Hank Hill, apparently.

I don’t use Facebook and use all the ad blockers, but apparently I’m still tracked by IP.

When my SO and I started dating, he hooked to my wifi one day and immediately started getting ads on Facebook for various lawn care products. He’d never had those come up before, lived in an apartment all his adult life, and has never searched for any kind of gardening supplies.

I, on the other hand, do have a lawn that I take care of and frequently shop for various landscaping stuff. But he gets the ads for them.

Lol. We had ours set to 74 during the previous heat wave. Wasn’t sending any power back to the grid since we can’t do net metering, but we weren’t drawing any from it either.

Nice!

I don’t have an EV (yet!) but the last couple of days have been fairly cool for July and haven’t had to run the A/C much. The house batteries ended up charging fully by about 2 in the afternoon. Since we can’t do net metering here, any excess is just wasted right now.

When I do manage to get an EV in the next couple of years, I’d like to setup something similar to charge it when I’m producing an excess.

(Hopefully this is OK for this community. Not news, but could be a nice highlight/discussion. If not, glad to find another spot to share it.)

!solardiy@lemmy.world would probably love to hear about your setup.

I feel like this is the kind of joke Frasier would have told Freddy when he was a kid.

Wait, what?? Those are a thing?

I’ve seen some rechargeable smoke detectors but never had a reason to trust those. Everything else has used the old school 9v.

Literally this.

Twice a year I fill in as DBA when our lady graybeard Oracle DBA takes vacation. This month is one of those times. Yay me.

For my org, it’s just the massive in-house developed line-of-business application that’s tightly coupled to Oracle that keeps us chained to it. It’s technical debt from top to bottom, and has been accumulating steadily since the early 2010s, but no one seems willing to start replacing it.

The new projects typically go with Postgres, MariaDB, or if all else fails, MSSQL. But the Oracle monster in the closet isn’t likely to leave any time soon.

If only 9 volts were that price, I’d stock up for the smoke detectors for the next 5 years.

For everything else, I bought a bunch of rechargeable AA and AAAs a while back and those have been great. Haven’t used a D battery in years and a C battery for decades. I assumed they stopped making C’s.

The only tricky bit is forcing the Pi’s USB port into host mode by default. I thought the hub was defective but it worked when I put an OTG adapter into the micro USB port. The default auto detect behavior doesn’t work with this since it doesn’t connect to the OTG pin.

I had to edit /boot/firmware/config.txt and add under the [all] section:

[all]
dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=host

They can browse for free to see what it’s about. That’s how ArsTechnica works, and I’ve been a subscriber there for 10+ years.

Sometimes a little bit of friction and slight gatekeeping is a good thing. As my massive block list can attest, not everyone who signs up here makes the fediverse a better place.

Still get the benefit of the determined people funding the instances they’re using.

Check this out: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/20/old-ssds-find-new-life-as-game-cartridges/

Just saw it on Hack a Day and remembered this post. It’s using old SSDs instead of SD cards but is basically what you’re describing.

And they’re using auto launch scripts like I mentioned in my first comment and a whitelist to address security.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K9IVUYM

I bought that earlier this year. Works great. Have two RTL-SDRs hooked into it along with a Meshtastic node. It mounts under the Pi Zero so you still have your headers available for other stuff.

Every time I play Skyrim:

“You are carrying too much to be able to run”

Inventory:

• …
• 30 “Solution of Strength” potions

Me: But I might need those later.

Lol, no. And if you were expecting something clever like a goat, sorry to disappoint lol. Just a basic battery-electric push mower that I’ve charged from solar panels all season.

Check back in 2-3 years when I (hope to) get an EV. I’m sure I’ll be crowing about it then 😆

In the mean time, would you like to hear about my solar powered lawn mower?

The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I’ll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.

The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.

I’ve only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They’ve been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.

about $0.06 USD/kWh

😭 The per-kilowatt hour rider fees on top of my base rate per kWh are way more than that lol.

Lol, def can become an obsession. First hand experience there.

I’ve wanted a whole house PV system for a long time, and this is just me finally getting around to making it happen. SO and I were talking about getting a backup generator installed, but that would have been about $7,000 for something that would only get used two or three times a year since our power doesn’t go out often (we have no heat or ability to cook when the power goes out, and it’s always in the dead of winter when we lose power). The PV system I sketched out was about $9.000, but in addition to covering us during outages, we could use it daily to reduce electric bill so, unlike the generator, this would pay for itself over time.

SO finally came around to my way of thinking, so here we are lol. My limiting factor is usable roof area. Of the roof that’s south facing, only about 14x20 feet of it is suitable for mounting panels. There’s a west-facing gable, but it’s blocked most of the time by a tree. The east-facing side of the gable is available, but it’s pretty much always foggy in the mornings here, so it wouldn’t add much to the system.

Unless I build a ground mount setup in the back yard, we’re pretty much at the limit of how many panels I can buy. I’m kind of glad for that because otherwise I’d just keep buying them.