Today I was driving around in the country. It was warm, and the snow that has been building up was melting. One one hill, a dirt road, water was gushing down like a stream. This will drain off soon as we get closer to spring.
My own house is on a hill. I got water in my basement, but not too much, since it tends to drain off. My area is also prone to flooding, which is another nice thing about a higher elevation.
I'm just happy that most of my ice is gone, and hopefully the water should have drained off before it gets a chance to freeze over again.
I'm just realizing that I need to vacuum the kitchen, and most of the downstairs of my house. Maybe wash the floor too. It's not too bad, but it's getting to that point.
There's a little snow left. We got more last night, and it's been cold, so it's sticking around. It is very sunny though.
It's sunny out. I am running my laptop. If you have a #solar electric system, the only real way to waste solar power is not to use it.
When it gets sunnier I have quite a bit of power available through this. I'm on grid, and this is kind of a hobby/backup source, but I try to skim excess off the top when I can.
But I also try to keep my battery charged most of the time, especially if it's close t inclement weather (which it isn't right now). I haven't made the jump to lithium iron phosphate for this system yet, so keeping it charged is beneficial since it's lead acid.
A future project will provide an easier way to top it off from the grid, as well as making transitioning between grid and solar AC power easier. But that's for future posting.
So I think I got the server set up in the new location. Might be some messing with the VPN and such, but it seems to work now. Surprisingly, DNS was only part of the problem.
Sometime in the near future I am going to move my internet-facing server, physically, to someplace where it can get fiber. It works now, but the connection speed (upload) could be better. Right now it's on a cable modem.
I wish better upload was common, but in my ISP's defense most people I guess don't need it. For streaming and normal web surfing it's not a problem. But, as soon as you start moving stuff out from you onto the greater internet, better upload is nice. It also makes a difference of course when you have multiple people sharing your internet connection.
Maybe someday symmetrical connections will be more common.
I upgraded the host system that the container that runs this is running on. It came up fine, but when the container restarted WriteFreely didn't for some reason. Just went in and started it, and made sure it was enabled, and now it's up.
I forget the model, but years ago I bought a small 12 VDC power supply that can float charge a battery at the same time. I think it's rated for a 60 W output. If the power goes out, it transfers to the battery, basically making it a UPS.
I use this with a small Mini-ITX board in a case intended for a car, which takes 12 VDC as input power. It's older, but works, and has been my web/mail/whatever server for a while. The UPS functionality is great, although it doesn't have a built-in way to signal to the server that the power has been out. For shorter outages this isn't a problem, since it can just ride through, but for longer outages I have to manually shut it down.
I haven't decided whether or not to try to come up with a way to shut the computer down automatically. I probably should, but consider this a lower priority. In the mean time, I would like to redo some of the wiring, including putting a fuse on the leads to the battery.
I had thought about trying to get all of my networking gear onto a similar low voltage UPS, including a 12 or 24 volt input ATX supply for my NAS, but for everything else I opted for a normal UPS with some larger batteries added. This has worked out fine.
There is a small solar panel on the roof over my back porch, about 21 watts. This runs into my basement where it charges a small (7 Ah, 12 VDC) gel cell battery. This panel has been covered with thick, icy snow, and so for a while has not really put out any useful power.
Recently, the weather has warmed up, and the panel has gotten a little sun exposure. I don't really use this system for much on a routine basis, but I try to keep it charged. It's really a temporary system.
I would like to try to use this panel for an idea I had, a website accessible only when the sun is out. This is part gimmick, part concept art project, part technical exploration. The panel would power a Raspberry Pi pretty much directly, which would host the site. The fact that the site would not be accessible for a while due to snow covering the panel would be part of it.
I may enact that come spring. In the mean time, I have several other panels (164 rated watts in total) charging a larger battery, which I use for things like charging my laptop, or lighting in a power outage. These are easier to keep free of snow, and in fact in the winter time they can still get some decent sun, albeit for not as long as summer.
I toyed with the idea of running my own #Mastodon instance back when I'd first started looking into it. This was also before I knew much about the #Fediverse in general. I decided ultimately to just join mastodon.social and get a feel for things. This I think was the right thing to do.
Since then, I've moved to hackers.town for my microblogging needs, which is a nice community. I've kind of put aside the idea of selfhosting Mastodon, partly because of the resource usage, and partly just because this is working for me. I selfhost a lot of other stuff, like web and email (and this place, which is somewhere between microblogging and normal blogging (macroblogging?)), so at this point I've just been thinking I'd stick with this for a while.
In the mean time, I'm kind of content that at least there are other options out there for selfhosting, in that someone will be able to even if I don't have the urge for it right now.
I'm just looking at the #cat perch I bought a few years ago for George. It has a column that's wrapped in jute rope, great for scratching. Most of it is frayed right now. He still scratches it, but I should see if I can rewrap it soon.
He likes scratching on that carpet stuff they use for various audio cabinets. In fact, most cats seem to like that in my experience. Thus explaining the damage to my bass amp speaker cabinets.
He doesn't scratch on too much else. But scratching is good, and I try to encourage it on the right things. He also has some of those corrugated cardboard scratch pads, which he likes.