Category: Uncategorized

Well the experiment can only be described as a success. At 9 pm last night I switched the house completely off-grid. We ran the house off the battery bank all night. Solar power began to come in almost before the sun was over the horizon somehow. Not much, just a couple of hundred watts, but even so, I was surprised. We made no effort to conserve electricity. We just did what we always did.

By 8 AM we were running the entire house off the solar panels and putting a few hundred watts back into the battery bank. By 8:30 we were making 2.5 KW of solar and dumping almost 2KW of that into the batteries. By 11:30 AM the batteries were fully charged and the house running on the panels. We made 12 KWh of solar power just from sunrise to noon today.

I’m very pleased with how well this all worked. This means I probably won’t need to put the ground mount panels back up against the back side of the garage. We should be able to handle everything with just the new panels on the garage roof. Putting the other panels back up would remain an option of we ever ran into a situation where we’d need more power for some reason. But as of right now, we don’t need them.

We finally got the solar panels up on the garage!

It’s hard to see in that photo up there but that’s the best angle I could get because MrsGF won’t let me up on a roof. (But she has no problem making me climb a rickety old stepladder in the house to clean the tops of the kitchen cabinets) The guys did a very good job. They ran out of daylight before they could get the wiring done but we jury rigged some connections to test them and they work quite well.

They’re 420W bifacial panels. Because they’re roof mounted like that the bifacial bit isn’t going to be very helpful, but at the time I bought them they were the cheapest panels in that wattage range. If I remember right I picked them up for about $107 each plus shipping, which by today’s prices, is ridiculously cheap here in the US.

Anyway we were testing them at the time I took that photo. You can see that not only is it cloudy, but it’s already starting to get dark. Much to our surprise they were still putting out 400W.

Of course the weather had to turn bad right after they were put up and it rained all day today. I switched them in just for the heck of it and the dopey things were putting out 300 – 500w. In the rain. I’m not entirely sure how that’s even possible.

So now we have about 4.2KW of solar up on the roof. Once I put the ground mount panels back in place we’ll have over 6KW total. That’s going to be quite a change from having only about 2KW solar.

Is this the most boring video on Youtube? Probably not but it should be in the running.

Now, coming to a screen near you soon, The Compost Pile!

trying to figure out how to post files to be downloadable by my readers. This should be simple. I hope. If you click the link below it should let you download a file called “reader.zip” which is a .SVG file of the image over there on the left. I have to compress it into a zip file because for some bizarre reason WP will not let me upload a .SVG file to my media library.

Anyway you should be able to download a file called “reader.zip” by clicking on the “DOWNLOAD” link below.

.SVG is a vector graphics format that is commonly used with laser engravers and you should be able to directly import it into the design software used by most brands of engraver. So try downloading it, unzipping it, and checking that you get a usable image. If you have problems please let me know.

This image is public domain, a scan taken from an image published well over 100 years ago and is available free from several other sites on the internet. Feel free to use it for whatever you wish.

If this works I hope to be able to share some of the designs I make myself for the laser in the future.

So I got this real deal on a Gopro 12 and I’m thinking of using it to make content for this place but here’s the thing, I only have a limited amount of storage space here. A lot of space, really, but these videos can run many hundreds of megabytes in size so it doesn’t take long to suck up a lot of storage space. So I’m experimenting with uploading them to my Youtube account and then just linking to the video from here instead of storing them here. I tried this once before with some other incredibly boring stuff that was almost as mind numbingly dull as these new ones are, like this one of me

So here we go. If all goes well, this should be a video of a cat being petted.

That’s Marvelous Mercy the Wonder Cat. She’s about 13 years old and was a shelter kitty. She got adopted once, then the brought her back to the shelter for some reason. Then my youngest son adopted her. But she didn’t get along with his other kitty. She got along pretty well with our other cat and here we are. She was very shy and nervous at first but she’s turned into an absolute sweety.

Now this should be a video of this silly and ridiculously complicated marble run thing I just finished building a couple of weeks ago.

Finally I stuck the Gopro inside of the Vision laser and got this. The fun stuff doesn’t start to happen until about 1 minute into it.

When it’s actually cutting it looks like a blowtorch for heaven’s sake. I’d never seen what it looks like underneath the workpiece before. No wonder they tell you to never, ever, leave a laser engraver/cutter running unattended!

Well darn, this seems to actually work. So maybe you’ll have some more incredibly tedious, boring, mind numbingly dull videos to look forward to in the future! I even got a mount for the bike. Ooo, just think! The possibility of hours and hours of videos of nothing but endless miles of backroads while you start yawning and falling asleep at the computer! Ooo, the excitement!

Why Does Doc Rivers Still Have A Job?

Seriously. Why?

I’m not really a fan of pro sports in general and my interest in the Milwaukee Bucks is little more than that of someone who likes to see the home team be successful. But even a casual fan like me has to start wondering what the feck is going on here.

