Recent content on ned Productions
I hadn’t expected to write another diary entry in here during August, however last week Deepseek v4 Flash 0731 was released and for reasons as you’ll see shortly, I have spent most days this past week using it all day and sometimes all night long. We may finally have a Step 3.7 Flash LLM replacement! Before we get into that though, yesterday my children finished painting the west wall…
Three weeks since the last diary entry here, but only two weeks since round three of the groundworks for my house build were completed – they lasted about one month in the end. We’ve had an unusually long bout of sunny and dry weather, about a month now. I can’t personally remember one like it since maybe 2006, though last summer was also unusually sunny to the point where you…
It’s been a long three weeks! For those past three weeks I have been most days waking weekday mornings at 4am to be onsite for 6am as that’s when popups installation for my house build starts each day. Work continues until about 4.30pm when the workers leave, then I do cleanup and survey using my camera and drone, usually getting home some time between 6pm and 7pm. I then merge what…
Five days remain until the EU brings in a new tariff on small packages entering the EU which has been designed to stem the flow of direct-to-EU-consumer small packages being sent from lower cost countries, with the overwhelming majority (91%!) coming from China. On the one hand, yes sending four billion small packages per year each on a 10,000 km trip is environmental insanity, but the fact that…
I am typing to you now from the cabin on my site where popups installation continues apace. We should be about three quarters done by end of today. It is currently raining outside but will clear later – the lads soldier on as if you didn’t you’d never get any construction in Ireland. But I have the luxury of being able to wait inside until it stops raining later today, so…
I am finally able to write up the third and final part of my series of diary entries on ‘balcony solar’ installations in Ireland. The first entry went into some detail about the hardware and the theory behind ‘balcony solar’ installations in Ireland, and the second entry discussed issues around local measurement and control of the balcony solar installation. As mentioned in…
Here is the annual update to my periodic comparison of storage bytes per inflation adjusted dollar for magnetic hard drives and flash SSDs ( you can find all the past posts here ), which I have done every June since 2012: Raw data: http://www.nedprod.com/studystuff/SSDsVsHardDrives.xlsx What an astonishing year it has been for storage pricing! SSDs are more than double their cost last year –…
Last diary entry I went into a fair bit of detail about the hardware and the theory behind ‘balcony solar’ installations in Ireland, and I was hopefully persuasive about the theoretical potential reduction in electricity bills and theoretical return on investment of under two years. One major caveat is that we cannot legally export power to the grid in Ireland without gaining prior…
First things first: April 2026 was a rotten month for us, as we had fail all in quick succession the dishwasher, the side mirror on my car, the lawn mower, and Megan’s car failed its annual roadworthiness test due to a rotten rear subframe. All very expensive and time consuming to fix, and it blew out almost all my free time and energy outside of erecting temporary solar panels, so I got…
After recovering from illness a couple of weeks ago, it’s been a flurry of activity since – mostly outdoors too, as we’ve had good weather. We had bad news with Megan’s car NCT, a new subframe will need to be fitted which will be expensive. Not the best news when one has had no income for nearly a year now. The dishwasher’s waste pump burned out, as it tends to do…
Woke up early this morning with plans as the groundworks got cancelled, but I began to feel increasingly awful so I went back to bed. After four hours of additional sleep, I still feel not well, so I won’t be leaving the house today. Instead I’ll be writing this entry, as I was going to write this anyway later this week. I remember getting something a bit like this after my wedding…
I am feeling run off my feet as I shall be taking all my children alone to England for ten days tomorrow to give Megan uninterrupted space to study for her exams. It’s quite stressing me out – I was up until 3.30am last night clearing backlog items before I depart, and then I barely slept from the anxiety and I was up bright and early this morning to ring people to clear more backlog.…
I’ve been rather run off my feet these past couple weeks such that I kept not getting round to writing up my rented home internet upgrade. Here it is now, and just in time given that the current broadband contract runs out in a few days time. Yes almost exactly one year ago I was writing here about our shiny new fibre broadband connection which I just had installed into our rented house. In…
I had thought that this St. Patrick’s Day entry would be about making my rented home internet faster, but before I do that I ought to fix something I completely forgot to mention last entry which discussed how best to run Qwen3 Coder Next: I entirely forgot to discuss options for upgrading the house server with LLM possible hardware. And no, I don’t mean just fitting a graphics card to…
I just finished making my rented house internet go much faster, it took me several hours of work this morning, then this afternoon I was in a WG14 standards meeting, so I just finished the work there now. And the internet is indeed now much faster! But that’ll be discussed in detail in a later virtual diary entry, because this one will be on AI coding assistants, and I apologise in advance…
Mostly these past two weeks I have been working on another long overdue chore item from my unemployment backlog: doing something about the tens of thousands of photos we have accumulated over the years. More on that shortly – firstly last weekend I think I have solved another problem which had been growing these past six months or so: I have been increasingly finding water in my boot where…
Yesterday the site switched from Eir fibre broadband over to Digiweb fibre broadband. Yes I know I said on here before that I intended to stick with Eir going forwards, but the price difference became too much, so I’m going to suck down an inferior service and save a lot of money by doing so. Also I’m feeling a bit under the weather, so as I’m not up to doing much more, I thought…
After paying the second stage payment to the future builder of my house build three weeks ago, he tells me that we might get the service popups installation plan next week. I’ll expect it when I see it! In the meantime, I’ve been trying to coax my architect into completing the Passive House certification work which had been let languish these past two years as until the builder and…
This day last week we took a major decision for my house build by deciding to press ahead with the build by paying the second stage payment to the builder (so yes, he finally came back with a final quote for both substructure and superstructure, which was for the cool sum of €433,078.19 inc VAT). That includes the foundations for the greenhouse and excludes airtightness, so if we deduct say 33k…
It’s been seven months now that I’ve been unemployed, and I’ve been making good progress through the todo list that I had built up these past eight years – which is about one year less than the age of my son, if I think about it, which makes sense as I was last unemployed for the first year of his life, and I have been continuously working since then. As I spent much of the…
A few posts ago I said that I had written another ‘long form’ essay style post, the second I’ve written since I had children (you may remember with fondness – or not – the last long form essay on geopolitics last April . The last essay consumed weeks of my time – this one has been considerably worse as I’ve been able to work on it full time, and it stands…
Last post I did a show and tell of the secure encrypted key fob and portable monitor I had purchased from Aliexpress. I’ve also had posts recently on moving my phone stack over to GrapheneOS and I may have mentioned the repurposing of my son’s former gaming PC into a ChromeOS based secure PC. I dropped a few hints about QR codes. I guess it’s time to explain what I’ve been…
That portable monitor and the additional secure encrypted USB drives arrived from Aliexpress, so here is some show and tell on those. The 20k word essay is still being processed by family members, and I currently expect that might be ready for publishing here in early January. Between now and then I expect to write over the Christmas break the following posts: I’ve assembled that 3D printed…
I’ve finished the WG14 reference libraries implementation and I’ve written and submitted their associated WG14 papers, which was my major todo item to get done before Christmas. For my house build, my engineers are done! I’ve paid them the final part of their fee, and my timber frame supplier is currently coming up with a final quote, and then we’ll need to take the…
Two weeks ago I compared on here my new phone, a Google Pixel 9 Pro, to my previous phone a Samsung Galaxy S10 . In that post I compared the hardware, and apart from the camera I didn’t find much in it, plus the Pixel was a good 50% more expensive than the S10 was even after adjusting for inflation. My bigger motivation for the upgrade was the fresh battery, but also completely changing up…