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.

Ubuntu Unity

I'm sure the radically re-designed Ubuntu interface is brilliant, but it's just not at all quite ready yet.

It seems to work fine on my Lenovo X61 laptop, but I'm having LOTS of trouble on my 2-year-old Dell T1500 desktop PC.

=== newly added:

Surely the advanced graphical user interface is big trend these days. Apple has been digging the mine all over the years, and look at the blooming of new web design, fancy/elegant styles are all over the Internet... But we're talking about Linux! Does Linux have to minic and re-engineer that Mac UI to win to get users? Isn't Linux all about freedom, performance, and get-job-done?? Wouldn't it be bad if it resulted nothing but burned out developers and grumbling users?


=== added again:

Above complaints were about 12.04 beta.

Just re-re-re-re-installed 12.04 LTS 32-bit on the Dell desktop, and rather pleased that it seems to do fine.

Look forward to setting it up on my new Thinkpad X220.


$ uname -a
Linux subtleKnife 3.2.0-24-generic-pae #37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 10:47:59 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux