RSS Spam
20:28 Sunday, 8 May 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 67.32°F Pressure: 1006hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 96
Just a comment about "for subscribers only" posts in RSS feeds.
May I suggest that bloggers, or "influencers," or whatever the folks who are monetizing their web presence call themselves, create a separate RSS feed for paid subscription content?
Otherwise, it just feels like you're spamming my feed reader. If I'd wanted to pay for your content, I'd have already done so. Reading the first few paragraphs of a post only to discover that you have to pay to read the rest is a waste of my time.
I'll be deleting those feeds from my reader.
✍️ Reply by emailMy First Exhibition
Current Wx: Temp: 70.75°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 6.91mphWords: 92
Well, I guess I'm an artiste now. My first exhibition at the Anastasia Club. Heh.
At the last photography club meeting, they asked if someone wanted to put some of their photos in the community club display. Nobody raised their hand, so I did.
Made a QR code of my Flickr photo stream. So far, no uptick in visits. (Nor do I expect one. Not sure how many of these folks understand or would use a QR code.)
✍️ Reply by emailCleaned
Current Wx: Temp: 72.79°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 1.01mphWords: 155
Put the drone up this morning to look at the array again. I had it up while they were cleaning yesterday. Judging by their reaction, I'm not sure anyone has ever done that before.
They are cleaner than yesterday, but perhaps not as clean as I might have liked. They used a hose and scrub brushes but no soap. Plus, the water is hard. We'll see how the output goes today, weather looks similar in terms of cloud cover.
If I can figure out a safe way to get on the roof, I may try to do it myself next year, with soap.
We're still making more power than we use and the "problem" is likely more cosmetic than production, but if I can get more from them, I want it.
I put a "before" and "after" example up on Flickr.
✍️ Reply by emailTable Feature In Tinderbox
09:43 Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 80.17°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 361
This post in the Tinderbox Forum prompted me to look more closely at the new Table View feature. (New to me. It's been out for a little while now.)
Table view works principally on children of a note or container. It also works on siblings, if there are no children of a selected note. It consists of the name of the note and a row of the values of its Displayed Attributes; so if tables are important to you it's probably worth thinking about what you wish to include in Displayed Attributes. (That's a whole other discussion.)
Since every post in the marmot is contained in a Month container, it was easly for me to select the April 2024 container, and then select Table from the View menu. This gave me a table of containing the name of each post and all their displayed attributes.
It wasn't exactly clear how to export this data, but I figured it out. In the Table view, select any row. You can't Select All from the Edit menu without having at least one row selected. With one row selected, then Select All from the Edit menu. Right-click anywhere in the table view and you'll get a contextual menu. Select Copy, and in the sub-menu, select the format you wish the table to be copied into, I picked Comma-separated values.
Then paste the table into any app that accepts comma-separated values, in my case Numbers. You get a nice spreadsheet with all your data. You may have to fiddle with cell formats if you want to do any further analysis.
In April 2024, I wrote 81 posts totaling 23,489 words (Word count seems somewhat off per-post, but it's close.) The Sentiment Analysis value varied from a high of 0.300000012, to a low of -0.800000009. What that means, I don't know. But now I can look at those two posts and try and figure it out.
You could write a dashboard agent to keep track of things like that on an ongoing basis, but I haven't done that yet. I may do so soon, just to learn more about Tinderbox.
Pretty cool.
✍️ Reply by emailFurther to the Foregoing
10:23 Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.67°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 203
So, the highest Sentiment value post was Sometimes I Love People. Unfortunately, it's probably an outlier, as it only had three words. (Correctly counted.) The lowest value post was The Apocalypse Has Not Been Postponed, 224 words in Table view. (Word Service reports 223, but close enough.)
So, positive values = "positive" sentiment; negative, the opposite. The average for April was -0.401272571, the median was -0.434313734. (Surprisingly, you can't just right-click and copy these summary values at the bottom of a Numbers table. I'm using TextSniper to copy them because that's a lot of digits to remember.)
I also discovered the word count discrepancy is significant in the posts with images, probably because there's html export code included in the $Text, and values inserted into that export code.
To make something like this more useful on a regular basis, I'd probably want to include the permalink as a Displayed Attribute, so I can just click right to the post from Numbers, instead of looking for it in the archive.
Again, all this type of analysis could be rolled up into a live dashboard within the Tinderbox file itself, which could then be exported as a page in the blog. Something I may do.
✍️ Reply by emailI Am An Energy Nerd
12:30 Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 88.34°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 58% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 442
Woot has another low price on the Nebo 100W portable solar panel, $120. (Limit 2 per customer.) I bought another one.
