toroidalcore

Summer has a couple weeks left as far as I configure – here in the northern hemisphere, Fall begins on the 22nd of September this year. Today, Labor Day Weekend, it is beautiful. Sunny with some clouds, and cool, dry air. Still good for swimming, and great for doing stuff outside.

The animals, at this point George and Tim (gray cat and Irish Wolfhound respectively), are enjoying it as well. George is mischievously meandering around on the dresser, while Tim is hanging out downstairs after being outside with us. I am staying with family, and their two cats are similarly enjoying the day.

To think that the summer went by so quickly... It feels like it was June not too long ago. Now we're on the verge of Fall, and the crazy thing is that it will be summer again before we all know it.

Projects

I'm trying to get back into working on a couple things. I nearly have the schematic for the Solar Pi controller done – the idea is to run a Raspberry Pi off of solar-charged supercapacitors, and the controller would basically turn it on and off depending on the voltage. The capacitors keep it running if a cloud goes overhead or something, but ultimately it just runs when there's sun. It would run a website, and other things.

Along with that, I've been toying around with a static website generator. Yes, these sometimes seem to rival hydrogen atoms in quantity, but I had an idea to do one and figured it would be a good project to do stuff with Perl. It will help me put together a site for the Solar Pi, as well as my main site, or whatever else.

After that, it's a tossup between a MPPT charge controller, and the inverter project I've been stewing over. I say tossup because a big blocker for the inverter is having a powerful microcontroller. I'd like to use an STM32, but I'm not familiar with the platform. The MPPT controller is simpler, and in my mind not a bad way to get a hang of things. I figure I can sort of do them in parallel.

Internet Upgrade

My home internet is now fiber! It's 500 mb, instead of the 1 Gb I had with cable, but it's symmetric, so that's up and down. It's pretty nice. Normal usage isn't really affected, but when downloading something remotely from my phone it makes a huge difference.

I do kind of miss having a public IPv4 address, but IPv6 works quite well. The caveat being that not everything implements it, so if you want to self host having some sort of workaround is desirable. I'm exploring that with a VPS.

This ISP is somewhat local, compared to the old cable one, which was of course all over the US. It's nice to support a smaller company I guess. Plus, fiber is just superior, and I'd rather get behind that. That said, if the cable company ever does get the high split upgrade done (which would provide symmetrical service), and can give a discount, I might be tempted to switch back. But maybe not.

Music

I bought a 6-string bass back in the spring. I haven't been playing it a whole lot, but I should be to get used to it. It's actually kind of fun. Yes, you really need the 4 for most things, and 5 is pretty good overall, but having the extra low and high range is a plus.

I need to get back into playing piano, too. I'd like to be able to comp and solo a little over jazz changes. I can plunk things out, but I'm not really fluent.

Find me at @toroidalcore@masto.hackers.town