to negotiate a direct radio link without OS-level support. Even Android's QuickShare, which does peer-to-peer via WiFi Direct, drops your existing WiFi connection on older devices because the radio can only be associated with one BSS at a time.
The EU interoperability mandate lxgr mentions would theoretically require Apple to expose this, but AWDL interop would mean licensing or reverse-engineering some fairly deep radio scheduling logic, so I'd expect compliance via a different (probably slower) path.
Is this working seamlessly? Iirc you needed to switch settings to bypass the contacts only thing. Plus Apple can of course create more adversarial hurdles to lock other vendors out.
And, of course this only solves the phone - phone, and not even all of them. Desktops & laptops have less hope.
>It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
This seems like such a basic solution that I'm surprised that it isn't required by any of the mainstream standards before WiFi Aware. I wonder if this was some sort of a patent issue or similar.
It is entirely possible to inject (unrelated) wifi frames while being associated to a BSS without violating the existing 802.11 standards. That’s why Apple is able to implement AWDL on standard compliant wifi hardware.
However the path towards this type of interoperability would likely go through additional standardization via IEEE 802.11* and the Wi-Fi alliance. At which point Apple will need to implement and support the new standards. There is no need to reverse engineer AWDL to meet the new European interoperability requirements.
What is needed is for wifi chipset OEMs to implement such standardization.
Something pretty routine of them.
It can be expected that Apple will also maintain the proprietary AWDL in order to support their legacy devices.
AFAIK, Wi-Fi Aware / Neighbourhood Aware Networking is basically the "standardised" version of AirDrop, and as of 2025, iOS's Airdrop transparently inter-operates with it.
AWDL is such an amazing technology, it's understandable that Apple wants to keep it only for their devices as it gives them a noticeable advantage for quick stuff sharing.
Google's QuickShare contains a reverse-engineered AWDL implementation that works on Pixel and a few other phones.
As for WiFi NAN: support for it seems rather limited outside of iOS and Android. From what I can tell the feature is barely tested on Linux and I can't find any generic Windows APIs for it either.
I've definitely used STA and AP modes concurrently on my Windows laptop with the operating system's built-in internet connection sharing function to help troubleshoot a problem in the field.
That was around a decade ago. It didn't take any extra effort on my part; I just told it to do the thing, and then it did that thing.
Researched this for a bit: there is some hardware for PCI supporting it, but Windows 10/11 not, and Linux is still work in progress, so no real support on OS level, only for some iOS/Android devices.
it might be interesting to use unused or extra wifi cards to support this. My pc motherboard has both wifi and ethernet and I only use the ethernet. That card does absolutely nothing at all.
We have been using AWDL intensely (not via AirDrop but Network.framework) for 6+ years and it fails less than 5% of the time. It's pretty impressive for a non-connected link between devices. The most common problems we face are very high device density places (100+ device in 30sqm space) and device wandering out of reach quickly (sometime as low as 5m).
This is misinformation, including most of the comments here, the majority of phones from 2014 support Wi-Fi Direct, and simultaneous group and station mode (2 BSS, yes even different channels). Even most Wi-Fi chips generally not just smartphones for a very long time. They stay connected to your home network.
When Quickshare drops your Wi-Fi connection, its not Direct anymore, that's just soft AP from an error, and if that doesn't work, it fallback to Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used for provisioning as well.
The only reason why many apps don't use it is because of buggy implementation, some phones require a full restart after using Wi-Fi Direct to fix connectivity issues, even Motorola's own product line with Smart Connect use it only with certain models, despite having Wi-Fi direct due to poor implementation (can be forced).
They even have a white list of supported adapter for the Windows app since direct is used as well, can be unofficially force enabled for Mediatek based adapters (rare on some laptops).
Back in 2016 things were much stable on Android phones with Wi-Fi Direct, even with old Blackberry, there were many apps including file managers that used it before it was essentially dropped, even for onboarding/provisioning apps like HP printers...
Apple's Airdrop success is about gaining traction, in the era of Wi-Fi Direct or other methods, most people were not aware of such features, as it required an app to be installed, they used email/messaging, even when Airdrop was first introduced and preinstalled, it took years for the average person to use it.
> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?
I think the thing that makes an OSS implementation more difficult than iOS/macOS is the friction involved.
