Exploring converted filling stations and solar powered EV chargers in South Carolina

One minute video on how to handle the heat by: finding water, immersing in beauty, focusing on something else, taking a bath, getting up early, going for a swim (even if you’re a squirrel), and relaxing on a cool rock…all in the time it takes for a Central Ratsnake* to cross our driveway. The sounds are dulled because even the birds were panting instead of singing on those hot afternoons…

*Yes, the species I grew up calling Black Ratsnake and had just trained myself to call Gray Ratsnake got split again by the geneticists this week. As of today, this beauty is a Central Ratsnake.

Favorite photo of the week: Green Heron preening, best of 70 photos taken in bird mode before my model got tired of posing.

Current seasonal highlights: catching spiderwebs gleaming in the sun and the first colored buckeye leaves, a few already on the ground.

Don’t forget to go out and play! And:

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My house has the same amount of solar, passive HVAC, 1/10th the battery and inverter, can charge my car 3x as fast.

Dad's new and older solar arrays

https://www.youtube.com/live/VsnqWp3r7yA?is=DzNPx6uc0Xygq5qz 

  Had fun!

Retrospective: I visited Drake Bay in December 2019. Despite that being quite a while ago, I keep recommending the location to folks, so I figured I should write up my thoughts for ease of future sharing.

This is one of the trips I keep going back to when I want a mini mental break, so I feel like I’ve spent months in Drake Bay. In reality, I was there for just five immersive days (four nights).

Getting there: My friends in Drake Bay gave me the mid-budget recommendation we followed. Their Costa Rica rule: do not plan your international flight and your in-country hop on the same day.

So we spend our first night near the airport in San Jose (not as boring as I expected since I saw parrots in the parking lot the next morning!), then we took a small flight* to Drake Bay. Our Airbnb host arranged to have us picked up at the teensy-tiny airport in a four-wheel-drive vehicle that bounced along roads and through shallow water to our secluded home base.

* We flew on Skyway, but they are now defunct and Sansa fills the same niche.

#1 highlight: Sitting on the balcony drawing or watching a sloth, toucans, monkeys, and macaws. I highly recommend this Airbnb or the other one next door managed by the same host. He arranged tours, let my try my broken Spanish then used his excellent English when my brain got tired, and provided the perfect atmosphere to relax and be amazed by wildlife. Plus, the AC was appreciated on hot and very humid days.

#2 highlight: A boat ride north up the coast past a seabird-nesting rock then into a mangrove-laden paradise where we could watch reptiles, birds, bats, monkeys, and so many other things as we slowly cruised past. If you take one tour, I recommend this one over Corcovado, which was cool but people-filled and without the slow naturalist pace I enjoy (plus gave me a very painful blister between my toes when I didn’t dry my feet well enough after the water landing). I don’t have a link to the mangrove tour, but it will be on the Airbnb host’s recommended roster.

#3 highlight: Great company, including both my amazing traveling companion and the expert natural-history knowledge of our local friends. While you can’t fully replicate my good luck in this department, you can enjoy their Night Tour.

#4 highlight: Walking along footpaths through the rainforest to Cocalito Beach — a hidden treasure with no one else around. There aren’t roads in most of the area, and the paths are the way to get around…while also picking up beautiful flowers off the ground, ambling over a swinging bridge, and being awed by wildlife. This part of the trip felt very much like Monteverde in 2001.

#5 highlight: Food! Walking a few blocks to the town center to buy delicious fruit then gorging on amazing papayas back at our Airbnb was the highlight, but the smoothies were also excellent and so was a restaurant meal on a rooftop overlooking the ocean.

(Chocolate was in short supply though. Maybe bring your own if you’re a chocoholic like me?)

New additions to my iNaturalist life list: 76 (My previous trip to Costa Rica was pre-iNaturalist, so some of these were old favorites. Also, I have no clue why I hadn’t reported Black Vultures previously since I see them almost monthly at home. I’m a hit-or-miss iNaturalister.)

Would I go back? In a heartbeat! I like to visit new locations, so Drake Bay hasn’t returned the top of the list yet. But just writing this post pushed it up a notch…

Photo notes: These pictures were taken with my previous point-and-shoot camera, which boasts a less intense zoom than my current bridge camera. In other words, the wildlife was pretty darn close!

