I have a few multicolor Christmas light strings up in my front yard. These were leftover from the holidays. Other strings have been switched to clear lights. Since it's warm out, I'm going to go switch these remaining ones to clear.
I live at a corner, and it's pretty dark there at night. I usually leave some lights up all year round, if only to make my house visible to drivers. I think it looks nicer than just leaving the doorway light on too.
Several components of my home network run off of low voltage DC, 12 or 24 volts. The computer I'm using as my router is one example – it's a fanless industrial PC that actually takes I think 10-32 VDC. I have it running from a 24 VDC power supply.
My small off-grid #solar power system gets used for things like charging batteries and occasionally running my laptop. I make an effort to use it, and not just let the battery float, but I've been thinking about how to divert some of the excess power.
One idea I had was to use a small DC-DC converter, going from 12 VDC (from the battery) up to 24 VDC, diode OR'd with the power supply running my router. It would basically look at the input voltage, and push current up to the 24 VDC side such that the battery didn't sink below 14 VDC (or some other setpoint). The idea being that when the battery is in absorb, you can skim excess power off the top.
This is interesting because another option would be a grid-tie inverter. In my case, I'd need to find a small one that could officially work off of a battery. There are plenty of cheap ones available, but I'm not sure they're approved for this application, and I'm not sure how much I trust them in general.
The converter should be relatively safe if done right, and doesn't interface directly with the grid. The computer I'm thinking of draws 20-30 watts continuous, and while it won't consume all my excess power it can take some and do something somewhat useful – I will admit that a lot of the time it just idles.
I just spent some time trying to troubleshoot a wireguard link I have between two sites. One side is running OpenBSD, and I found that all of a sudden I couldn't ping the networks at the remote site, which I could previously get to through the wireguard tunnel. However, if I disabled PF on the OpenBSD machine, I could.
The other side was configured to see the OpenBSD machine as a wireguard endpoint, and so had the DNS address of this machine in its wg0.conf file. I didn't have this set up on the OpenBSD side. When I configured the OpenBSD machine to have the other side as a wgendpoint, things worked.
I'm happy it's working, but this is something I'll have to look into more.
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.