Solar panel experiment

This apartment has a southerly facing that may allow some sunlight into the balcony.  I don't know if it will be a whole lot, nor do I know what devices that the panel could power.  At the moment, I am considering powering my phones and tablet with it.  If I can make it work well enough, I may power my little scooter with it.

The scooter has a couple 12 volt batteries in it that I purchased in the summer of 2014.  It has been sitting around here for over a year.  There is also the 12 volt battery that I used to power my electric tools out at the ranch last April.  It got a good workout, but it is still relatively new.  I could bring that into the action, as well as the inverter and have all these tools get a workout.

Getting the solar panel a stand to sit on involved a bit of ingenuity.  I didn't spend a penny.  Just got a chair, some elastic cord, a "C" clamp, and put the thing together.  The chair allows the solar panel to lean on it, while the other stuff keeps it securely on the chair so that the wind won't blow it off.  If it hits the concrete, that won't be good.

I hope all this will give me some practice for living out there.  At least I will know what I didn't find out when I was out there.  I didn't find out the capabilities of the solar panel because something was wrong with it.  I wasted a lot of time setting the thing up out there.  That's one of the reasons it took me longer than I bargained for when I was planning the outing.

Of course I took the malfunctioning panel in and got it replaced.  I checked it out, as can be seen on one of my videos.

I've been busy today, even though I should be working.  Actually, this is a lot more fun.  They don't call it "work" for nothing.

Update:

It may take some maneuvering of the chair in order to get some sun.  Besides that, I've got to fix something that came loose.  Now, if I could only remember how I did it in the first place.  In the meantime, there's a football game.

Earlier today, I put in some work.  Need to make some bucks.

Update:

Set it up, but it isn't putting out much.  Too much shade.  Hopefully, I assembled everything correctly, and all it needs is some sunshine.  I'll check it again tomorrow morning.

Update:

Didn't wait till tomorrow morning.  Put a voltmeter on it, and it is generating some electricity.  Too much shade to be effective.

Update:

This is "tomorrow morning" and I've done a check out on the panel.  Sunny day, but the controller doesn't seem to be working.  The panel is putting out plenty of volts, but it doesn't show at the controller.  The battery shows no current going to it.  This suggests something, but not sure what.

Perhaps my mc4 work leaves something to be desired.

Need to check some more, and make sure it isn't the controller itself.

Gravity

This is not a review.   It is an impression of it immediately after watching it on my tablet.  I managed to get the rental for less than a buck and thought, why not

I liked the film.  There is never a dull moment throughout.  Very action packed.

As for realism, cannot answer for that.  I remember that an astronaut liked it.  Might have been Buzz Aldrin.  Seems realistic enough for me.

I suppose that this is not the best use of my time to spend over an hour and a half watching this, but since I am trying out the tablet, I suppose that I could justify the time spent that way.

Out west, I will not have the bandwidth available to downstream a video.  If I wish to see something like this, it will have to be on dvd.

Perhaps this was not the best use of my time after all.

Computer housekeeping

You probably wouldn't guess it if I didn't mention it.  I have a computer science degree.

Yep, didn't do me much good.  

My computer skills may not be any better than anyone else's.

Computers have a rapid obsolesence quality about them.  What you know today won't necessarily help you tomorrow.  What I learned in the seventies isn't much good now.

Anyway, I spent some of my time today fixing the netbook.  More RAM is now available.  There ought to be a way to get it ALL back, but I won't make the effort.  There may not be much life left in it anyhow.

This post is being written on my tablet.  I am thing of dropping the conventional internet and going all wireless.  I've done that before.  It constrains you, as you have to keep track of your data usage, and be careful not to incur additional costs.  The tablet uses wireless.

The desktop needs updating.  What a pain that is.

All the old computers are gone.  These three are what I have now, plus a couple smart phones.  I am wondering if I can use the old smartphone for something.  It has a better camera than the new one.

Once I get out on the property out West, blog posts may just be links to videos.  A heads up for you, in case you are interested.

"Best of" posts continued

In order to complete one of my goals, I want to go through all my posts, and update the "Best of" lists.

I'm working slowly on this because I don't like to do it much.  However, the compensation for such drudgery is some insights which might come from it.  In other words, it is work, and I don't like work.  Yep, laziness is one of my vices.

Let's get on with it...

Wishbone
Bloggers living off the grid
Napoleon Hill, W. Clement Stone, and Me - RobertRinger.com
About this Remnant
Ramblin, Gamblin, Man
Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society
Can Niceness and Firmness Coexist? - RobertRinger.com
Goodyear Inflatoplane
Why Elon Musk is a Poor Person’s Worst Nightmare
I'm single at 50. Why? Men hate me being brainier than them, says KATE MULVEY
Social Disaster --- Mark Farner ( 1977 )
What happened to Al Fin?
Karl V. Kordesch: must remember that name


There's more in this category, but I'm spending more time on this than I wanted.  I'll stop here.  This is a lot of reading material in case anyone's interested.

