fratermus

fratermus, 2 months ago

to keep from mixing up pet ash containers

fratermus, 2 months ago

www.eternal-september.org

free access to text froups

fratermus, 3 months ago

any idea why distrowatch periodically goes down for days before returning.

My guess is it’s run as a hobby by A Guy “on his own time and his own dime”.

I mainly use it to find out if some distros have updates to their ISOs but I find it very annoying that quite frequently it’s down completely.

You might follow the RSS feed. Your feedreader would catch new posts whenever they are available.

fratermus, 3 months ago

I ran a FidoNet BBS back then on a 386-16 and 2400 baud modem. Woot! It would run WordPerfect 5.1 while people were logged on to the board but compiling brought it to its knees.

fratermus, 3 months ago

Hopefully won’t affect us. This language:

The term does not include lodging or residing overnight in a motor vehicle that is registered, insured, and located in a place where it may lawfully be

a couple times in the text

fratermus, 3 months ago

Sebastian

fratermus, 3 months ago

the site is still up, at least.

fratermus, 4 months ago

In the early 90s I was running a BBS on DesqView over DOS and was annoyed by the limitations. My older hardware didn’t have grunt or RAM (SIPP at $50/MB) to run OS/2 like the big dogs. I also had nearly no money (grad student).

I started experimenting with MINIX, and from there to linux. IIRC I started with Slackware, flirted with Red Hat, then found Debian and it was true lurve. Since that time I’ve generally run servers on Debian stable and workstations on Debian testing.

fratermus, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Do you have stats on how many watt hours you collect from the 100w panel in the Dec/Jan (assuming you’re in the northern hemisphere),

You can model average insolation (and use that to extrapolate average harvest) by month using tools like PVwatts. Here’s a walkthrough.

Using Bowling Green, KY as an example since it’s on the 37th. 100w of flatmounted panel on an MPPT solar charge controller would average:

<span style="color:#323232;">Solar wattage	100
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Month	Daily Wh Avg
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jan	168
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Feb	249
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Mar	331
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Apr	426
</span><span style="color:#323232;">May	513
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jun	598
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jul	555
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Aug	506
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Sep	396
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Oct	305
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Nov	201
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Dec	156
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Average	367
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>

Derate those yields by ~18% if using PWM. <-- rule of thumb, not gospel

if we are on the west coast instead, here’s Santa Cruz, California:

<span style="color:#323232;">Solar wattage	100
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Month	Daily Wh Avg
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jan	206
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Feb	286
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Mar	386
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Apr	519
</span><span style="color:#323232;">May	582
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jun	642
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jul	605
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Aug	542
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Sep	447
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Oct	349
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Nov	245
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Dec	183
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Average	416
</span>

and how those stats vary on overcast days vs sunny?

The figures above are daily averages, including normal weather patterns and are how we size our systems. But for the sake of curiosity/understanding, my observations have been that if my clear-day harvest is X then overcast is 0.6X, bright overcast is 0.7X and dark/rainy is 0.05-0.10X. Cloud-edge effect and other reflective phenomena can result in harvest >1X.

While it does freeze here (occasionally down to 0° F) the battery will be inside the chicken coop where the temp has always remained above freezing.

A battery warming solution could be implemented for $20 (warming pads, 12v temp controller).

fratermus, 4 months ago

What would happen if it was connected to a battery pack containing one 3.6V 18650 battery such as this?

There are many reasons why this would not work. The first one is 3.6v is not enough voltage to boot the solar charge controller in the first place.

Perhaps you could tell us what you are trying to accomplish.

Renology Wanderer

There is no L in Renogy.

Note: I do not own any Renogy gear but have had hands on many of their components (including a Wanderer) and found all to work as designed.

fratermus, 4 months ago

Nominal 12v panel + nominal 12v battery is good, and the Wanderer will charge LiFePO4 with a canned profile IIRC.

Here’s the next hurdle: I’d expect a 10w panel on PWM to max at ~7w under excellent conditions; we could estimate this more accurately better if we knew the panel specs. And the controller will require a certain amount of power to run its own innards. The Wanderer 10A specs say Self-consumption <10mA but this may be with the panel[s] disconnected, or when the panels are connected but there is no PV input. Or it may really be <10mA in all cases; not much electronics inside a PWM compared to MPPT. If you do it please report back with what you find.

