Category : Diary

For registered users.

For registered users.

For registered users.

It’s been so hot, that doing anything has been questionable. I did manage to order a coolsuit. For less than half the retail price (because it’s a discontinued model), I was able to get 2 pairs of pants, a vest and a hooded shirt, the backpack for the water reservoir with 2x icebricks, the pump, battery and charger.

It’s affordable enough, that even if it doesn’t work out, all the parts are there to build upon and modify.

A week in which I realised I will need to do something about temperature, if I’m to do any welding before winter… and the house air conditioning failed.

I think I’ve found a solution, for welding at least – a powered icewater coolsuit. I’m still trying to sort out the supply, the distributor has only a few demo units, but they’re half price.

The basic rig is a shirt & leggings, that have thin tubing sewn onto them, each forming a closed loop. They plug into a backpack, which contains a small pump, battery, water reservoir, and ice brick, which acts as the cold source.

You wear it under your work clothes, it keeps you cool while you work.

Add to that my powered respirator welding helmet, I’ll be a freaking astronaut.

A quiet week, medical stuff, bike rides, went to sushi train for the first time in 8 months.

Life under the dome is returning to normal.

Catastrophic storms over the weekend saw my UPS kick in for the first time, so its already paid for itself as far as I’m concerned. Less fun news, we have to replace the houses’ airconditioner, which is going to be something like $10k.

A pretty quiet week, a fair bit of time spent messing around with a project. Ended the week by changing my internet access plan after our ISP dropped us from 100/40 to 100/20, while increasing the price.

Conversely, we decided to actually move up to a higher plan, returning to 100/40, with an unlimited cap – and now the question of bandwidth simply doesn’t have to be a concern any more. We had found that streaming through Prime Video was using a lot of bandwidth – significantly more than Netflix or Youtube.

I picked up the UPS, and installed it.

The setup could be better in terms of the device’s UI. Part of the configuration wizard involves setting the service-start date for the battery, but whereas most devices with a date function ask for day, month, year as separate values to be input and locked, this device is just a long continuous scroll through dates – you go through all the days in a month, then on to the next month etc.

The result is I set the day correctly, then hit enter, and that locked the date as April, and from then on, not even a restore to factory defaults would give me the option to reset the battery date.

So, a long call to the manufacturer’s support line, where the tech hadn’t actually used this model, because they’ve been working from home for 8 months and haven’t had access to their labs, and we figured out we had to open the unit, remove the battery (while it was still running – it’s designed to do this, but it’s still unsettling when you’re on your own), disconnect the battery leads, reconnect them, and then tell the UPS that this was a new battery. Then, it re-enabled the wizard to set a battery date.

So both I, and the UPS support guy learned something from the experience.

Medical appointments, and purchase of a new high-capacity UPS, which should keep my system ticking along if the power goes out.

Moved my steel stockpile over to my storage facility, the sheet cladding is already starting to rust from the air.

I’ve registered a Fastspring account to move sales of my eBooks away from the Apple Books store, and in a major shot of good news, found that the cross-platform eBook reader Thorium has now adopted fixed-layout EPUB, and it renders them really well.

So, now the wheel of leaving Apple Books begins turning.