Krugman: The exemplar of the Liberal catechism

In an earlier post, I struck upon the theory of the Liberal catechism.  I got the idea from watching the film Brave New World.   Thinking a bit more about the word "catechism" helps understand not only the concepts that one wishes to put forward with the catechism, but that the use of the catechism helps you understand the person or group using the catechism for their teaching.

I seek to put that theory to the test.  So, here we are.  So called conservatives are struggling mightily against the Liberal onslaught.  Surely something is wrong.

Rush Limbaugh loves to say that he knows Liberals.  Does he really?  A failure to understand Liberals is like the general who doesn't know his opponent, as in Sun Tzu's axiom that a winning general knows his enemy.  Know him not, and your chances are at best 50-50.  How can Rush really know the enemy then if he cannot consistently beat them?  Blaming it on "low information" voters just shifts the blame away from the failed general onto the troops.

But this isn't about Rush, it is about Krugman.

It's about his latest article, about how wealth is bad for the soul.  Did Krugman have a revelation somewhere down the road to Damascus?  Not to worry, Krugman didn't get all religious on us.  Krugman is probably just using this as a rhetorical device to gull you into believing his thesis.  His real target isn't about wealth per se, or he would divest himself of all of his.  I'm pretty sure that Krugman won't take up a vow of poverty anytime soon.

He bases his latest thesis upon some of what he calls "serious research", which is a Time op-ed.  Sounds pretty doggone serious.

If attaining wealth makes one more narcissistic, then why write this as a part of a "serious" piece of scholarship?

...there is a difference between narcissistic traits, as measured in this study, and clinical narcissistic-personality disorder. The disorder is actually more common among the poor rather than the rich, according to other studies. That’s probably because at its most extreme, narcissism destroys relationships both in the home and workplace — and therefore, is more likely to lead to unemployment and poverty, not success.

If there's a correlation between narcissism and wealth, that paragraph just blew it up.  Even if there was a corrrelation, there is no claim to causation.  In fact, correlation as causation is a logical fallacy.  Indeed, poverty seems to breed clinical narcissistic-personality disorder, not the other way around.  But if being wealthy means that someone engages in its traits, but not the clinical disorder itself, isn't that more benign?  This seems to be an argument for getting wealthy.  It reduces the clinical disorder.  If the price paid is a bit of annoying traits, then that isn't necessarily a bad trade.  However, this is just a musing of mine, not a claim to "serious research".

Krugman, after admitting there's no connection, which means he is being somewhat dishonest, then launches into one of his sermons that demonstrates the second triad of the Liberal catechism-- untruth, Equality, and Peace.  We all must be Equal, gosh darn it.

Finally, he closes in on his real target- Trump and the GOP.  So, the real design of all this is not to share his revelation about soulful things, but to go after the leader in the nomination for the presidency.

Trump is eeeeeeeeeeevil because he is rich.  Rich is bad.  Equality is good.  If we all were equal, the Utopia would be at hand.  Peace and prosperity would reign forever and ever and ever.  Amen.

Too bad it is all just another Liberal fairy tale.

"Super intelligence" tandem to solve AGW "problem" ?

Computers aren't smart.  They can only do exactly what they are instructed to do.  They can appear smart, if the programmers are smart enough to emulate intelligence in a convincing way.  You only have the intelligence of a computer programmer collaborating with a bunch of numbskulls who think computers are smart enough to tell them anything.

The trouble with this line of thinking is that there are those who are relying upon computers to do their own thinking for them.  That is all but an admission of failure, as far as I'm concerned.

I may get some argument for this, but what the hay?

You know, I was thinking about this just a few moments ago.  If you disagree with liberals, they tend to get mad at you.  It is like you are attacking them personally.  It isn't personal with me.  I just think they are stupid.

About those resolutions...

Let's do a "Best of" post.

The "Best of post" is to promote the blog a bit.  That's one of my resolutions.  I'm going to work the list in reverse order, because I'm sure I've worked the list the other way.  Maybe I'll find some interesting posts that way.

Here's the list:

Big Brother is Watching
Doodle Bug and Ying Yang
Frog and Scorpion
Dog and Butterfly meaning
When all else fails, think
Optimism v pessimism
Sleepless night
Connecting the dots

That's enough for now.  I will continue until I cover the entire blog.  If I don't, I will have failed at keeping my resolution.