Scenery
On Sunday afternoon I went for a short walk up the hill behind (to the west of) a house plot I'm contemplating. Here are a few pictures - click to embiggen.
More...On Sunday afternoon I went for a short walk up the hill behind (to the west of) a house plot I'm contemplating. Here are a few pictures - click to embiggen.
More...The other day I bought a Pogoplug to use as an always-on home server. I had no intention of using the official software at all but rather planned to install Debian GNU/Linux immediately. In the process I found a little gotcha not mentioned in the otherwise-excellent instructions (alternative) I was following, quite possibly because it's new behaviour implemented since those were written.
More...Somebody asked me about using EW Windows Uploader with a USB-to-serial adapter when running under Linux (with Wine presumably). My reply might be of sufficient interest to others to be worth posting most of it here.
More...We're coming up to the end of the last Space Shuttle mission. There's been a lot of agonizing about this being the end of US human spaceflight. Similarly, there's been a lot of wailing about the possible cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope and the general disarray of NASA's programs over the next few years.
Frankly, I think this is all a bit misguided.
More...There was a lot less breeze this morning but still very little heat being moved into the bathroom despite temperatures in the collector in the mid 30s °C and in the box outside the window in the mid 20s so I dug through my junk boxes for an old computer fan to hook on to one of my Maplin 15 W amorphous silicon PV panels.
More...The solar warm air collector is now at version 1.0. Previously: part 1, 1.5, 1.6 and initial results.
The weather has been pretty poor, though with a few nice days. Unfortunately, the nicest last week were Monday when I had a hospital appointment 40 miles away so all I managed on the solar warm air panel was to buy some more draft extruder strip and Thursday when I woke feeling very depressed and only got a little bit done - I slept most of the afternoon.
Consequently I got the box to feed the warm air into the bathroom window done midday Sunday, just as the sun was far enough round to the west not to be on the panel.
More...Saw this little critter in the front garden this morning:
More...Today (Sunday) started quite bright but by the time I'd sorted myself out it had clouded over.
More...After yet more gloomy, wet and windy weather we seem to be getting a proper Billy Connolly June.
I had a bit of difficulty cutting the polycarbonate
PVC sheet to length
without it cracking but, with some
good advice from the Navitron forum
(with some nice ancillary discussion), I got a
rotary tool
by mail order which did the job pretty well.
A couple of days ago I made up the central support for the
polycarbonate
PVC
sheets with a piece across the bottom to which to tack the absorber.
The weather for the last week or two has not been good around here - windy, wet (sometimes very much so) and a bit chilly for the time of year. Somebody a little upwind with vastly more experience of the weather around here agrees. If I was superstitious I'd think it was because I started on that solar warm air panel which it's made a) difficult to get so enthusiastic about and b) difficult to hold in place and keep dry long enough to do anything useful. Also, I hoped for a bit of rain to test that ditch - be careful what you wish for.
My neighbours kindly offered me the use of their garage to finish the panel off but actually on Saturday I reorganised the stuff in the shed here to make some room and yesterday (Monday) I got the slots cut (rather messily) in the top and bottom and applied some stain but then the wind was driving the rain in through the door so I decided a better use for the evening would be to go to Thurso for some shopping. Given that it's an 80 mile round trip I don't do this often - usually it's just short of a month between visits.
Just as I finished in Tesco with the fruit and veg the power went out. They wouldn't let us continue shopping even though the emergency lights were just about adequate so I hung around as long as I could hoping the power would come back then checked out with what I had.
More...