This one looks neat, but I think I can propose a better one. :) It could be a tower, externally black in color, with the south-facing side transparent or windowed. The interior under the window should also be painted black. Instead of one rack, multiple racks of food could be installed.

Why?

• a tower develops ascending airflow, while a horizontal box does not, this helps ensure that moisture does not re-condense but leaves

• with a tower system, you can also dry foods that would degrade from sunlight (gather energy at the bottom and deliver it to a closed top part)

I even built one and used it to dry kale chips, but it was too tall - wind kept pushing it over.

I have batteries and a stand-alone inverter. Currently, there is no grid connection, the power company is still working on getting a cable here.

My batteries are not a shiny example of how to do things - poorly installed and pretty dangerous right now (batteries should not be indoors) so I’m building a battery box outside the house for them. (Of course, already now they have redundant balancers and a battery alarm.)

Currently, my battery capacity is quite low: about 10 kWh. I plan to expand that to 18 kWh.

Currently, they suffice to run the heat pump for half a day.

Often times, I operate with a partial energy balance: e.g. panels currently produce 700 W, heat pump requires 1200 W (this seems to change with outdoor temperature), I take the difference from batteries.

But in mid-winter, I use a wood-fired stove.

Also, when it’s warm enough indoors, but I feel that I need to store heat for subsequent days, I have a pool heat pump converted (more like hacked) to heat a 1 ton water tank. It circulates a solution of car windshield washing liquid (ethanol based) through a system of hoses and a long copper coil in the water tank. It draws about 600 W and make no immediate difference to room temperature.

Nice system. The first drain and spillway are well thought out.

Not sure about elsewhere, but here in Europe, one can often get plastic IBC containers in a metal support cage (1 x 1 x 1 m cube shaped) really cheap. It’s smart to examine the labels before buying, to make sure it didn’t hold anything hazardous. They come with a tap too and store 1000 L of water.

So if one practises gardening, a bigger tank might be handy to have. Elevating the ground under the tank or digging a hole under the tap will ensure better access.

The concept is new to me, so I’m a bit challenged to give an opinion. I will try however.

In some systems, software can be isolated from the real world in a nice sandbox with no unexpected inputs. If a clear way of expressing what one really wants is available, and more convenient than a programming language, I believe a well-trained and self-critical AI (capable of estimating its probability of success at a task) will be highly qualified to write that kind of software, and tell when things are doubtful.

The coder may not understand the code, though, which is something I find politically unacceptable. I don’t want a society where people don’t understand how their systems work.

It could even contain a logic bomb and nobody would know. Even the AI which wrote it may tomorrow fail to understand it, after the software has become sufficiently unique through customization. So, there’s a risk that the software lacks even a single qualified maintainer.

Meanwhile some software is mission critical - if it fails, something irreversible happens in the real world. This kind of software usually must be understood by several people. New people must be capable of coming to understand it through review. They must be able to predict its limitations, give specifications for each subsystem and build testing routines to detect introduction of errors.

Mission critical software typically has a close relationship with hardware. It typically has sensors coming from the real world and effectors changing the real world. Testing it resembles doing electronical and physical experiments. The system may have undescribed properties that an AI cannot be informed about. It may be impossible to code successfully without actually doing those experiments, finding out the limitations and quirks of hardware, and thus it may be impossible for an AI to build from a prompt.

I’m currently building a drone system and I’m up to my neck in undocumented hardware interactions, but even a heating controller will encounter some. I don’t think people will experience success in the near future with letting an AI build such systems for them. In principle it can. In principle, you can let an AI teach a robot dog to walk, and it will take only a few hours. But this will likely require giving it control of said robot dog, letting it run experiments and learn from outcomes. Which may take a week, while writing the code might have also taken a week. In the end, one code base will be maintainable, the other likely not.

They have made the fences tall, which creates an impression of fragility, but we don’t see how deep the posts run into ground. :)

I have a solar fence in operation for 1 year. My version is 1 panel width tall - about 1.2 meters tall, and I built it extremely cheap - 5 cm rectangular wooden posts with a metal screw tip running 30 cm into ground. Assembly using household screws and luck. During storms, it does change position, but I haven’t noticed disassembly.

During hail, it would survive events that would smash my other panels, because a vertical surface exposes less target area and offers more oblique angles of collision to hailstones.

As for efficiency, my vertical array is the most efficient array I have during winter. It’s never covered by snow and catches low sunshine better. In summer, it is the coolest (but not most efficient) array that I have, because it creates verticial convection and gives away heat more efficiently. But it differs from theirs because it’s an east-west array (they seem to have used a north-south geometry to catch morning and evening sunshine).

As for what they said of their results:

The panels generated much less electricity than a standard tilted array, but it was produced in mornings and evenings. “It matches better when there is high electricity demand in the system,” says Victoria.

Ethanol is among the few substances which practically doesn’t burn into CO. It is extremely hard to poison oneself with an ethanol burner.