They fired Budenholzer in 2023 after establishing a record that could only be described as bloody amazing and which included 5 trips to the playoffs and a championship in 2021, and a record of 271 wins vs. 120 losses. And his reward for that was being fired? After one year with Griffin as coach, they hired Doc Rivers with great fanfare for -for “reasons”? And since he came on board, well the Milwaukee Bucks have turned into an absolute mess.

I don’t know what kind of back office politics or other BS is going on down there in Milwaukee but it’s got to stop. It’s gotten to the point where fans can’t even be bothered to boo them any more, they just get up and leave at the start of the 4th quarter to beat the traffic home.

AI Stuff

I am getting sick and tired of all of this AI BS and I suspect you are as well. The thing with all of this is that so far we’ve had investors sink hundreds of billions of dollars into the development of the software and the building of massive data processing centers, and what are we getting in return? Not much, it seems. According to a study done by Goldman Sachs that just came out AI added exactly zero value to the GDP last year. So far it seems that about the only thing AI seems good for is cranking out deep fake images, political propaganda, the flooding of social media with extremist garbage, faked photos of celebrities having sex, and child exploitation material. And now we’re hearing of mentally fragile individuals being led into actual real psychosis and even suicide from their interactions with these things.

One of the biggest problems with AI is that because of how corrupt our political system is, there is virtually no regulation of this crap at all. None. The billionaire tech bros who are behind a lot of the development of these systems have so thoroughly corrupted our political system with what amounts to legalized bribery that they seem to be completely immune from prosecution for even the most flagrant abuses being committed by their shiny new toys. Even when they are held accountable, it is the company, not the individuals actually responsible, who end up being penalized. If ordinary individuals were responsible for some of the abuses taking place, they would be locked up. We have several cases in the courts here in Wisconsin right now of people being held accountable for producing indecent images of children or deep fake images of others through the use of these AI systems. But the people who make the tools that allow this to happen? Nothing.

We need to have the actual people behind these abusive systems held accountable. The boards of directors, the CEOs, the officers of the companies, and yes, the owners as well, need to be held personally liable for the abuses being committed by the resources they create and control. If you or I created an app that permitted someone to make child sexual abuse images or deep fakes of real people in the nude or engaging in sexual activities, we’d be in jail, not laying out the specifications for our latest mega yacht.

Journaling

When the dickens did what we used to call “keeping a diary” turn into “journaling”? And what is the difference between a diary and a journal anyway? Oh, sure, if you want to be pedantic about it the exact definitions of the words are different. A diary is supposedly little more than a list of the events that take place in your life while a journal is supposed to be more thoughtful and full of ideas and observations. But come on, in the real world? Has anyone who has ever kept a diary ever refrained from jotting down things that technically should have gone in a journal, or vice versa?l

I suspect it turned into “journaling” simply because it sounded more, oh, more pretentious. Keeping a diary is something an adolescent girl does. Journaling is something posh people do.

And I’m as pretentious as the next person so yes, I do “journaling”. And because I’m a firm believer in the old adage, “anything worth doing is worth doing to excess” I’ve turned it into a full blown affectation. I get these leather bound volumes with archival quality paper, each engraved with “Name’s Little Book Of Stupid Shit Volume xx”. And I use what is allegedly the best pencil made, the Blackwing Palomino 602. I do that because I have a reputation of being “eccentric” to maintain.

And imagine the surprise of anyone who ever reads one after I’m dead and discovers they are completely filled with utter drivel. Bad sketches of cartoons I’m working on for some project, project ideas, bad jokes and even worse puns that might eventually get worked into something useful for some of the promotional stuff I crank out, random observations about utterly trivial nonsense and outright lies.

Yes, I said outright lies. Hey, here’s the thing. Write a journal. But remember no one said you had to tell the truth, now did they? Your life, like mine, is probably mind numbingly boring. I mean let’s face it, for most of us the most exciting thing in our lives is the weekly trip to the grocery store, or if you’re like me, its getting up early on Friday mornings to watch the garbage truck come through with its automated can picker.

(I wish I was joking about that last part. I really do.)

So you’re going to do what? Write about that? Hell no! Just make shit up! Tell about the time you rode on the back of a Harley with Elvis to go to the New York World’s fair in 1964. Wax poetic about your memories of the year you spent in the south of France. Sure, you’ve never even been out of the state but your great grandkids won’t know that, now will they?

There, I feel better now. Now back to fiddling with wood and lasers and stuff…

Yeah, seriously. Apparently as the flu was finishing up doing its job on me I contracted Covid too so I’ve been putting up with that for the last week.

Sigh… Sometimes you just can’t win.

I seem to be mostly recovered? Fever is gone. My appetite has been gradually returning. I still have a nasty cough and walking up a flight of stairs leaves me winded. But that seems to be getting better as well. And as MrsGF pointed out this morning when I was complaining, it hasn’t even been a week yet since I was diagnosed and it’s going to take time to fully recover from this. I’m no spring chicken, after all.

