Is there a good online tool for calculating the cosign of solar Zenith

There are an online calculators like this one from NOAA. This fork adds the ability to update the time with a click rather than manually. There are others but I haven’t played with them much.

Since I travel constantly I’ve been on casual lookout for an app that does the calcs for us based on local time / position but I haven’t seen any. Several apps show the solar zenith angle and we can take the COS of that manually with a calculator with trig functions. The standard android calculator app will do it.

so I can know how much solar my my panels could be making in ideal conditions?

Yeah, it’s an imperfect tool for our purposes but better than nothing. Combining it with data from a solar irradiance meter would be great but right now I can’t justify ~$100 to devote to the cause. :-)

I’d rather mods who don’t want outside participation to be able to stop their communities from showing in All.

Agreed. Niche communities can get hammered with downvotes and “I don’t want to read this” comments from readers of ALL.

It’s confounding: “show me everything”, then “I don’t like the content in your niche community”. WTF?

VictronConnect

I physically damaged one of the 3x 190w in that array. Since the originals were obscure NOS I couldn’t find another one to replace it. It was summertime so I was able to get by with 380w but that would not be sufficient to meet needs during other seasons.

So I started looking for replacements that would fill the available space. I ended up with 3x of the Trina 250w that flooded the market, the ones that Will Prowse would make famous in his video.

I made the swap on BLM land outside Las Cruces, NM and donated the 2x 190w to a family in a skoolie the next camp over. They had a 2x 100w set out so I figured they could use them. The deal was they had to come over and carry them them, I wasn’t going to deliver. :-)

Interesting. I’d never looked at my “lifetime” numbers before; I am keenly interested in daily harvests to understand the power budget but haven’t thought about the overall harvest.

Caveat: mine are higher, relative to size, because I live in the vehicle and so place more loads on the system. The rig has had two setups

• 570w array for the first 1,630 days = 2.82MWh
• 750w array for last 457 days = 0.89MWh
• total 3.71MWh

the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.

It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

PDAnet I’ve tethered a laptop to a phone via usb and bluetooth that way. Nowadays I just run my SIM in an LTE router and share the connection via wifi.

hide tether usage if possible

Some solutions involving tweaking TTL.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

“You’re not the boss of me” :-)

Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”

genmai cha, as is

ambient

Examples from Eno, the OG: 1/1, An Ending (Ascent)

During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:

… during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. – source

What are everyone’s thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot

I don’t mind them. If I did I’d block them.

Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.

• sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
• streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
• also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
• a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…

It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.

Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.

I have driven and found joy in many cars: Pinto, beetle, 2CV, original 500s, 1940s Ford tractors, beater pickups including a 1949 International, HMMWV, etc. Mopeds (like 1970s Puch), ratty motorcycles. They all make me giggly.

I had to think a few minutes about one that was just terrible, no redeeming points I could find: first (north american) gen Hyunda Excel What a soul-sucking turd.

Can’t find it now, but someone once made a vi [gVim?} version with a Clippy-style helper: “I see you’ve pressed ESC. Would you like to…”

Main advantage I’ve found in unmixed workgroups is less (no) fighting over the thermostat

My only hard rule is refrigerated/frozen items together so I can handle that bag first when I put groceries up.