However, according to an article linked below, burning large amounts of ethanol in a confined space (their experimental space was 48 cubic meters, which would be comparable to a small cabin) can exceed reasonable limits for CO2, nitrogen dioxide and benzene. Sadly, their article summary does not provide the quantity of ethanol that they burned. It is an important parameter of the process.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140903091728.htm

Strange, I can’t get the link to open. If I just click the link, (Firefox on Linux) it says “SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT”. However, when I revert to http:// instead of https://, it loads a page saying:

Invalid url! /t/K2Wj4

Can anyone else tell - does it open for you?

That was a long story, and I was a fool.

I bought a car that had driven an incredibly short mileage, hoping to restore the battery to working order. Being unfamiliar with it, I was unable to find the fault at first, so I bought a second-hand battery separately to test the car. I found the problem, fixed the car, but now had a batttery with a few dead cells left over. After fruitless attempts to find another person in need of many cells, I decided to use them for my house. :)

3. How does it look under snow? :)

That’s quite understandable.

On related notes, my first disassembly of an EV battery pack was very slow and careful, and the surface, boots, gloves and tools really carefully considered. Of course, EV batteries have those safety jumpers which split the pack in two, but even the halves are dangerous enough to worry.

Indeed, I have nothing here that would draw 35 kilowatts. :) If I weld, the maximum is 4 kW, if I charge my car, the maximum is about 3.6 kW. By the way, I’ve observed that most of time, the MIEV cruises at around 10 kW - accelerating is a whole different matter of course. :) If I get a bit more, I’ll be happy, but I don’t expect a lot more.

I have no power grid here. Maybe next autumn, but I only asked them to build a laughably small connection of 3 x 6 A, to act as a backup in case my systems are catastrophically broken) so no grid tie. Since it’s a really curious location (no official road either) I wonder if the grid operator actually manages to build it in one year. :)

As for inverters, my setup isn’t new or shiny - there’s a legacy DC-AC (poor choice of brand name from some Taiwanese maker, even I can’t find their website because their name is so generic) 24 V 5 KW inverter. It produces modified sine wave, was too expensive, and the first one that I got developed a fault and was replaced. The replacement has been running my house for the past 5 years. It will retire when I manage to move over to a 48V system voltage.

…and its replacement is a somewhat newer Maximum Solar PIP-4048MS (no longer produced, but they make similar ones). It’s actually less powerful (only 4 kW) but produces a pure sine wave and I bought it used for a really good price.

Although the new(er) inverter can act as a charger (drawing power either from solar or a generator or a power grid) and likely it soon will, I have 3 separate chargers, each for a different panel array. All of them are Maximum Solar PCM60X. I mostly chose them because they have passive cooling and they’ve been working for several years.

They are supposed to have a capacity of 37.5 amp-hours left and I’ll have four stacks in parallel, so I’ll have around 150 amp-hours.

If I multiply that by the average voltage under load (16 cells per stack x 3.85 volts per cell = 60 V, but I might have to compromise and go for 15 cells per stack), I get 150 x 60 = 9000 Wh = 9 kWh. A factory-fresh battery of this sort has a dozen more cells and is supposed to hold 16 kilowatt-hours. Since I drive one of those cars, I know from experience that 9 kWh is a realistic estimate, but I’ll find out the true capacity later.

Yep, indeed, I’m already discovering differences too. :) A good document for techies to read seems to be here.

https://reticulum.network/manual/understanding.html

I also think I see a problem on the horizon: announce traffic volume. According to this description, it seems that Reticulum tries to forward all announces to every transport node (router). In a small network, that’s OK. In a big network, this can become a challenge (disclaimer: I’ve participated in building I2P, but ages ago, but I still remember some stuff well enough to predict where a problem might pop up). Maintenance of the routing table / network database / <other term for a similar thing> is among the biggest challenges when things get intercontinental.

Interesting project, thank you for introducing. :)

I haven’t tested anything, but only checked their specs (sadly I didn’t find out how they manage without a distributed hashtable).

Reticulum does not use source addresses. No packets transmitted include information about the address, place, machine or person they originated from.

Sounds like mix networks like I2P and (to a lesser degree, since its role is proxying out to the Internet) like TOR. Mix networks send traffic using the Internet, so the bottom protocol layers (TCP and UDP) use IP addresses. End to end messages use cryptographic identifiers.

There is no central control over the address space in Reticulum. Anyone can allocate as many addresses as they need, when they need them.

Sounds like TOR and I2P, but people’s convenience (easily resolving a name to an address) has created centralized resources on these nets, and will likely create similar resources on any network. An important matter is whether the central name resolver can retroactively revoke a name (in I2P for example, a name that has been already distributed is irrevocable, but you can refuse to distribute it to new nodes).

Reticulum ensures end-to-end connectivity. Newly generated addresses become globally reachable in a matter of seconds to a few minutes.

The same as aforementioned mix networks, but neither of them claims operability at 5 bits per second. Generally, a megabit connection is advised to meaninfully run a mix network, because you’re not expected to freeload, but help mix traffic for others (this is how the anonymity arises).

Addresses are self-sovereign and portable. Once an address has been created, it can be moved physically to another place in the network, and continue to be reachable.

True for TOR and I2P. The address is a public key. You can move the machine with the private key anywhere, it will build a tunnel to accept incoming traffic at some other node.