The most troubling symptom I had were the panic attacks. I’ve had those before but never so often or as severe as they were during this bout with the flu and I wonder if it was due partly to the Tamiflu antiviral they had me on. Apparently there are some rather nasty and thankfully very rare neurological side effects to the stuff and one of those is an increase in anxiety issues with some people, including panic attacks, hallucinations and other nasties that nobody warned me about when they put me on the stuff. Within about 24 hours of stopping taking the stuff it was almost like someone flipped a switch. My thinking seemed to get more clear, the panic attacks began to disappear, I started to get my appetite back and generally started to feel like a human being again.

Can I absolutely attribute the panic attacks and other mental issues I was having to the drug? No. Of course not. But at the same time it seems more than just a coincidence that within 24 hours of stopping taking it there was such a drastic change.

But enough of that. I’m on the mend, nearly back to normal, and am enormously grateful to that and to MrsGF for putting up with me. So let’s get on with this.

Laser stuff: Needless to say I haven’t been doing any work with the lasers during this time. The last thing I needed was the possibility of stray fumes from the lasers getting into the air and irritating my already very angry lungs and respiratory system.

I do want to talk about CNC machines, though. Right before all of this nonsense started I picked up a cheap, desktop CNC machine. Emphasis on the “cheap” part.

I’d wanted to experiment with CNC machines for many years now but two things have held me back. First was the cost. A good CNC machine is not cheap. A decent ones were always several thousand dollars or more and I just couldn’t justify the expense. The second thing that held me back was the mess. These things spew dust and chips everywhere. It’s the nature of the beast and unless I could also afford to buy or had the ambition to build an adequate enclosure for it, I wouldn’t want one in the house because of the mess.

But these little fully enclosed desktop style machines take care of the mess, mostly. That left just the price. But that’s come down too. This little beast up there was only $400, cheap enough for me to be willing to take a chance on it.

Now that I’m starting to feel better I’ll have a chance to set this little beast up and play with it and see what we got here. From what I’ve seen online this little unit doesn’t seem too bad for the price. It is far, far from the best on the market. Not even close. But it’s probably going to be good enough to give me an idea if this is something I want to pursue without breaking my budget.

Now I need to start to catch up on all of the stuff I had to postpone while I was sick. I was supposed to get together with the owners of the brewery in Milwaukee to deliver a new batch of coasters and other goodies and that fell threw. I didn’t want to take the chance of passing this along to them. And in any case I wasn’t fir for human companionship for a while there.

I was cleaning out stuff and found a whole box full of wooden handled bottle openers. Where they came from I have no idea, but we’re thinking of doing some kind of promotional thing with those so we were going to discuss that. There is apparently another brewpub that wants to pick up my line of joke coasters so I need to see if they would object to that.

Damn, it feels good to being able to think straight again!

Friday night I was feeling tired, had the sniffles, nothing new for someone who has allergies like I have. Only these got worse. By saturday it had developed into an uncontrollable cough. A cough so bad it triggered an SVT episode necessitating a trip to the ER. And in between all fo the panic (on my part) by being hooked up to about 20 different electrical leads attached all over me to monitor my heart, not jujst one by 2 IVs. amd a blood pressure cuff, they’re telling me I’m just fine and I should just relax and try to get some sleep????

Hate to say this bue they ended up giving me a sedative because I was having such a bad panic attack it was screwing up all of their readings.

Somewhere along in there I was told I had influenza H3N2. Oh goody.

Well they got all that straightened out and then bright and early the next day I had another coughing fit that triggered another SVT episode and back to the ER we go…

They go what, him again? Yes, him again, my wife sighs. Well, chuck him into a wheel chair and bring him along. You know where to take him.

Say, I hear MrsGf saying under her breath. After yesterday maybe you should just sedate him right off the bat?

I was just thinking the same thing. We’ll load him up on benadryl…

Good thing they did. Probably saved me oe hell of a lot of panic and them having to deal with an old, fat man having having the raving staggers.

Anyway it’s about 3 AM Monday morning now. At least that’s what the computer tells me. My own personal time sense is all over the place. Last night around 7 PM I thought it was 7 AM and was wondering why it wasn’t getting any lighter out. I just got done putting down a great pile of pills they’re having me take. I don[t know what most of them are but they seem to be working I’m actually feeling quite a bit better.

I’m on the third dose of Tamiflu and it really seems to be helping.

Feeling very weak, though. Even simple tasks like bending down to pick up a show leaves me out of breath. Takes me a minute or more to recover from going up ro down stairs. Dr. swears it’s one of the effects of the flu. they imaged my lungs and basically they’re the lungs of someone with a bad case of the flu. Haven’t eaten anything in something like two days. No appetite, but this morning I’m starting to feel hungry so that’s a good sign I thinK