Say you've got an android phone, windows PC, and a linux box, and you want to be able to quickly drop files from each one. unless we get some kind of cooperation across all three platforms at the OS level, you'd at minimum need to install some kind of client into each system - when the nicest feature of airdrop is that it's baked into all of Apple's OSs, in my opinion. even if it worked exactly the same way, but had to be installed, I think it would see less use - and there's no real way for a single OSS project to do that across multiple OS platforms, to my knowledge
The physical layer part really isn't complicated, and most Wi-Fi chipsets have supported something like it for over a decade now.
What's tricky is to specify and get everybody to implement the layers on top of it, including device discovery (frequently offloaded to Bluetooth for efficiency reasons), user identification (Apple runs a PKI for this) etc.
There is an open standard for that which is included in Apple devices since the iPhone 15. google implements it since the pixel 3. It’s called NAN. There are no WiFi cards available for consumers to buy which expose that as part of their firmware sadly. But wpa_supplicant has implemented part of the standard.
> It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
This is really nothing special as 802.11 implementations go, as it's pretty easy to do as long as you can control the physical channel for at least one side.
Many Windows, Linux, and Android devices have been supporthing this for years. It's usually called something like "simultaneous AP/STA mode".
No you didn't miss. I mixed the concept, UDP broadcast similar to mDNS, yes part of net library. actual mDNS like visible in Finder and actual RFC implementation not part of standard library. What I was trying to say was easy to make "mdns-ish" with just standard lib, rush typed it and ended up like that.
hah, I feel you for 3. I was constantly hitting the loopback network interface and I was like, why no discovery. in hindisght bad idea to always get the first entry in an array, now go through a list of network interfaces that i spam.
for 1. i send a mutlicast of max 512 bytes on 224.0.0.167:26999 every 3 seconds
2. not really caching, just have a map of people that get discovered.
and god bless, I just rolled with this. if people will use the tool and they will complain about it, then it will be a problem for later. for me between my home devices did not notice inconveniences.
IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy.
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
Framework laptops are selling like crazy. The pre-orders on their highest end configuration of the new pro are completely sold out, and the pre-orders on the two lower variants are backed up until their 9th batch that wont ship until August.
It looks like theyre selling more laptops than they expected to, not less.
Their laptops are niche, but that niche seems to be growing quite nicely. There's a big cultural wave of frustration with Big Tech companies and their rent-seeking practices, and Framework is doing a good job of riding this wave.
Your concern about their being bought out is unfounded. They're not a publicly traded company and dont need to sell equity to anyone if they dont want to.
It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell, and likely dont have enough allocation of at least some of those chips.
Sure, they could have thought it'd only sell a tiny number of units, but if they thought that, they wouldnt have launched the product.
> It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell,
Hate to be contrarian here but this is a known marketing trick to make product appear as selling faster than it does to create hype. I'm sure you waited in line to a club/bar for 30 minutes only to realize club/bar was empty?
They are still a for-profit company and I totally expect those batches' shipping times to actually reduce soon. An order placed right now would ship in August and at this point it must be cutting into their earnings because any regular, walk-in type of customer is not gonna wait this long for their laptop.
This seems unnecessarily cynical. Telling your customers
> 'No, we won't sell you our most expensive new laptop config at all, and if you want the other cheaper configs, you will need to wait at a minimum until August'
is not a very effective marketing stunt.
Besides, Framework has a very consistent history at this point of quite frank, open communication. If they didn't have this history, I might lend more credence to your point of view, but my experience is that these are people that are pretty allergic to that sort of bullshit, and will just say what they mean.
I really can't imagine why they'd try and undermine that reputation just to counterproductively tell people they can't buy a laptop from them.
I am not saying you're wrong, I am just saying we can't draw serious conclusions based on pure speculation. They absolutely need to built their brand first and foremost to scale up and hyping up the brand by "selling out the stock on first day" is a legitimate way to do so. They can't stand clear of regular, high-school marketing for too long. Again, this is a for-profit endeavor with serious investors expecting a return.
This is a rather silly article. Yes, elevated fossil fuel prices are bad for Europe, but they're worse for the USA, even if the USA has more domestic supply. The USA is a significantly more oil and gas intensive economy than the European economy, and will suffer greater economic fallout from the rise in prices than the European economies. Sure, US fossil fuel companies are making huge profits, but that's nowhere near enough to offset the economic damage it does to the rest of the US economy when energy prices spike.
Furthermore, US voters are significantly more sensitive to inflation, and the US administration is more vulnerable to the political fallout of this price spike because they'll be blamed for it more directly by voters.
As for these examples that are meant to sound scary:
> As we speak, jet fuel reprices. LNG cargoes are rerouted mid-voyage. Summer flight schedules thin out. Across the industrial corridors of Germany and the Netherlands, energy-intensive firms that survived the Ukraine war crisis at enormous cost are running the numbers on a second shock.
* LNG cargoes being re-routed to Asia is because Europeans are more willing and able to reduce gas import levels in response to price jumps than Asian countries, because Europe is less gas dependant (especially in the warmer months of the year), and are more able to sit out the bidding war. That's not a bad thing.
* The flights that are being thinned out are almost entirely the ludicrously cheap short-haul flights used by people who decide "hey, why not take this flight, it's only 50 euros". These flights have real substitues with train and car travel. It's not a serious economic indicator if these trips are being reduced in response to fuel price spikes. People have actually been fighting for a while to try and get rid of these flights for climate reasons.
* The energy intensive firms in Germany and the Netherlands are running the numbers and are mostly finding they'll be okay, especially if they speed up on their already ongoing electrification programs.
_______________
I'd love for European electrification to go faster, and I do think that we'd be in a better position right now if it had gone faster over the past couple years.
However, the reality is that electrification in Europe, especially in economic sectors where energy usage is a significant chunk of input costs, has been going forward at a rapid and reliable pace.
Trump's new adventure and its subsequent supply shocks are just going to speed this up even more.
The whole article feels little bit like Brexit articles in 2018, where people were spelling doom for EU and only upsides for UK, while ignoring how UK leaving EU could be positive for EU and severely damage UK.
Numerous commentators have already pointed this out, the dementia patient has done more for the takeup of solar and wind and EVs than any amount of COPxx talking ever achieved. I doubt he's aware of how much he's done to promote, or at least incentivize, the environmentalist cause.
High oil prices are good for most of the oil industry, but the oil industry is only like 3% of the US economy.
On the other hand, elevated oil prices are bad for a very large chunk of the other 97% of the US economy, who rely on buying oil and oil derived products in order to operate their industry.
Well, I have good news and I have bad news for you, and they're the same thing:
An electric machine (other than the Decent) is not any more reproducible in terms of the outcome of the shot than a manual lever, and in many ways they're less reproducible. The reason is that the actual pressure the water is under is not the important thing, the important part of coffee extraction is how that water is flowing through the puck.
Due to just random happenstance configurations that the puck can settle into, applying the same pressure every time will not result in the same extraction every time. Someone skilled with a lever and who is used to knows what it feels like when a shot flows too fast or too slow can adjust the pressure on the fly to compensate, improving consistency.
Not really a meaningful comparison because you haven't defined how much of a temperature difference versus how much of a water flow difference we're talking about here. But for most people, at least if they take the most basic level of care to not use water at like 85 degrees or 110 degrees, then no, that's just not really true.
There's a lot of folklore out there that's lingered from the early 2000s espresso community where it was widely believed that temperature was the holy grail control parameter, but now with modern instrumentation and temperature probes, it's been pretty much debunked. Temperature stability throughout a shot makes almost zero perceivable difference in taste.
It takes brew temperature differences swings of around 5 degrees Celsius before people can start to notice any difference better than random chance, and almost a 10 degree brew temperature difference before it gets to the territory of 'ruining a shot'.
Meanwhile, very small differences in puck preparation, including micron-differences in grind size, or sub-gram-level differences in coffee quantity have profound differences in flow rate, which has a very strong affect on coffee extraction levels, which has immediately recognizable differences in the produced flavours that a trained palette can reliably detect. This is before we even start talking about channeling which has an enormous affect on the coffee.
Manual control of the applied pressure can and does allow skilled people to compensate for those differences in flow rate, and combined with very basic attention to brew temperature, does help shot consistency.
So much bs that I don't even want to go further into discussion, sorry. I say this as someone who has made several thousands of espressos on E61 group machine. I'll let you have your own opinion but anyone who has made more than a few espressos will immediately understand if and when the temperature drifted away. Pressure? I've made espressos at 6 bars and 9 bars. Makes literally almost no impact or whatsoever. You're right though that 5 degrees Celsius is probably about the right minimum amount when the espresso starts to change in taste, and there's remarkably many machines which cannot sustain the temperature in shot after shot workloads.
Dietary need scales with volume, whereas incident sunlight would scale with surface area.
Assuming a spherical cow and a spherical human, the calories needed would scale with the radius cubed, whereas the calories gained from sunlight would scale with the radius squared. So while I agree this wouldn't be very many calories, even if you sat under the sun all day, I think the 4% figure is probably quite pessimistic.
For a good chunk of the year (April through to October), the prices even go negative at mid-day most days of the week. This will pay itself off very quickly
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