The Vent and Rant Thread

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by wodin

Well, Mario the solar guy was out last night, and sure enough da buggah was wired wrong. I'll know in a couple of days if he fixed it, but I think he did.

Hope he fixed it. Tepid showers are no fun.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by wodin

Well, my shiny new (less than a week old) $7,000 solar hot water system gave me a TEPID shower last night. I went out and checked the temperature in the tank and it was 80 degrees F! Since the air temperature was 82 I was a bit disappointed, especially after a beautiful 87 degree sunny day that should have been heating the tank all day!

Just have to wait until HiPower Solar opens this morning to give them a call and say "HEY! WOT'S UP WI' DAT??!!" (that's pigeon for "What is up with that?".

You are using solar panels to generate electricity, and using that to heat the water? Is that all it's intended to do?

Back in the 70's, I worked for a HUD/ERDA sponsored project to promote alternative energy. OPEC was in first flower, gas was over (gasp!) $1 a gallon, and there was interest in reducing dependence on foreign supplies.

What we pushed was using solar collectors to use the sun's heat to provide hot water. Photovoltaics were not in the picture. Hot water heating was 20% of the average residential energy bill, and a solar hot water installation had relatively low up front costs and relatively short payback period. (We were tracking photovoltaics, but that was simply too expensive back then for wide deployment.)

The economics for solar cells are different now, due to low cost supplies from Chinese manufacturers, and are a more viable solution for generating part of your electric power, but if my use case was heating hot water, I don't think it's the way I'd go.
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Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

I'm interested in hearing a little about what they're doing with solar now -- so, Wodin, care to summarize what your system is and does?

[wodin]

Yes, I'm in the process of installing solar hot water AND solar electric (Photo Voltaic (PV)) at my home. Solar hot water is more economical in terms of length of payback so the experts (solar installation companies) advocate using both.

Hot water also has much fewer bureaucratic issues as the power company, Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) in spite of what they profess would rather sell me power than have me get it for free from the sun. So they have instituted a permitting process which can sometimes take months to navigate. Also some neighborhoods have community associations that insist that what you put on your roof can conceivably be any of their business. Thankfully mine does not.

I am currently at the stage of having the hot water installed and hopefully working, and am waiting for the permits for the PV. I have applied for a 10KW PV permit, but have only contracted for 6KW. Based on my current use that will be close to what I need, but adding additional panels will be relatively easy as I will already have the permits for more. The cost of my system is about $7K or hot water and $35K for PV, but incentives and tax breaks will cut that more than in half.

The climate and economy in Hawaii is the most advantageous for solar as we have the most year around sunshine and the highest electrical rates in the nation, but it may also be advantageous in other areas. I think it mostly depends on the local electrical rates.

You can drive through nearly any neighborhood and see solar panels on nearly every rooftop. There is a fairly recent state law requiring all new home construction have some amount of solar or other renewable energy installed but I’m not familiar with that.

[badgoodDeb]

Thanks. Neat to hear about! May you have a yummy hot shower now that the technical guy has fixed something.

[cromag]

For many years I have used a pair of stoneware mugs for my tea -- big (slightly more than 16 ounces), heavy mugs from Colonial Williamsburg. Mine were the middle one in this photo:




I say "were" because today, through a combination of clumsiness and an unstable table, one of them fell to the deck and broke into several thick, heavy pieces.

Oh, well.

There are plenty of them available at Ebay, and I may pick up a replacement, but I'm also thinking of other possible alternatives.

[DMcCunney]

That's annoying.

My desktop system is a Win7 Pro box with a quad core Xeon CPU and 8GB RAM. Win7 and Ubuntu dual boot from an SSD.

Win10 finally became available for download, and wanted me to start upgrading. As it happens, I already downloaded the ISO file and created a USB stick installer. I simply hadn't gotten to it.

But something about the process hosed my Windows state. The entire machine appeared hung, and it wouldn't even power cycle from the front panel power button. I had to reach behind and disconnect the power cord, than plug it back in.

It did provide an opportunity to update Ubuntu with the latest batch of critical updates, which I did before booting back into Win7.

All seems normal. The annoyance is my browser setup.

