PV Solar Up and Running

I recently installed a PV solar grid-tie system in my house in Guatemala City. I posted the basics on https://gringo2gt.com. Here are the details. Grid-tie inverters and safety stuff. The inverter has a capacity of 3000 watts and includes WiFi and Bluetooth so you can talk to it. In the box on the left are DC and AC breakers, a DC fuse, and both DC [...]

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My Life with Transistors

When I was young, my dad worked at National Technical Schools, a technical trade school that was world-famous. It offered correspondence courses in electronics all around the [...]

OutWiker – the tree notes organizer

If you know me you probably know I have been using Zim for years to organize notes. It is billed as a "Desktop Wiki". In the Zim group someone mentioned OutWiker as another [...]

Instant Pot

No, this has nothing to do with fast growing marijuana. (Is there such a thing?) This is a kitchen appliance that I avoided buying for quite a while. Why? Because it seemed [...]

Becoming More Invisible

For me, becoming less "spied upon" has been a process and it is far from done. Sometimes I forget how serious this spy level is. Yesterday I was reminded when my daughter had [...]

Vocho — Update 2

The previous episode of this adventure is Update 1. The first obvious note is that there has been a huge delay. It's not my fault -- blame it on a combination of Aduanas and [...]

Bitchute — A YouTube Alternative for the Right Reasons

YouTube has offered an amazing change for Internet users. It means that you can share your videos and find an amazing amount of videos from others. But, the definition of the [...]

A Linux New Year

Installing Linux for "Joe Average" hasn't been on my list in ages but it seems to be a Linux season here right now. I installed Linux on Jean-Pierre's chromebook. All is [...]

Creating sites with SPIP

The world is full of things to create web sites. WordPress is probably the most popular but to do anything beyond a dumb blog there is learning to do. And more often than not, [...]

Searching with YaCy

Language evolves. Just like  "Xerox" became the verb meaning "make a photocopy", "google" has evolved into a verb meaning to search the web using a search engine. Today we [...]

Elgg (again)

I have used elgg before. It is "old" social media web site software. By old I mean both that it has been around for may years and it is just social software, not spyware. I [...]