These kinds of challenges are common in very small (experimental, learning) solar setups; when the numbers get larger this kind of challenge largely gets lost in the noise of bigger numbers.

fratermus, 4 months ago

Isc 0.61A

We can ballpark maximal/theoretical harvest by multiplying the bank voltage (Vbatt) by the panel’s short circuit current (Isc).

• Vbatt 10.0v - ~0% SoC = ≤6.1w (Isc 0.61A x Vbatt 10.0v)
• Vbatt 13.0v - ~50% SoC = ≤7.93w
• Vbatt 14.0v - 100% SoC = ≤8.54w

Real world conditions and esoteric concepts like I/V curve fill factor will conspire to depress observed current (A) and therefore observed harvest (W). The quick math to above is just to illustrate how the bank voltage tail wags the PWM dog.

Keep us in the loop about how the project turns out. :-)

fratermus, 5 months ago

1940 Turkish Mauser (8mm), at the newest 83yo. But that year’s production was cobbled together from old stock receivers and barrels made just before 1900. So parts of it could be ~120yo.

Might not be tech now but in the late 19th c. the Mauser bolt action was absolute tech.

fratermus, 5 months ago

I worked an ISP in the nineties and a coworker registered atdot.com, ran a home server for it with sendmail, and assigned himself the dotat username. He would tell people over the phone that his email was “dot at at at dot dot com”. This was when you had to contact InterNIC directly to register a domain.

Could be the same guy for all I know.

Digression: I registered mouse.net in ~1996 back when TLD categories were being enforced. But the NIC bungled the renewal and by the time I proved it to them it had been snagged by a Korean company. NIC threw their hands up because no one there spoke Korean. I think Altavista’s Babelfish existed then but I don’t remember if it supported Korean.

fratermus, 5 months ago

I am reminded of those fuzzy-head drinking bird things.

fratermus, 5 months ago

Cf. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Also Behind the Bastards’ John Wayne podcast

IMO xtians want Strong Daddy Figures they can prostrate in front of like they do the Strong Sky Daddy.

fratermus, 6 months ago

capybara

fratermus, 6 months ago

scrooged

fratermus, 6 months ago

I’ve got a kindle keyboard 3 and want to know if there’s anything better out now

Better in what way?

KK3 + calibre is hard to beat. I own a paperwhite and some kind of nook (thrift store pickup for $10) and prefer the K3 experience the most. I typically end up using the paperwhite more because I am often in low-light conditions.

When these die my perfect ereader would be

• eInk
• android-based so I could run my preferred reader (FB Reader)
• google play supported so I could choose my own browser

fratermus, 6 months ago

It’s more likely that a Google data center exists in 100 years than your house.

Yes, but it’s more likely that Google will have killed a particular service like Drive. Cf. Google Reader, Hangouts, Data Saver extension, Buzz, etc.

google graveyard

fratermus, 6 months ago

Do you prefer digital or physical books?

Digital. I live in 76ft^2^ and can no longer store thousands of physical books like I did in a “sticks and bricks” house. But there are ~13,000 easily stored between the e-ink kindle and waiting in the wings in calibre.

Reading is a big part of my retirement plan.

fratermus, 6 months ago

I emerged from a blackout drunk sitting in a classroom; it was the last hour of the GRE (graduate record exam). I was reeking of alcohol and I remember feeling sorry for the poor bastards seated next to me. I finished and walked directly across the hallway to the bathroom and vomited a while.

I’d gone to a bar the night before for one dollar draft beer; I had $2, so 1 beer + tip. I don’t know exactly what happened but later heard people thought it would be funny to buy me drinks before the exam and I was too young/dumb not to accept.

The most bizarre part of the story is I scored a dead-average score on the exam.

fratermus, 6 months ago

The Bridge (Sweden/Denmark, not the America/Mexico remake).

I bailed on the America/Mexico one, but tne the UK/France version is worth watching for Clemence Poesy’s performance.

fratermus, 6 months ago

• Slow Horses (UK/US) Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas? Yes, please!
• Broadchurch (UK)
• Glitch (AUS, first season only)
• Chef! (UK, first two seasons only)

Forgetting many others but just having first cup of coffee