I physically damaged one of the 3x 190w in that array. Since the originals were obscure NOS I couldn’t find another one to replace it. It was summertime so I was able to get by with 380w but that would not be sufficient to meet needs during other seasons.
So I started looking for replacements that would fill the available space. I ended up with 3x of the Trina 250w that flooded the market, the ones that Will Prowse would make famous in his video.
I made the swap on BLM land outside Las Cruces, NM and donated the 2x 190w to a family in a skoolie the next camp over. They had a 2x 100w set out so I figured they could use them. The deal was they had to come over and carry them them, I wasn’t going to deliver. :-)
Interesting. I’d never looked at my “lifetime” numbers before; I am keenly interested in daily harvests to understand the power budget but haven’t thought about the overall harvest.
Caveat: mine are higher, relative to size, because I live in the vehicle and so place more loads on the system. The rig has had two setups
the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.
It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.
In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).
PDAnet I’ve tethered a laptop to a phone via usb and bluetooth that way. Nowadays I just run my SIM in an LTE router and share the connection via wifi.
I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.
I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(
During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:
… during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. – source
Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.
sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…
It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.
Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.