Kelvin water dropper (electrostatic generator)

I just learned the remarkable Kelvin water dropper which builds electrostatic differential and potentially can be used to generate electricity. The device was invented 150 years ago!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper

I'm so intrigued by the simplicity of this design compared with electricity generator pushed by water currents. It only require simple immobile parts, except the liquid. No expensive generator, no gears whatsoever.

The electric power generated by this device comes from the altitudinal potential energy of the liquid. I'm wondering the efficiency of energy conversion here. What is more, if multiple water droppers are linked together in the form of a relay, the efficiency might be dramatically improved and more electrical power might be collected, to make it applicable at industrial scale?

The electrical power seems to be difficult to collect in a conventional way (put in the electricity grid), but it might be used to electrolyse water to get hydrogen. And hydrogen will be collected as final product. I imagine such a device should function autonomously and requires least human intervention and maintenance.

Skype on Ubuntu almost a bomb

On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS desktop 32-bit with Unity, the Skype software has been extremely unstable and this time it ate up all the RAM and half of swap, and then got killed. It nearly crashed my computer.

Gas mileage record on my car

I bought a new Hyundai Elantra at beginning this year and I've been keeping a record of its my gas mileage on the blank page of its manual. But I finally figured out why not just post it on my website? dumb...


https://sites.google.com/site/xzhou82/2012-elantra

Badminton game with a friend

I shot the game which I played with my friend and now have it on Vimeo. It's quite interesting.

I estimate the Kodak Zx5 (which was used for shooting) can only work for around 1hr of intensive recording. I was using 720p/60frame per second video resolution to capture players' fast movement.

And the sound recording is absolutely bad.

But generally Zx5 works fine for my purpose here, it's such a handy rugged gadget, I'm quite happy with it.