With 8GB RAM, I have enough to play a bit. I found a 64 bit ramdisk driver that works in Win7, and there's a 1GB ramdisk seen as Z: with an NTFS filesystem. I'm set up to have Firefox's browser cache and profile on the ramdisk. A startup script loads the FF profile to the ramdisk from a zip archive on the hard drive, A shutdown script zips it back to catch profile changes made in that session. (I have fast broadband and don't bother preserving cache.)

The profile in the zip archive hadn't been updated in a bit, so when Windows came back up and I ran Firefox, it was a time machine trip to days back. Various updates made since the last time the zip was updated vanished.

It's not a disaster, but it is a reminder that I need to update the zip file regularly...

It is the first time I've seen this machine so jammed up it won't power off from the front panel. That's...different.
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Dennis

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by cromag

For many years I have used a pair of stoneware mugs for my tea -- big (slightly more than 16 ounces), heavy mugs from Colonial Williamsburg. Mine were the middle one in this photo:




I say "were" because today, through a combination of clumsiness and an unstable table, one of them fell to the deck and broke into several thick, heavy pieces.

Oh, well.

There are plenty of them available at Ebay, and I may pick up a replacement, but I'm also thinking of other possible alternatives.

Sorry about your broken mug.

Are those from the Pottery Factory? My wife loves going there, although the prices these days aren't quite the amazing bargains they were in years past. We live about 50 miles from the place.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Sorry about your broken mug.

Are those from the Pottery Factory? My wife loves going there, although the prices these days aren't quite the amazing bargains they were in years past. We live about 50 miles from the place.

Looks like. I picked mine up in a gift shop on a family visit to Colonial Williamsburg many years ago, and I remember buying them in a shop either on or near the premises. The illustration on the "Legacy Specialties" section of the Pottery Factory website looks just like it.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

With 8GB RAM, I have enough to play a bit. I found a 64 bit ramdisk driver that works in Win7, and there's a 1GB ramdisk seen as Z: with an NTFS filesystem. I'm set up to have Firefox's browser cache and profile on the ramdisk. A startup script loads the FF profile to the ramdisk from a zip archive on the hard drive, A shutdown script zips it back to catch profile changes made in that session. (I have fast broadband and don't bother preserving cache.)

The profile in the zip archive hadn't been updated in a bit, so when Windows came back up and I ran Firefox, it was a time machine trip to days back. Various updates made since the last time the zip was updated vanished.

It's not a disaster, but it is a reminder that I need to update the zip file regularly...

It is the first time I've seen this machine so jammed up it won't power off from the front panel. That's...different.

How much faster is Firefox from a ramdisk anyway? It's things like this (accidents do happen) that make me rather hesitant about storing permanent info on a ramdisk...

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

With 8GB RAM, I have enough to play a bit. I found a 64 bit ramdisk driver that works in Win7, and there's a 1GB ramdisk seen as Z: with an NTFS filesystem. I'm set up to have Firefox's browser cache and profile on the ramdisk. A startup script loads the FF profile to the ramdisk from a zip archive on the hard drive, A shutdown script zips it back to catch profile changes made in that session. (I have fast broadband and don't bother preserving cache.)

Why on earth would you do this? The only reason I can think about is to prevent others from looking into the profile, assuming you store it into an archive that has a password. I think Firefox won't be much faster running from a RAM-drive than when running from an SSD. I wouldn't even be surprised if Firefox just reads and caches its profile in RAM on its own.

The only thing I'd use RAM-drives for are thousands and thousands of small temporary files that don't need to be saved. Maybe I should try and set up one for Calibre's Edit Book functionality, as it spits out a lot of small files when opening a book.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

How much faster is Firefox from a ramdisk anyway?

Subjectively, it seems faster, but how much is a good question. I don't offhand know how to really measure it.

The first iteration simply placed the Firefox cache there. Firefox makes that easy. Go into about:config, and create a new string preference called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Set the value of the preference to the location where you want the cache to be. (Here, that's Z:\FFramdisk.) Firefox will create the cache where that preference specifies.

I don't bother to preserve the cache between boots, though I could. I have a 100mbps cable modem connection, and it's simpler to let FF rebuild from scratch. You can also specify the maximum cache size in about:config, but I haven't done so. Thus far, the largest I've seen it get is about 190MB.

