Last week I did some thinking about how much power my PV array generates on average and
came to no really clear conclusion, only that the offer I have is unreasonably optimistic.
Power generation is measured in terms of hours per day at nominal generation capacity, and
round here it's quoted at 3.5 hours per day: a 6.6 kW array should generate an average of
23.1 kWh per day over the year. My offer claims 4 hours (26.4 kWh).
But it occurred to me that I have quite good records: my current inverter tells me that I
have used 57,665.57 kWh of “green” energy since the system was installed, coincidentally
almost exactly 5 years ago. That's 31.49 kWh/day on average from my 10.8 kW system,
or 2.9 hours per day equivalent. A lot less than the claims, but then they're optimistic.
But that means that 6.6 kW system would generate an average 19.2 kWh per day—if the
panels were oriented correctly. Clearly the offer isn't worth considering. I'll be
interested to hear from the people and what they have to say.
The dryness continues, and even the little forecast rain hasn't arrived. Things are
correspondingly bad. I don't know how many of these roses will survive, despite irrigation:
Clearly the irrigation is part of the issue, but I'm no longer in a position to look at it
myself, and it seems to be beyond the comprehension of people who help me. Other plants are
also suffering:
How is it gaining access? Via the web browser? A bit of searching showed: yes. Apparently
it set a cookie to allow it to continue presenting notifications even when it didn't have a
page open. For Chromium, go to Settings / Privacy and Security / Site
Settings / Notifications and disallow them. In this case, I also deleted the
cookie.
I suppose that's normal nowadays, but it's the first time I've seen it.
Now opensubtitles.org have really
annoyed me with their spamming. How do I download the rest of my subtitles? Tried again
and got the usual
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-all/imdbid-2398016: Not Found
OK, can I download it from the web browser? No! First I need to select the language. When
I do that in the browser, I get a page that looks the same but has different links. And
then I was able to download the files.
Well, some of them:
...
imdbid-762006 148 kB 180 kBps 01s
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-eng/imdbid-738030: Not Found
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-eng/imdbid-737988: Not Found
Another check with the web browser gave me the message:
You are not logged-in. Try to login - this will help in most of cases
(not logged-in). subs_subtitle d IP: 121.200.11.253 exceeded. If you will continue trying to download, your IP will be blocked by our firewall. For more information read our FAQ or contact us, if you think you should not see this error. This deny will be removed after around 24 hours, so be patient.
OK, I can live with that. Presumably access from a different location would do so too.
Mañana.
Found an article in ABC news today
extolling the virtues of free video streaming. Nothing new to me: ABC themselves have
iview, and SBS has “on demand”. But they had a third one:
“Brollie”. OK, try them out. A fair
selection, including a number of Australian films. I have been looking for Sunday Too Far Away for some time, so it
was worth trying to download it.
First, though, another one that looked interesting: Mushrooms. Download went very quickly, but
I discovered that there were only 2¼ minutes out of 90 minutes, apparently in very low
resolution (though the video itself was 1024×768, presumably upscaled) and apparently only a
cropped part of the image. And no subtitles. Total loss.
OK, how about Sunday Too Far Away?
ERROR: [youtube] jIy4hcrXoKo: Video unavailable. This video contains content from Umbrella Entertainment, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds
Dammit, idiots, I'm in Australia, and you're an Australian company. Which IP address did you look at?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/49) /Video/spool/Videos 114 -> host hydra hydra.lemis.com has address 192.109.197.129
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/49) /Video/spool/Videos 115 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.129" AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
4764 | 192.109.197.129 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU
The column CC (presumably “country code”) gives the location. So what are they thinking?
In any case, how about doing it the way they want, via a web browser?
What? They want to dictate which browser and operating system you use, and they don't
support Linuxat all? The
statement that Chrome may work suggests that their software is extremely buggy, and
probably they've never even heard of FreeBSD.
Goodbye, Brollie. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Não sou um robô? I know enough Portuguese to understand that,
but why Portuguese? In any case, I have my answer to “why not?”. I'm getting more and more
turned off by CAPTCHAs, though
it might have been interesting to see what terms they use for “crosswalks”, and what their
fire hydrants look like.
Recently I found a recipe for
Pad See Ew. What's that? I
had never heard of it. The recipe explains: Thai Rice Noodles.
Well, I've eaten plenty of Phat
Thai, and the name sounds to me like a word I know from Malaysia: “see yau”, meaning soya sauce. And how about that, it
really does translate as “soya sauce noodles”.
The trick in the dish appears to be the caramelization of the noodles. And they want really
wide fresh rice noodles. I found some frozen fresh noodles in the deep freeze, and I used
them, though they were much narrower, and they fell apart while cooking:
Can't open /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20250422/photolist.php: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20250422/photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory
Can't open /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20250422/photolist.php: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20250422/photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory
Still, an interesting dish. Maybe I'll be able to add it to my breakfast menus.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia page states that the full name is kuaitiao phat si-io.
That comes even closer to Malaysian and Singapore usage: kuaitiao is a
more correct spelling of (Char)
kway teow. Interestingly, the Malay page Char kway teow states that the
correct spelling is
Kuetiau. I had always assumed that Thai food is very different from Malaysian and
Singapore food, and I'm still not convinced that this is a Thai dish: there's no mention of
it in my old cookbooks.
The Pope is dead. Rather
suddenly, as people were gradually expecting him to recover from his recent illnesses. But
he did it in no uncertain way, on Easter Monday, with both a stroke and a fatal heart attack. The world mourns.
At the time of the Queen's death, I had wondered whether her last official act, appointing
Liz Truss as prime minister,
might have been in part responsible. Liz Truss lived down to my low expectations, and I can
imagine the dread that the Queen must have felt when appointing her.
And the Pope? Less than 24 hours before, he had met with another politician, JD Vance. He, too, is beneath contempt.
Did he also have the Pope's death on his conscience? No, I don't think he has one.
Of course, I wasn't the first person to come to this conclusion. This YouTube video came out while I was planning the article:
It even includes a very brief reference to Liz Truss. I wish it were not quite that
horrible.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
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but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
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