All communication is secured with strong, modern encryption by default.

As it should.

All encryption keys are ephemeral, and communication offers forward secrecy by default.

In mix networks, the keys used as endpoint addresses are not ephemeral, but permanent. I’m not sure if I should take this statement at face value. If Alice wants to speak to Bob tomorrow, some identifier of Bob must not be ephemeral.

It is not possible to establish unencrypted links in Reticulum networks.

Same for mix networks.

It is not possible to send unencrypted packets to any destinations in the network.

Same.

Destinations receiving unencrypted packets will drop them as invalid.

Same.

Would be great if they could do it. But it feels like lower-hanging combinations could be easier to pick. :o

I agree that Hamas is a response to conditions. I do recall that a long while ago, Israel did fund Hamas, in hope of counterbalancing Fatah.

But, just like many other movements, Hamas seems to perpetuate the conditions which created it. Their rule is Gaza hasn’t only brought a war with Israel, but also a suppression of democracy and repression of people from competing Palestinian movements (mainly Fatah).

Israeli forces do often act like they’re a recruitment branch of Hamas, stirring up anger. I don’t doubt it the slightest that Hamas has received many recruits because the IDF again killed someone who randomly got in their way (or again made the calculation that for a junior Hamas official, 15 civilian lives are OK to take).

But, despite knowing the above-mentioned - I don’t see a way out of the long-term conflict without both sides changing.

As long as Israel behaves like it wants to destroy (or drive away) all Palestinians - there will be Palestinian politicians who call for the destruction of Israel and support terrorist tactics, with considerable support among the population, even if their rule is not democratic (the rule of Hamas in Gaza only started democratically). Meanwhile, fear of revenge and terror, fear of appearing weak and another Arab-Israeli war - this ensures that politicians in Israel who promise to deal harshly with Palestinians get votes and frequently attain power.

Since the conflict is now quite old (at least 70 years) and the fighting parties have lost a viable framework for solving it, they need either massive luck or considerable foreign assistance / advise / pressure to find a stable solution.

Re: one state solution: did you mean two state solution? Because I think - but I could be wrong - that Israel must somehow come to the point of understanding that a Palestinian state with a reasonably defined territory (not a patchwork-of-enclaves territory) can be their neighbour, but the current situation is unstable.

Though the projection is about solarpunk, a side note about the situation in Gaza…

…recently, the UN demining agency (I’ve forgotten their acronym) published an estimate of war damage in Gaza. They assessed that there was “more rubble in Gaza than Ukraine”. Since that seemed unbelievable, I consulted various sources, among them a review by the Lund University Center for Middle-Eastern Studies named Monitoring Israel’s Destruction of Gaza from Space.

What I found out:

• the UN measures war damage in kilograms of rubble per square meter
• Gaza is tiny and densely populated
• thus despite a hundred times less (approximation) munitions getting fired than in Ukraine, Gaza has massive damage to infrastructure
• the rubble density is currently 300 kg / m2
• the most damaged settlement is Gaza City (75% of buildings damaged or destroyed)
• the least damaged settlement is Rafah (31% of buildings)
• on average, 57% of houses are damaged or destroyed
• war was waged in an un-evacuated city: this typically produces high civilian losses
• the current estimate is 30 000, so Israel’s response has caused 30 x more losses than the initial attack by Hamas
• night time satellite photos suggest that electricity is missing in most of the strip
• crop monitoring photos indicate that agriculture has mostly stopped (and irrigation is likely broken)

For me, journalistic photos from Gaza most remind of what happened in Grozny, the capital of Chechnia during the First Chechen War (disproportionate amounts of Russian firepower reduced it to a trash heap).

Since both sides are responsible for war crimes (Hamas at first and now Israel) and the military response has overshot any goal associated with justice, I support any action that makes the conflict stop. Hamas started this war, but Israel has gone far beyond sanity while responding. Later on, I think the leaders of both sides ought be brought before the International Criminal Court and answer charges of war crimes (which could take decades).

How to ensure another war won’t happen… much harder without structural change in both societies. Considering the way Israel currently functions and how the Palestinian Authority functioned in Gaza (Hamas militants took it over, things seem better on the West Bank), there’s a high chance that someone from either side could ignite a new conflict in future.

It’s a poor solution, but better than nothing. The plowing profiles are welded with the L pointing forward and down (to ensure rising on top of snow), the holding profiles can be welded any way. They are at 1/3 of length and 2/3 of length respectively.

P.S.

A note: if one has automatic transmission, or continuously variable transmission, one should not pull things.

With manual gearboxes, fixed reductors and direct drive, it’s OK. The car is indeed blurred for privacy. :)

Yep. The three networks I don’t have here are:

• public roads (I’m plowing a no mans land which belongs to some folks, but nobody uses their land)
• electrical and fuel networks
• water and wastewater grid

Ordinary mobile phone network. Also I would be uneasy about giving my money to Elon Musk’s companies without a dire need to do so. :)

(Having communications also helps see weather reports, which kind of matter in such conditions. I especially love meteorological radar.)