Windows

Minergie is a fantastic concept for a cold planet, and to keep cool in winter. It traps heat with ease during the morning and radiates it for the rest of the day into the night. It supplements to solar radiation heat with geothermal heat, which it gets from the heat pumps. That heat is then spread across the buidling with hot water pipes.

In winter this is fantastic because it saves on energy and provides a comfortable environment. In reality it’s not unusual for me to notice 25°c in winter, so in effect it might be too warm, for some.

This morning I woke at 4 to have a shower, have breakfast, and then drive to Morges for a 6am run. As a result I had no opportunity to open windows, aerate or anything else. I kept every room closed so each room is a compartment.

The result, is that the temperature in my flat has been completely flat, varrying by .01 of a degree throughout the day, rather than huge fluctuations.

For a while I was thinking of moving from MacOS on the MacBook Pro to Ubuntu on the MacBook Pro and I prepared a remote boot option for this to be possible. Eventually I changed my mind and finally installed Ubuntu on the Windows HP machine. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason for which I decided to install Ubuntu on my HP laptop is that when I tried to play audio and use wifi on the Mac book pro there were issues. By running on an HP machine I have audio working, wifi working, and video playback.

Recently I have been sliding between Windows, Linux distributions and MacOS throughout the day. I use a mac for blogging, and Linux to experiment and learn new skills, and windows to watch Netflix and YouTube. I might be over-simplifying but that’s the simplified version.

Pi and Linux

I find that I have come to be at ease in all three environments, especially since playing around with Raspberry Pi devices. “Why?”, you may ask. Because with a Pi you can try dedicated images for Nextcloud, for PhotoPrism, for Immich and more. You can also try them for Ph-Hole and others. The advantage is also that you use microSD cards. This means that you slot in card A and try A1, then you slot B and try B1 and finally you try C with C1. In the end you’re trying instances with what could be thirty seconds with your Pi being a PhotoPrism server, before it becomes a NextCloud server, and so on. With enough SD cards if you mess up you can revert to something that you enjoyed using with a minute or two.