The ideal conditions rarely happen, because the battery usually gets filled from low to 100% even on cloudy days before all the solar panels have a good angle on the sun, typically before noon. And after that point power is going to fill a larger battery (EV).

The main situation where it can happen is when it's been raining all day until the sun breaks through around 2 or 3 pm.

I have 6 solar charge controllers, which if all running flat out in ideal conditions can charge the battery at 2.2c. Which would not be great for battery longevity, it should be limited to 1c ideally.

The particular charge controllers I chose don't support charge rate limiting. At all. But I have just now found a way..

(Good thing too; my backup plan involved a rather huge industrial contactor capable of breaking quite a lot of amps.)

@liw well I hacked on some rust today...

presenting the britishairways.com flight checkin page

it appears like this in all 3 browsers I have tested, and there is no indication what these checkboxes and buttons do

#gitAnnex can now use Iroh to connect two repositories located anywhere, including behind firewalls needing hole punching.

As well as sending data with git-annex, git pull and push works too

https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/p2p/git-annex-p2p-iroh

Developed at the #distribits hackathon in collab with matrss

This commit to crypton-x509-store fixes a security hole I found, that could leak private key material to a child process across a security boundary.

https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/crypton-certificate/commit/e353d450c381c9d6b903c4257927e0c89c97acb1

While this specific security hole is unlikely to affect many users of the library, I'm glad that the maintainer took this seriously and fixed it. And I think this drives home that #haskell has a very bad default in opening files without close-on-exec set.

Note that the old x509-store package also contains this security hole, and as far as I know will never be updated to fix it.

Now this is the Dusseldorf food I have been craving (not to speak ill of Schweinshaxe!)

1 year old! #distribits

Lovely comparison of parallel developments #gitAnnex #distribits

Awesome #gitAnnex #distribits

4 hours from now I'll be talking about #gitAnnex at the #distribits conference. There's a link to a live steam on https://www.distribits.live/

#l10n

On a deserted redeye to London. Seems the US is not getting a lot of tourists..

Rainy day test of my solar expansion and I'm pleased to see the new west-facing arrays are producing slightly more power than south-facing. The slightly brighter sky to the south doesn't make up for the larger sweep of skyglow to the west.

Look Daddy, your kid is on TV!

pulled up my old solar data from when I moved here in 2010, and this time of year, it was common for the maximum production, at solar noon, to be about 50 watts

the arrays are producing 50 watts now... after sunset

Here's my completed 11kw #solar expansion, added to the 1kw roof mount I did 8 years ago.

I have turned off all my other solar panels to test these, and they are easily powering all my needs at 3:30 pm, including EV charging, and probably will until the sun sets.

The real test will be a rainy day..

(I wish I had not been 6 inches off with that lower-right ground mount, leaving an unsightly gap, but it does not affect array stability and I didn't feel like spending 2 hours correcting it)

Completed my #solar panel install with the west facing array (4.4kw).

down to the wire

hauled 15 wheelbarrow loads of gravel in 3 hours, and that's done... ready to install the final 8 solar panels

literal cardboard box to dump gravel into has reduced my workload significantly

turns out that a box of rocks can be pretty smart if you know what you're doing

Second row ready for #solar panels, only took 1 day of wheelbarrowing gravel!

my #solar field is full of thyme

(Sowed it last year as a ground cover and was very surprised it did so well, covering 100 square feet or so.)

same newspaper that had a "we need to keep burning natural gas" editorial the other day

(the NYT)

reading our national provincial newspaper tut-tutting about long distance green energy power transmission lines in the developed world that "emit static electricity that local people said they could feel when holding a metal fishing pole"

also with regard to wiring gender analogies and MC4 connectors...

Four new solar panels are wired up, chilling in the shade and producing ~50 watts while waiting to start their work this evening.

While crimping the MC4 connectors, I was thinking about how wire colors don't stick in my head well... I keep looking at the wires going into my multimeter to remember if red or black is positive. Externally imposed memorization has always bounced off me, but I can remember tens of thousands of lines of program code/structure in enough detail to sometimes do productive lucid dream programming.

Anyway... solar... anyone can do it. Some millions of other solar panels also turning on for the 1st time today.

my first time installing a longer row on powerfield powerracks, and I was unsure how hard it would be, but some very careful alignment paid off and it was a breeze to get them mounted

first of three #solar

Cables for the #solar field expansion are run and connected up to the PV combiner box mounted on the solar fence

been maintaining the xr_usb_serial_common-1a kernel module for my own uses for way too long, didn't want to update it to a newer kernel again, and despite the kernel being documented as supporting the genuine cable, it didn't seem to work for me, so

successfully ordered the right knockoff USB to RS485 cables on aliexpress, removing unmaintained out of tree kernel module needed by the genuine cables

Produced 1 megawatt-hour of solar power #offgrid over the past year to charge my electric car. That was 25% of overall its power use, and charging cost has been stable at $0.05 per mile.

Once ongoing installations are complete, I expect to charge the #EV more llke 50% at home. It's currently limited by inverter size mostly.

We got one wire pull done this morning after a rethink of how to pull it, the second one is stuck in the second to last 90 so lube ahead, and the third is not yet attempted. Oh well, enough to install the first third of the solar panels already.

conduit is ready for wire pull tomorrow, and then I expect to get the 1st four #solar panels on fairly easily, fingers crossed

good morning

 click for video

 listen to me sing

After 9 months, I am back to filling ballasted #solar ground mounts with gravel. Half way done with them all at this point, and hoping my 4 ton gravel pile makes it to the end.