_{Note on links: I don’t get any kickback if you choose any of the excellent Drake Bay folks I’ve recommended, but the link to the camera is an affiliate link and I’ll get a few pennies if you buy anything on Amazon soon after clicking on it. Thanks for paying for my next camera battery!}

I've spent about 100 hours of work to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/

This has me reconsidering my continued use of #haskell

I am actively reviewing my dependencies and expect to have less of them shortly.

gotta love a 1489 line git commit message written by a LLM that just

https://github.com/yesodweb/yesod/commit/1ee25122d82f8f94136bf1496a825c6c00b74fcf

The highlight of this week was carving out a full Saturday to paddle…in the rain. I thought I’d planned ahead with all the food and water and spare batteries I’d need, but didn’t realize that if I used my poncho to protect the electronics I’d end up running out of dry fabric for cleaning lenses!

Despite having to put the cameras away eventually, there’s nothing like a steady stream of water to anchor me in my own skin. Eating the first wild dewberries and blackberries of the year plus harvesting the first chanterelles was also a plus.

New thing I learned this week: Yellow False Foxgloves (Aureolaria spp.) are in the Broomrape family (along with Bearcorn). And, like the other members of that family, they’re parasitic on the roots of other plants (in their case, they steal water and nutrients from oak trees).

In the photos above, the yellow flowers on the left is Aureolaria, which was beside a lovely Russula mushroom, which is the same type of fungus the Box Turtle is chowing down on in the middle picture. The photo on the right is an American Snout Fly on Jewelweed, added just because I liked the yellow-yellow-yellow lineup.

Sensory feature: Did you know that if you scoop a drowning Luna Moth out of the water, her feet will cling to you with the sharp tenacity of beetle legs? (In the video, she’s hidden in the niche she crawled to after I offered her a spot on dry land.)

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deferred running the hot water heater until the heat of the day... time to suck the heat out of this place like a good little energy vampire

In 2020, I learned that the peak firefly season (in the eastern U.S.) is right around the Fourth of July. More recently, I’ve gotten into oding and am learning that dragonflies and damselfies (Odonata) have seasons as well.

Odonata spend most of their life as nymphs underwater. Here in southeast Ohio, the first emergence depends on the weather but usually happens in April, with more and more adults showing up until we hit the peak around the middle of June.

Most interesting (to me) Odonata fact: Many Odonata species are like spring wildflowers in that they only show up as adults for a short time.

Best way to get photos of Odonata: Go out in a kayak first thing in the morning as nymphs crawl up onto rushes and sedges then break out of their exoskeletons. For a few hours, the newborn creatures are pale and soft and — critically for those of us without a fast shutter finger — not yet able to fly.

Best time of day for Odonata: Despite what I just said above, dragonflies and damselflies are sluggish until the day warms up. To see the maximum number, go out in the afternoon (but then they’ll be moving fast!).

Most addictive element of oding: Here in Ohio, Odonata enthusiasts are even faster to ID on iNaturalist than birders are.

My iNaturalist Odonata life list to date: 59 species

Odonata I don’t even try to identify to species: Bluets (except for Orange Bluets which are orange, not blue…)

Biggest danger of oding: You have to look down to notice most of them, which means fewer pictures of birds!

Recommended reading: If you live in my state, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Odonata of Ohio is well worth the price.

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_{Note on links: I only recommend books I adore, but I do get a few pennies if you buy the guide I recommend using the affiliate link above.}

The last official day of spring on Lake Rupert felt like paddling through a Monet painting.

Summer Solstice dawned foggy at Dow Lake, which made for some gorgeous spiderwebs. It took me a while to paddle around this trio and figure out that backlit by the sun was coolest shot.

And today felt like the last day cool enough to make the sunny parts of the bike path fun as dog-day cicadas start easing into song.

I spent most of my outdoors time this week obsessively recording dragonfly and damselfly species, but I looked up long enough to enjoy this Yellow Warbler flitting through the canopy. I also saw the most gorgeous male Scarlet Tanager, but he moved so fast the only photo I got was with my eyes.

And, of course, I looked at lots and lots of Odonata. More about them in my next post…

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cistern 40% full

got very lucky with rain and might be able to refill the cistern in a few days, rather than a few weeks

Solstice brought a #solar power record here, and the closest I've gotten to being able to see the full curve of my arrays.

