Hacked my sheevaplug's power supply so it will run on anything from 6V-48V DC. Voltage regulator is the size of a quarter.

Quite a contrast from wiring up massive PV combiner box yesterday!

I wondered where Michi was spending all her time lately..

I have a porch again! It had turned into a construction zone mess with every surface covered with tools and materials.

(Which reminded me of growing up in a house with an addition that was in a state of suspended construction for years.)

Now if I can just get the damn drill to charge again, only 5 holes to drill before I'm all done except for connecting up cables..

All 4 panels installed and I also finished the outside wiring! \o/

Diving for coal in the river.

I had seen river-smoothed coal 30 miles upstream near my sister's but never down here before.

Why won't this drill charge, I only have 1.5 holes remaining to drill. Gnnnnn

The tiny town near me has gotten a taco truck that serves authentic barbaoca, lengua, etc. Awesome!

A kid age 10 or so also seems to like it, since he drove up in a pickup truck while I was there. This is right in the middle of town at one of 3 stop lights, a block from the courthouse. Kid was even wearing a shirt with the elementary school's name on it. His mom got out of the passenger side. Taco guy and I bonded over this craziness.

Installing two IronRidge rails on the roof of the house, to mount 1.2 kw of solar panels on. Got four flashfeet installed today, before my drill conked out.. recharging the drill on my old solar system.

The potentially hard part of that, besides sweating on a super hot roof, is hitting the beams when drilling into the roof, otherwise you get the fun of an extra hole in the roof to deal with. Luckily, I was able to remove vent caps, so see the beams, and hit them on the first try every time.

Thinking about what would be involved in switching my house wiring from 12v to 24v. Makes the charge controller more efficient.

From the there must not be a lot of people who have this problem dept.

-- Chris Smith, CodeWorld - Teaching Haskell to Children

Cost will be $1900, of which $800 is panels, $400 is shipping, and rest is roof racking, wires and a breaker box.

That's doing my own installation and with the house already having suitable gear inside (fuse box, charge controller, inverter). An equivilant system including the inside gear would probably be $4000-$6000, not including batteries. With professional installation, probably some percent more..

This is the complete source code for a client-server web application that estimates the strength of a password the user enters, updating the estimate after every keystroke.

Note the total lack of html, javascript, routes, callbacks, or any of the usual web cruft. It's using the threepenny-gui haskell library and a little bit of FRP. Pretty awesome library, although the GUIs it renders only work when javascript is enabled.

  import qualified Graphics.UI.Threepenny as UI
  import Graphics.UI.Threepenny.Core
  import Text.Password.Strength (estimate)

  main = startGUI defaultConfig $ \window -> do
        prompt <- UI.input
        estimatedisplay <- UI.string ""
        getBody window #+ [ element prompt, element estimatedisplay ]
        promptIn <- stepper "" $ UI.valueChange prompt
        let showEstimate = show . (`estimate` []) <$> promptIn
        element estimatedisplay # sink value showEstimate
        return ()

This reminds me of doc/unfinished/free-software-sf-essay which I see got left at an 80 line outline. Anyway, the root idea of that essay, if I ever finish it is that there's really surprisingly little SF that engages with free software concerns and ideas.

The only books I know of that do so at all are by Vinge, Stephenson, Doctorow, and Egan.

"life" ?

Enjoying a fire, latkas, and fresh strawberries, . Which winter is this, past blackberry winter and dogwood winter? For me: strawberry winter

Brunch:
Rhubarb, mint and maple syrup crepes.
(Followed by tomato, parm, and herb crepe.)

Second time I've made crepes. And I've reached peak cast iron -- I have a dedicated cast iron crepe pan.

Having some keyboard trouble. Mostly dooubleed letters, but also for some reason it stopped letting me type the capital leetter I. Alright then.

MP3 isn't dead, just journalism -- mavhc

"Haskell is a memetic virus, and monads are the eggs it lays out in innocent programming forums to entice others to become infected." -- hobophobe via spj

One more old time auction.