I also have Google Chrome set to have cache on the ramdisk, but that was a more complex exercise, because Chrome doesn't provide a way to specify where cache lives. Doing it required OS level hacking.

NTFS5 supports *nix style hard links and symbolic links, but does not expose the functionality by default. You need an advanced utility package from MS or a third-party offering to use the functionality. I use a freeware utility called Link Shell Extension from William Schinagl. LSE adds Pick Link Source and Drop Link As selections to the right-click context menu in Explorer.

Chrome attempts to create the cache directory under the profile directory on the HD. (Here, that's in C:\Users\Dennis\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache.) I created a symlink from the HD cache directory to the ramdisk. Chrome follows the symlink, and puts the cache on the ramdisk.

It's things like this (accidents do happen) that make me rather hesitant about storing permanent info on a ramdisk...

The info isn't that critical or permanent. This was an annoyance, not a disaster.

It was also a sharp pointy reminder that accidents do happen, and I'm thinking about ways to automagically update the profile zip on the HD outside of the standard process. Right now, a shutdown script does it when Windows is shutdown/rebooted, but that doesn't help in a power fail because the script never gets run.)
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Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

It was also a sharp pointy reminder that accidents do happen, and I'm thinking about ways to automagically update the profile zip on the HD outside of the standard process.

Run the script you use in the shutdown sequence as a cronjob at every 5 minutes

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Why on earth would you do this? The only reason I can think about is to prevent others from looking into the profile, assuming you store it into an archive that has a password. I think Firefox won't be much faster running from a RAM-drive than when running from an SSD. I wouldn't even be surprised if Firefox just reads and caches its profile in RAM on its own.

Why do it? It's quicker, and it was fun to implement. (I am not concerned about others seeing the content of the profile. The only way anyone could get to information on the desktop machine is to sit down in front of it, and if they can do that, I've got much bigger problems than PC security. Loading from a zip file was simply faster than a block copy from HD.)

I originally did something like this on my old desktop. That was a dual core 32bit machine dual booting WinXP and Ubuntu, with 4GB RAM. For technical reasons, 32 bit Windows can't see/use more than about 3.2GB RAM, so I had RAM that was unused. I found a freeware ramdisk driver that could see and use that extra memory, and had a 768MB ramdisk seen as Z:

The first step was putting the browser cache there. Next step was putting the profile there. Last step was running the browser itself from the ramdisk.

At the highest level of development, I could use Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Thunderbird that way, and since I run production and beta builds of Firefox, specify which was run from the ramdisk.

On the new desktop, I boot and run Win7 Pro and Ubuntu from SSD. A quick test showed there was no real benefit to running Firefox itself from the ramdisk: speed of loading and invocation from SSD was about as fast as it would be from the ramdisk. There was still a benefit to putting cache and profile on the ramdisk.

A secondary benefit was reducing writes to the SSD. To the extent convenient, things here are set up do that the SSD is primarily read-only, and actual variable data is written to and lives on the HD.

The only thing I'd use RAM-drives for are thousands and thousands of small temporary files that don't need to be saved. Maybe I should try and set up one for Calibre's Edit Book functionality, as it spits out a lot of small files when opening a book.

That's a valid usage. I started using ramdisks in the MSDOS days. My original PC had an addon card with a meg of additional memory. 512KB of that was allocated to a ramdisk, various frequently used things were copied there on boot, and the ramdisk was first in the %PATH%. It was also set as the place to create temp files for things that could be told where to make them, like PKZip. Sped things up a treat.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Run the script you use in the shutdown sequence as a cronjob at every 5 minutes

Overkill, and cron doesn't exist on Windows unless I want to run something like Cygwin.

The script that stores things back to zip on the HD can be run manually. I just hadn't done so in a while. In general, the machine is on 24/7, and Firefox is up and running. If I run the script with FF active, various things won't get updated because FF has the files locked. I run FF Developer Edition and Nightly, both of which get frequent updates and want to be restarted to apply them

I simply need to exit when an update appears, run my shutdown script, and then restart FF instead of restarting from within FF.
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Dennis