Pupdate

The holidays brought the chance for longer lunchtime walks :)

Zig

A bunch of smart (network) engineers kept mentioning Zig to me, so I took the opportunity to try it out. It’s supposed to be a replacement for C, and I was impressed by the bitwise switch statements in the fizz-buzz sample. If I was writing a device driver this feels like the language I’d want to use.

Even better, the Zig tool chain can cross compile C code. This seemed like the answer to my prayers for easily creating a range of binaries for the C implementation of NoPorts – until I discovered the binaries only worked superficially. I guess I’m now waiting for Zig 1.0.0 and a complete implementation of compiler-rt.

Warship

There’s a reunion planned in mid September to mark 35 years since a bunch of us joined Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) in Dartmouth. It’s sent me on a bit of a Navy nostalgia trip, which has got me watching episodes of Warship during my morning workouts. As it was made from 1973-77 I was far too young for an adult themed show, and I don’t even recall ever seeing any repeats of it back in the day. It holds up really well though. There are some scenes and episodes where it seems like my former colleagues were cosplaying what they’d seen on TV. And numerous comments (sometimes dismissed with ‘maybe before your time’) now suddenly make sense. Perhaps most (sadly) striking is that the challenges faced in the 70s that set the frame for some episodes are still relevant today.

Birthdays

The big event of the summer was Rachel’s 50th birthday, which we marked with a variety of activities culminating in a big party for friends at a local restaurant. Everything was great fun, and I’m particularly glad we got to see ABBA Revival at Trading Boundaries, which was an excellent evening out (and worth the early start and late arrival for OSHcamp…)

Weirdly, my car was registered on Rachel’s 25th birthday, meaning it hit its quarter century at the same time as her half.

OSHcamp

It was great to return to the Open Source Hardware camp (OSHcamp) as part of Wuthering Bytes in Hebden Bridge. Even better to see one of my favourite communities thriving and growing, with a bigger venue allowing for more attendees with a good bunch of new younger faces :)

I enjoyed the talks on Saturday, and had the chance to present myself on ‘Showing that you care about security for your open source (hardware) project‘.

Whilst Sunday brought the much greater challenge of assembling Ken Boak’s ‘TICK‘ bit serial computer.

New things

Windows

When we moved into our new build house in 2002 it was frustrating that the windows were so bad – poorly fitting wood framed units. We were told that wood was mandatory because of building in a conservation area, which was madness – chopping down more trees, and with gales blowing into some rooms that obviously impacted our energy use for heating. Thankfully there’s no such silliness for replacement windows, and we are perhaps in the late majority on the street to get uPVC units.

At this stage it’s hard to notice any difference (other than the lack of rotten window sills outside), but hopefully they’ll make a real difference once winter comes. I’ll be keeping a close eye on our gas usage.

Hot tub

I wasn’t a fan of getting an inflatable hot tub – mainly due to the energy use. But when an mSpa Alpine D-AL04 showed up in the summer of 2020 I grudgingly got into enjoying it whenever the weather allowed. Things changed once the solar was installed, as the tub could be run from a timer that would use electricity that would otherwise be exported, which really changed the effective cost.

Each year as it’s gone away I’ve wondered if it would survive for another season, and it lasted longer than I expected. But after some time off during our Lakes Trip the pump wouldn’t run for more than about 15m without stopping with an E1 error. I tried stripping it down and cleaning it out, but actually everything was pretty clean.

Deciding that it wasn’t worth buying a new pump that might fix a now somewhat shabby old tub I thought the money would be better spent on a new one, so I grabbed a Lay-Z-Spa Barbados (which was half price in their summer sale). In many ways it’s a much better tub than the old mSpa. Energy efficiency is hugely improved by better insulation, the base is much more comfortable, and the chemical dispenser makes keeping the right chlorine level easy. My one niggle is that the lid fills up with rain water, though it’s much easier to clear than the old one. Also the WiFi/App is utter garbage – I can’t even get through the setup process.

Solar Diary

It’s been another year since getting the panels installed, with a total of 8665 kWh generated (4271 this year, a little down on the previous year).

Ethernet data logger

I was never happy that the WiFi data logger couldn’t connect to my devices SSID, so I got a ShineLan-X ethernet data logger, and a managed switch to run a VLAN to it (because there’s no way I’m putting something that connects back to China onto my regular LAN). It’s great when it works, but there seems to be a race condition where sometimes the logger comes online before the inverter is ready.