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While playing with Nextcloud I saw that the raspberry pi was overheating so I played with a fan for people to cool the device. It worked well, except that when you’re holding a fan you’re stuck holding a fan. I looked at various Raspberry pi cases and decided to get a Joy-IT case with an integrated fan.

The case is simple. It consists of a base plate, a middle block, and a top plate. You put the pi, with the card inside. You then plug the fan to some of the GPIO pins and the fan starts to spin and cool the Raspberry pi beneath. The Raspberry pi went from 50-70°c to 38°c so it works, but it’s noisy. It seems paradoxical that something as small as a Raspberry Pi could end up with such a noisy fan. It’s as noisy as an old laptop or an old external hard drive.

Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.

Many years ago I used an old Beta SP camera with batteries that lasted just ten minutes per charge. I didn’t know if they would last long enough to get the entirety of what I was filming so I needed quite a few batteries. Since then I have used laptops, video cameras with 7hr long batteries, diving flash lights where I swapped new batteries in for each dive and more.

Many weeks ago I ordered something from Galaxus and it didn’t arrive when it was scheduled to. A few weeks ago I ordered one thing but instead got half a dozen things. I thought “Why do I have so many extras, before realising that the order was wrong. They sent me the order that someone else had made.

For a while I thought “What do I do, do I let them know about the mistake or do I tell them. In the end I let them know about the mistake. By eventually I mean within half an hour, not five weeks. They told me to send them a list of all the items I had received in mistake, and to send it back to them.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have cloud storage solutions. So does Evernote, Kdrive and other products. The issue with all of these solutions is that they are owned by corporations. They are simple and convenient to use but at the cost of being locked in to an OS in some cases, and to corporate interests.

NextCloud is an open source alternative with hosting solutions that offer people with the choice of choosing between hosting solutions that are as local, or as remote as they want. I could choose between a German and a Dutch hosting solution. I chose tab.cloud simply because they offer 8gb rather than 2gb like another solution. You can upgrade to 128 gigabytes, or to a maximum of over 500 gigabytes in the paying tiers.

Recently a CWT Vulcan system was installed on a pipe in the building where I live and the calcar that I had watched being deposited in a kettle stopped depositing, and even started to disintegrate. Within a week, or less the calcar almost vanished.

To over-simplify it, you wrap a coil around a pipe, with an electronic ciruit board and it uses electric currents, through electrophoresis to take calcium and magnesium from complex to simple structures. In the process calcar no longer builds up. It goes a step further and cleans the calcar, as was shown by the kettle example. You can read more about the process from this source. If that’s not technical enough you can read this paper.

A few days ago I signed up for a group hike but decided not to go for two or three reasons. The two main reasons were the size of the group and the weather. From what I saw fifteen people were going to go on that hike and I am still in pandemic mode. I would be happier with a smaller group of people. fifteen is too large.

The secondary more valid reason is that rain was forecast. It’s not that I don’t walk in the rain, because I do, but if I’m walking in the rain I might as well not drive the electric car, to do a group activity where we will be walking through puddles in a forest. My hiking shoes are in the car. I put them there yesterday, so I could walk comfortably in the rain.

The more I play with the electric car and the more I feel that it affects how I spend my time. Today I would have written a blog post before going out, but I didn’t. I didn’t write before going out because I knew that the battery would be down to 30 percent by the time I got to my destination, and 30 percent of battery power on a car means 14 hours of charge time. I.e. the earlier I head to charge the car the sooner I can head home to have dinner at a reasonable time.

According to streetlight data walking in the US has declined over the past three or four years. The decline was by up to thirty six percent from 2019-2022. The clearest reason for this is that 2019 and 2020 were walking honeymoon periods. By this I mean that for the duration of lock down and “work from home” people had more time to walk since they spent less time commuting, but also because the natural habit of getting into a car to do something had declined., thanks to the pandemic.

For three hundred and sixty six days I have written a blog post daily. In some cases I wrote two posts, and scheduled the post to appear the next day. This is when I was driving for thirteen hours, or if I knew that my morning was busy. In the process I have definitely given myself a writing habit. The question I ask myself now is whether to continue, or whether to change the posting frequency.