Since I've started running almost everyday it a) (oddly) seems more sustainableΒ and b) puts me within spitting distance of hitting my 100 runs for the year.
I released Sunbottle, the name gave to my solar generation/usage collector, as open source and have put it up at solar.jamesvandyne.com. My co-workers gave me some good ideas for different things I could calculate e.g. including the carbon intensity of the grid at the time and so forth. I might make a small API so I can include some data on my homepage as well.
It was Halloween! This year I actually stumbled upon a proper carving pumpkin in my neighborhood. Leo drew the face on the pumpkin and I did the carving as I couldn't find the little kid-friendly carving knifes you can find in the US.
We're slowly starting to graduate from animation-only movies to more story/live actions movies. We watched a Hocus Pocus as our first Halloween movie. Leo didn't find it scary at all, which was good.
Saturday was a rare Saturday where we didn't have anything scheduled or planned. We decided to take it easy and take Leo to ride his bike at the park next to sakai-gawa. When we lived in Texas, we used to bring Sophie with us all sorts of places (we also didn't have a kid). I feel a bit guilty that we can't do that as much here, so we brought her with us as well and she was all smiles and sparkly eyes.
I sent in my ballot for the 2022 mid-term election in the US. As I live abroad without a determined return date, Texas only allows me to vote in federal elections i.e. I have no say in the governor race. I understand the logic and mostly don't mind, except this year, I'd like to vote for Beto. This year I can only vote for my congressperson and as my district is gerrymanderedΒ the likelihood of my guy winning is slim-to-none.
Speaking of elections Lula won the Brazilian presidential election. I'd been trying not to read too much about it to avoid disappointment in the case where he lost. Certainly a win for the Amazon and by extension, the rest of humanity.
Great twitter thread about the cost of running some beefy Intel NUCs at home vs the cost of a server in the cloud. I wonder if I couldn't just host my blog/services at home like I used to...with solar/battery I've got power backups too :-)
The installer finished setting up my panels and battery. One of the reasons we went with the installer that we did was because they tried to get us the most possible generation on our roof. Most of the installers we chatted with put square panels on our roof. But these guys used the non-square panels as well to completely cover our south facing roof. Not only does it look nice and clean, it generates more power, and reduces maintenance on an entire section of our roof. Edge to edge panels
One of the last things they did was setup the app that would allow me to monitor my generation etc.. directly from my phone. Problem is, it's slow and clunky. So I did what any programmer would do and spent a few hours this week reverse engineering things, so I could make a tool to record my data and display it how I want.
I've tracked most of the progress in this twitter thread. When this is done, I should back-fill this thread into Tanzawa (but I don't support videos yet...?)....But the basic idea is I want to show my generation/state in plain English and in terms that make it easier to understand just how much electricity my little system has produced. I plan to integrate this with the Octopus' api so I can build a proper "payback" page based on my tariff and so forth. Most people use excel. I make a website. Bottling the sun If you have any ideas for factoids to display at the bottom, let me know!
Sunday was a beautiful warm autumn day, about 24 degrees out. As we dropped by the in-laws, I decided to take advantage of them being closer to sakai-gawa and go for a run along the river. My goal was to run for 40 minutes and 5k, both of which I managed ππ». Lately when I've been running I've been trying to focus only on time and forgetting pace and distance. It makes running a lot more enjoyable, at least at first.
