[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 2 points 11 hours ago

Looks like high sulfur bunker fuel is back on the menu, boys.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 14 points 2 days ago

It's likely to be forced participation.

You want to use airtags and benefit from other phones providing tag locations? Then you have to supply data to the airtag network as well. Quid pro quo and all that.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 9 points 2 days ago

pollutes internet for years to come and spews disinformation,

I wonder if future search engines will have an option to ignore results from 2022 to 20?? to avoid woeful AI content?

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 points 3 days ago

You can set up fast roaming (802.11r) which is supported by most mobile clients and gives a much more organised handover between APs. Bit of config tangle but apparently works ok once you get it going.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 2 points 3 days ago

They are capable of voice and data but are only permitted for text messaging due to transmit power restrictions.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 points 6 days ago

Get on uhf40 at the top of the gateway bridge in Brisbane, you can hear every whinging/gossiping truckie in the city all at once haha.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 22 points 6 days ago

Why the fuck isn’t there just a simple status LED that is on the same circuit as the camera?

Because cameras aren't simple on-off devices powered by a single wire, that's why. It's always got power, and it's turned "on" (send image data over the data bus) and "off" (do not send data) by software commands over the same data bus.

So the most convenient solution is then have the camera IC have an output that can drive an indicator light. And as camera ICs are basically full computers in their own right, they can be reprogrammed so that they don't turn on that output.

End result is that you are much better off either having a physical cover over the camera lens, or having a USB camera that you can unplug.

11

I know, upvotes/downvotes mean less compared to That Other Place. But it would be nice if I could set Boost to not show all the spammy spam spam in my communities that have a score below a configurable threshold.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 92 points 3 months ago

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 158 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)
  1. Replace CMOS battery.
  2. Get small UPS.
  3. Discover that small UPS's fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
  4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
  5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
  6. Get small generator.
  7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
  8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
  9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
  10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 119 points 7 months ago

"Outdated", or "impossible"?

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 143 points 8 months ago

This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.

What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.

And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?

45

I subscribe to a bunch of communities and often there is a cross post with the same title and the same URL link across four or five of them at once. This usually results in a screen or two of the same post repeating for me, and I usually just find the one with the most commentary to check out.

It would be nice just to do that automatically, and shrink to a single line or otherwise "fold in" the other cross posts to the highest commentary post so they don't clog my feed. Maybe a few "related" lines under the body of the post when you go into it, similar to the indication that it's been cross posted.

Thoughts?

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 119 points 9 months ago

Send them a letter via registered mail stating that upon receipt of said letter they waive their right to waive your rights.

23

Hi all,

In an effort to liven up this community, I'll post this project I'm working on.

I'm building a solar hot water controller for my house. The collector is on the roof of a three-storey building, it is linked to a storage tank on the ground floor. A circulating pump passes water from the tank to the collectors and back again when a temperature sensor on the outlet of the collector registers a warm enough temperature.

The current controller does not understand that there is 15 metres of copper piping to pump water through and cycles the circulating pump in short bursts, resulting in the hot water at the collector cooling considerably by the time it reaches the tank (even though the pipes are insulated). The goal of my project is to read the sensor and drive the pump in a way to minimise these heat losses. Basically instead of trying to maintain a consistent collector output temp with slow constant pulsed operation of the pump, I'll first try pumping the entire volume of moderately hot water from the top half of the collector in one go back to the tank and then waiting until the temperature rises again.

I am using an Adafruit PyPortal Titano as the controller, running circuitpython. For I/O I am using a generic ebay PCF8591 board, which provides 4 analog input and a single analog output over an I2C bus. This is inserted into a motherboard that provides pullup resistors for the analog inputs and an optocoupled zero crossing SCR driver + SCR to drive the (thankfully low power) circulating pump. Board design is my own, design is rather critical as mains supply in my country is 240V.

The original sensors are simple NTC thermistors, one at the bottom of the tank, and one at the top of the collector. I have also added 4 other Dallas 1-wire sensors to measure temperatures at the top of tank, ambient, tank inlet and collector pump inlet which is 1/3rd of the way up the tank. I have a duplicate of the onewire sensors already on the hot water tank using a different adafruit board and circuitpython. Their readings are currently uploaded to my own IOT server and I can plot the current system's performance, and I intend to do the same thing with this board.

The current performance is fairly dismal, a very small bump of perhaps 0.5 - 1 deg C in the normally 55 degree C tank temperature around 12pm to 1pm, and this is in Australia in hot spring weather of 28-32 degrees C.(There's some inaccuracy of the tank temperatures, the sensors aren't really bonded to the tank in any meaningful way, so tank temp is probably a little warmer than this. But I'm looking for relative temperature increases anyway)

Right now , the hardware is all together and functional, and is driving a 13W LED downlight as a test, and I can read the onewire temp sensors, read an analog voltage on the PCF8591 board (which will go to the NTC sensors), and I'm pulsing the pump output proportionally from 0-100 percent drive on a 30 second duty cycle, so that a pump drive function can simply say "run the pump at 70 percent" and you'll get 21 seconds on, 9 seconds off. Duty cycle time is adjustable, so I might lower it a bit to 15 or 10 seconds.

The next step is to try it on the circulating pump (which is quite an inductive load, even if it is only 20 watts), and start working on an algorithm that reads the sensors and maximises water temperature back to the tank. There are a few safety features that I'll put in there, such as a "fault mode" to drive the pump at a fixed rate if there is a sensor failure, and a "night cool" mode if the hot water tank is severely over temperature to circulate hot water to the collector at night to cool it. There are the usual overtemp/overpressure relief valves in the system already.

All this is going in a case with a clear hinged cover on the front so I can open it and poke the Titano's touchscreen to do some things.

Right now I am away from home from work, so my replies might be a bit sporadic, but I'll try to get back to any questions soon-ish.

A few photos for your viewing pleasure:

The I/O and mainboard plus a 5V power supply mounted up:

The front of the panel, showing the Pyportal:

Thingsboard display showing readings from the current system:

Mainboard PCB design and construction via EasyEDA:

view more: next ›

dgriffith

joined 1 year ago