I started doing daily builds of the Debian Installer in February 2004. (Before me, Martin Sjögren did them for a while.)
Seven years of building d-i every single day, twice a day in recent years, and also twice a day for armel. Well over ten thousand builds total. That would have been tedious, but thanks to cron it was instead seven years of keeping the machines running and upgraded, dealing with things when they broke, and getting highlighted on IRC whenever someone mentioned "people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i". Still a bit tedious, but those bits were used to install a lot of machines.
The rest of the d-i daily builds moved onto the autobuilders a while back, but I guess there was some reluctance to mess with my institution. I finally convinced them to take over my builds too. :)
There's something rather glorious about a simple outdoor shower.
Not as perfect as a waterfall, but more convenient. I put it together in lego mode, just snapping bits together until it seemed right. The water barrel collects the flow when the shower is not in use and also serves as ballast. And yes, there is duct tape.
It's fed down from the small spring house, so the water is always nice and cold, and gravity flow gives it just enough force. I hope it will run for a couple more months at least.
Not that the alternative isn't nice too..
So Blogger had a hiccough, and I've seen people in blogs I read being confused about why their posts and comments to posts seemed to vanish. I wish that people had more autonomy over their data and didn't just feel it could vanish like that when someone messes up. Giving nontechnical people that autonomy is hard, things have to be made quite simple, and they have to be educated to want it.
Liw and I are trying to take preservation of user data beyond backups at Branchable. Coincidentially[1], while Blogger was down I was working on automating_git_pushes_from_Branchable. So every change made to a site is committed to git and pushed right offsite to GitHub or Gitorious, or a personal server.
The only hard part of this for the user is the ssh key distribution, which is currently a cut and paste affair. Monkeysphere, I've got my eye on you..
By the way, I was stunned to see that GitHub does not support automatic git pushes out of GitHub. Although it can notify a million CIA-type services, the actual data is thus very subtly encouraged to be siloed. This feature seems to have been requested since at least 2009. Can't be that hard can it? (I didn't see a way to make Gitorious do it either.)
[1] Actually, this was the last feature I needed to move Ikiwiki's own wiki over to Branchable, so I plan to do that soon and retire its current server.
Entered in 6 months of the house's solar power data.
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When I last did in mid-December I was seeing the expected slow decrease, but did not anticipate the dip in mid-January, which I think was due to snow and bad weather.
At the end of February, I doubled the size of the active battery bank, and this damped out many of the spikes and lows. The mid-April low is bad weather paired with much higher than usual (24x7) inverter use, and possibly with some batteries that were still being conditioned after spending all winter off power.
I'd expect the last couple of months to be higher, but perhaps I'm just not needing to conserve power here at all (come to think, I have a radio, an inverter, a flourescent light, an electric shaver charger, a sheevaplug, a laptop, and 4 USB pepherials going right now).