I guess I'm glad I saw the fountain in its final miserable state a few years back, fenced off and choked off by temporary tennis courts, stinking of pee, loomed over by a giant naked woman.

I was briefly an almost cool kid in SF, gathering at dusk at the embarcadero to play roshambo with wannabe vampires.

RIP to that other almost life

I'll admit it, I read the orange horror-site threads on renewable energy just because I enjoy seeing SV dipshits continue to sleep on the transition.

I'll bet this poster has also complained that "solar panels don't generate power when the sun isn't shining"

I mean, I had ice before, it was just a giant tupperware taking up the bottom third of the fridge, chilled to typically -10C but sometimes as low as -5.

Have you ever tried to defrost a chest freezer with 15 gallons of ice in the bottom of it? That was not fun.

Got a conventional fridge and reprogrammed my chest fridge to be a conventional freezer, though still one under computer control so it doesn't unncessarily run down the batteries at night. I have ice and ice cream at home for the 1st time in 15 years.

Pity that linux does not have some kind of filesystem hierarchy standard.

feel my pain in https://git-annex.branchable.com/bugs/Problem_with_SSL_CA_cert_on_Rocky_Linux_9/#comment-6e4bd01440652b03ae3683f2cd627a6d

Pretty sure that the AO Smith 120v hybrid hot water heater's power usage is measured in their cloud backend at 2x the actual kwh used. Someone forgot to account for the difference from 240v. Lol.

It's cloudy and the hot water heater is turned off to save power. Suddenly,
the clouds break, and the house's battery is confronted with more incoming amps than are safe to sustain. It's about to shut off half the solar panels to save itself. But then the hot water heater dives in and takes the power.

The car's battery is low, and the hot water heater has a good amount of hot water, but could still heat more. It runs for a while but sees the house battery is depleting under both loads, and won't meet the hourly target. So it shuts off to maximise the car and house battery charges.

Or vice-versa, the hot water heater is running low and the car stops charging.

A few scenarios I automated today.. Mostly using less code than it takes to describe them here.

This is the power graph as it was heating up. Between the HWH having 2 modes and the EVSE being able to run at 7 different levels, I will be having some programming fun.

#offgrid hot water from #PV achieved. Heated 66 gallons today with about 8 kwh, with another 8 kwh going into the car, and the usual 3 kwh for the rest of the house's loads

I've wanted solar hot water for a long time, resisted the complexity of solar thermal, pondered on direct DC heating but it's got issues, in the end cheap solar panels and hybrid heat pump wins.

(heat pump hybrid, not gas hybrid.. so ready to ditch my propane HWH)

installed hybrid hot water heater successfully, no #plumbing leaks and running #offgrid while my car also charges at max rate

May the 4th be with you

Eight hours of driving over two days, evenly split over between EV and gas, and the first time I've had to do this in a year. The 13 minutes spent charging were nicer and faster, and 10x cheaper.

Wow, it's been too long since I read a really good #haskell blog post.

https://blog.haskell.org/a-couple-million-lines-of-haskell/

Putting this away to enjoy later, I was up at 6 am working out how to winch a huge hot water heater from a pickup truck onto my porch. Which we succeeded at eventually..

I'd rather hook my mom up but she lives 200 feet from sanity.

Plug in solar just became legal in #Virginia. Pondering who to give my spare 450 watt solar panel to, along with a $250 microinveter like the APsystems EZ1-LV-NA

tempting

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116465795296421293

At the point of permantly closing off communication and cutting ties with people who continue to inflict AI slop on me in bug reports etc.

This will have financial consequences for me, and probably reduces the probability I am able to continue working on free software in the medium term, but so be it.

The probability I would irreparably burn out if I don't do this is 100%.

scoping out where to hang the hammock in the shade the lazy way, by checking the graphs of nearby solar panel arrays

re #Conservancy's Eternal November post, pro/anti-AI sentiment seems to increasingly split along the same lines as political affiliation in the US. So a meta strategic consideration is that Free Software needs to avoid a political party affiliation split or risks serious losses in its reach.

Of course this has been a consideration going well back to CoC discourse and as with that it does not make sense for the free software community to tolerate every behavior a human is capable of.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/apr/15/eternal-november-generative-ai-llm/