An exploration of the things quantum chromodynamics makes possible
I recently upgraded my home Comcast internet service from 1gig/40meg to their newest 2gig/200meg service. This is a significant upgrade for Comcast as it requires some upgrades to field installed upstream amps to allow a greater amount of upstream bandwidth. I was surprised to see that the hardware work was completed in my area, but happy to give it a try. One oddity of the service is that Comcast…
When I was in middle school my parents got me a Sharp PC-1401 ( a slightly earlier version of this 1403) for Christmas. I had a Sharp EL-506 calculator, and the PC-1401/3 was an extension of that style but included a BASIC language interpreter and a full QWERTY keyboard. It was the precursor of the laptop, and I carried it around every day. I spent quite a bit of time writing basic routines to…
Interesting results with the newest Comcast offering at home. 2 gig download and 200m upload. The upload seems a little jumpy..of course this is during peak times. The DOCSIS3.1 modem has a 2.5G ethernet port, but fortunately one of my 10G SFP+ BaseTs supports 2.5G which works in the UDM Pro. From there 10G to everything else.
There is something very cathartic about doing pluck-foam cases and getting that perfect fit.
We had a power outage last week that gave me a good change to test out my battery system. Like any successful test it uncovered a few bugs. The battery system is based around the Enphase Smartswitch combined with a bank of 4x 10.2KWh battery packs that use LiFePo4 batteries combined with 53 380W LG Solar panels all using IQ7 microinverters. The concept is that the batteries and the solar…
Here is a helpful map if you find yourself walking with a compass and needing to find true north. The lines represent the degree difference between true north and magnetic north. Here in the PNW the difference is about 15 degrees, while in the middle of the US the difference goes to 0. Perhaps the most amazing observation is the latitude of the southern pole, which is close to 65 degrees. An…
Wind + Water > Tree + Roots < Eric with a chainsaw.
The fog gives it that Close Encounters of the Third Kind look. On a related note, these shoes with the Michelin snow tire tread work really well on ice.
I had mentioned a few months back that I was testing out an EcoFlow Delta Pro portable battery pack. I used it when doing some remote astrophotography late in the summer. It is a pretty compact unit that has 3.6kwh of storage along with a 3.6kw inverter, 1.6kw solar input, and the usual DC outputs. When I used it this summer I paired it with a small Honda 1800W generator, which worked well. The…
Today I am completing my 52 trip around the fusionball in the sky. A friend mentioned the yearly trip in an email recently, and it reminded me of something interesting I learned many years ago. When I was around 8 or 9 I bought a book called ‘Practical Astronomy with you Calculator’ which was a fantastic book explaining how to use a calculator to determine the position of objects in the sky, the…