24.5 kwh generated, with 7 kwh going to the water heater and 10 kwh to the car. Both dump loads well dialed in to match available power.

Now that I've installed a liner in my cistern, I have to religiously protect the feet of the stepladder from puncturing it.

So if you see this load of laundry on the line, you might have spotted a member of the church of Ladder-Day Socks.

#dadjoke

"lizard ladder" is on my todo list for today

after redirecting about 30 million hits of facebook's DDOS scrapers from my cgit to facebook.com/robots.txt over the course of 2 weeks, they seem to have finally gotten the message

amazing

Two weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my current novel, so last week was adventure time! Lake Erie is the closest Big Water to where I live, and I love ferries so a return to Kelley’s Island seemed in order.

Disappointment: big water & June = many people

Unexpected excitement: stops at Cranberry Bog State Nature Preserve on the way up up and Brown’s Lake Bog on the way back were pure geeky delight!

Rarest (sub)species sighted: Lake Erie Watersnake (very easy to see swimming just offshore from the lakefront campsites on Kelley’s Island)

Number of new species added to my iNaturalist life list: 13 (but three were invasive species…). My favorite was the Sphagnum Sprite (damselfly, not pictured). Four others are pictured: Hairy Beardtongue (white flower), Calico Pennant (dragonfly), Rose Pogonia (peachier flower), and Tuberous Grasspink (magenta flower).

Coolest behavior: Grackles collecting huge mouthfuls of mayflies on the beach (presumably for their chicks)

My coolest behavior: First time I felt secure enough to paddle in Lake Erie (albeit in a in a protected cove — the one the campground is nestled within).

Would I go back? To the bogs, in a heartbeat! To Kelley’s Island? Only during the off season…

idk maybe this is the apocalypse we deserve

percent of LWN comments about Conservancy's LLM document that engage with any of the ethical concerns in it: 6%

percent that are pro LLM use: 14%

(The rest are mostly quibbling over how to annotate it in commit messages, which I don't take as *strongly* pro, but certainly leans pro.)

The document tries to get people to engage with the ethics of AI use and make principled decisions, but at the same time it slants decisions toward AI use. It is deeply flawed.

cracked a rib -5 con

#caturday

successfully shot a lizard out of a pipe

And then you get to be in bash heavy material back toward the walls mini game for a long time.

Ever wanted to feel like a video game character? Try installing a heavy liner in a water cistern. Nothing like dangling off a wall and doing a leap out to land in the small space in the middle, avoiding the produce (sacks of rice and potatoes used as weights).

Having slept on Conservancy's "Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions" I think my takeaway is that I am actually not saving the world. I have no interest in doing so. I'll do my own little things that will be used by the people who find them useful. If this means lessened engagement in the "software freedom" community who are busy prompting proprietary systems because they've decided they're the second coming of RMS, so be it.

time to cathederal up

Somehow I have not actually deployed any AI slop removal tech until today when I turned on https://github.com/Stevoisiak/Stevos-AI-Blocklist

Submitted Plugshare's new AI review summaries and happy they quickly blocked those.

This is somehow the featured website on https://earlyweblinks.com/ this week.

Read all about my web site here! https://earlyweblinks.com/site-of-the-week/joey-hess

Kind of reminds me of back in 1995 or so when my website would randomly end up picked by some best of the web list that I never heard of. The web is still a small place I guess.

Maybe I should join a web ring or something?

how many watts does a fridge use?

If you search this, you will get all wrong answers based on the nameplate, which lists the maximum power the fridge uses at compressor startup.

A 1 kw balcony #solar system with a small battery can easily run a fridge 24/7 365 in all weather conditions. I did that for 5 years with a similar system.

(Saudio Aramco not the one you were thinking I was thinking of.)

Remembering the insane LNUX IPO and how we all knew it was insane at the time. 26 years later that company has been absorbed by Gamsetop and the circle of meme stock is complete.

Hoping for a similar ignomious end for another.

Interesting to see what people are getting up to with vibe coding and then reverting that in the next release without any indication of what bug it introduced.

In other news, replaced a git-annex dependency and sped it up by about 400%

Interesting to see what people are getting up to with vibe coding and then reverting that in the next release without any indication of what bug it introduced.

In other news, replaced a git-annex dependency and sped it up by about 400%