The vestigial lead acid battery in EVs is kinda weird, and annoying when it starts to do lead acid failure things. There are engineering reasons for that cruft to still exist, but this does make me wonder when that 12v battery will finally get eliminated from cars.

I wonder if the traction battery's balancing leads could be designed to also power the crucial low voltage systems like the contactor? Battery, enable thyself..

Not gonna pursue this idea personally, cars are still boring to me even w/o the 16th century parts.

I have a repository where I've collected many conference recordings, which I archive offline. Usually that is an exercise in web scraping. In this case, I was able to clone the git merge this into my repo, and `git-annex get` the videos.

Just wanted to point out how well done this conference video publishing is. version controlled files all the way down, and can be streamed right from the git repo.

https://hub.datalad.org/distribits/recordings/

The Distribits2025 talks have been published. Many of them concerned #gitAnnex, and I've put together a list of those here.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/videos/distribits2025/

finished up my winter prep checklist yesterday by insulating the fig tree and re-burying parts of the water line

I did not expect accumulating snow today!

plenty of solar power to charge my EV

shoutout to the "security researcher" who spammed me with a report that git.kitenet.net exposes a git repository, and followed up to request payment for their "responsible disclosure"

I needed a lol

Automatic curtailing of 3 charge controllers to avoid overcharging the battery, which I implemented on friday, seems to be working well.

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