Just a geek, finding my way in the fediverse.

  • 90 Posts
  • 482 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • “to make it more manageable” - this is the part I don’t get.

    Why do we HAVE to start school/work/whatever at 08:00 local time? It’s just a number that represents a time of day, it doesn’t matter what that number is. I’m perfectly fine starting work at the exact time of day I always do and calling it by the UTC time, 11:00.

    If everyone just used UTC then 11:00 is 11:00 everywhere, regardless of the part of the day it falls on locally. In some locations that’s early morning, some mid-day, some afternoon, some evening, etc. Business hours would be simple and universal - “o we’re open 12:00 - 20:00” and everyone in the entire world would know what time they’re open without needing to account for timezone offsets, savings times, etc. That’d also be really helpful for companies and employees that are global - “in this US office we work 11:00 - 20:00, that EU office works 09:00 - 18:00”. No more needing to do what I do all the time which is things like “we’re going to move that meeting to V PT / X CT / Y ET / Z UTC / Q CET”… or the even worse thing where people say “we’re doing it at R time” without bothering to specify a timezone and then everybody has to know, research, or ask wtf timezone they’re talking about.

    It seems like there’s this strong belief that “08:00 MUST be early in the day in my locale” but… what does it matter?

    Okay, rant over. I have extremely strong feelings about time and timezones because it’s a continuous source of tomfuckery.



  • I’m not who you asked but… I’ve never heard much good about jackery and they’re comparatively super expensive. Though, admittedly I haven’t price compared in several years. When I was looking, jackery was still using lipo batteries instead of the lifepo4, while being more expensive, so it was easy to discard them. Surely they’re using the newer chemistries now…

    You might check into ecoflow or bluetti.

    Edit: I have quite a bit of bluetti stuff and haven’t had any problems except with a folding 220w solar panel that was “free” with a battery purchase. It works, but not remotely close to spec even in ideal circumstances… Might be a reason they were giving them away : )

    The batteries/inverters have all done well though the passive drain is significant.


  • That’s a really cool idea. I just had two small solar cells on one side of the case which made it very directional. I’d toyed with the idea of building a little “housing” that was fixed to the pole where it could only enter in the correct orientation but I got lazy/impatient and just ran it up.

    Seems like that case would help a lot. My first worry was series vs parallel, but that is helpfully called out in the README (with these three panels in parallel) and if they were in series it’d likely be WAY too much voltage (depending on the charge controller).

    As long as the mounting location gets decent sun from at least one angle for a good part of the day, that looks like an awesome solution. I’m bookmarking it for future builds, so thanks : )


  • I’m not smart so I climbed the tree as high as I could, strapped a fiberglass pole with a pulley to the trunk for extra height, then hoisted the node up via the pulley.

    It “worked” but I didn’t fully clear the canopy so the solar charging was not great. Controlling the position/angle of solar cells is difficult when hoisting a node








  • Back when? I upgraded my storage with a couple of 14TB drives ~2 years ago and HDD was the only answer. Doing a quick search, the largest SSD I can find at the moment is 8TB and they’re well over $1,000 each.

    Also, there are crazy strong magnets inside of HDDs. I initially thought this is what the above was referring to since I use the magnets from old decommissioned HDDs to hold things to the fridge : D

    EDIT: I am weird though and prefer a desktop as my primary computing device… which doubles as a media server… in addition to my non-media server.




  • I’m going to claim this one wasn’t entirely my fault and should have been coded better… But I ran it.

    I ran a script that expected to run from a bin directory, cd/chdir to a input file directory, then do a sed on every file to replace windows line endings to UNIX/Linux line endings. After that it would start loading and processing them.

    The problem was, if the directory it tried to change to didn’t exist, it silently continued and ran it on the current directory… You know, the bin directory… With all the compiled C binaries.

    So at about 16:30 on a Friday, 30 min before we started our huge weekend builds, I nuked about 70% of the binaries by randomly replacing all bytes that looked like crlf with lf. Turns out binaries didn’t like that.

    Good times.