I figured I'd daisy-chain two in series for the Bluetti AC70, and use a single one for the Bluetti EB3A. The challenge is, I have the two I already have neatly hung up in the garage. The hook won't hold a third. But I'll figure it out.
I'm waiting until sundown to compare yesterday and today's energy production. It's become cloudier today, so I'll look at the peak production numbers at comparable hours. (You can tell when it's cloud shading versus sun angle.)
Mitzi was gone for three weeks in March and April, so I can't really compare energy usage with the new dryer, but we should have some good data at the end of this month. There's a lot of "noise" depending on how much we drove the car, how hot it was out (it's supposed to get to 96°F today), but over time I should be able to discern how much the dryer is saving.
We went to a North Florida Green Chamber event yesterday, and Donna Deegan, mayor of Jacksonville, was the guest speaker. I always enjoy hearing her speak, and I came away feeling good about the efforts her administration is making to address the climate emergency. She gets it. It's impossible to conceive of a Republican going after these grants and pursuing the initiatives she's pursuing, sad to say though it is.
I also spoke to Nathan Ballentine, "the man in overalls." I'd heard him speak a few years ago when I was on the St Johns County Soil and Water Conservation District board. He's like "Dave the plant guy," (though I think Dave prefers "Dave the plant man") who is here in Ponte Vedra. Nathan is more Duval County. They both try to teach people how to grow their own food, and are both very inspiring people. Nathan has a website, overalls.life. Click on the hamburger menu in the upper left for a complete picture of what they do. We chatted a bit about The Limits to Growth, and the crisis beyond the climate crisis. He gets it.
His wife was there with him, and they have a young son. I mentioned that many people say it's "too late" (me being among them), but I told them I thought it's never too late to do your best, and that's what I'm trying to do. They seemed to like that.
I'm trying to write this in a more "positive" tone, and I'm still at -0.4400000095 on the sentiment analysis!
✍️ Reply by emailConservation of Energy
07:03 Thursday, 8 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 68.45°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 399
Going to try this Quotations speed-dating thing. (I haven't written the function yet. I'm still doing this manually, like an animal.)
Therefore, good and ill are one. Heraclitus
And
Action is doing something, reacting is having it happen. Syd Field
I didn't like this pairing at first, but I guess the idea is to kind of think about this random juxtaposition of ideas and see what comes to mind. So here goes...
"Good and ill are one," is the same as, "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Thought is a reaction to an event. It is the subjective evaluation of the consequences of an event (an "action"), which, depending on the observer's point of view, may be either "good" or "ill," or both, if two or more observers have different points of view, or if a single observer subscribes to no particular point of view, and can see both "good" and "ill" in the consequences of an event.
Action is the necessary antecedent to reaction, though I suppose that, at some scale, they may be thought of as being simultaneous. At any rate, it brought to mind Newton's third law of motion, every action has an equal an opposite reaction.
"Binding opposites" was another idea from Heraclitus. (From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. Fragment 46) Similar, perhaps, to yin and yang, good and ill.
Syd Field was likely describing an aspect of screenwriting, but it's interesting in a broader context. (Or someone wouldn't have made the effort to jot it down as a quotation. I don't recall where this particular one came from. Likely Zen and the Art of Making a Living.)
Being and nothingness, binding opposites. Being is perhaps the negation of nothingness. An equal and opposite reaction, momentum is conserved, energy as well. Zero sum in a one frame, sound and fury in another, depending, I suppose, on the observer's point of view.
Ideas that were explored by Nishida Kitaro.
Nishida writes about experience, reality, good and religion. He argues that the most profound form of experience is the pure experience. Nishida analyzes the thought, the will, the intellectual intuition, and the pure experience among them.[4] According to Nishida's vision as well as to the essence of Asian wisdom, one craves harmony in experience, for unity.[5]
Everything is connected.
Maybe a productive exercise.
What do you think?
✍️ Reply by emailPotatoes, Peas, Sugar Beets and Spinach
08:59 Thursday, 8 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 72.03°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 0mph
Words: 37
A bit of agriculture that one might be wise to study.
We're all in this together, and nobody's getting out of here alive.
So maybe, in the mean time, we can all try to help each other.
✍️ Reply by emailThe Efficiency of Electric Vehicles
09:10 Thursday, 8 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 72.36°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 247
This is a nice piece that points out the inefficiencies of fossil fueled vehicles, just in delivering the fuel to the pump.
I love my Maverick, but I'd love it even more if it were a plug-in hybrid. If it were all-electric, that would probably be ideal. There are some interesting things happening with small truck EVs, but they're not ready yet.
I'm just over 1100 miles (1107, just checked on the Ford Pass app) on the Mav right now. I've only put gas in it twice. Mileage at last fill-up was 806.7, so I've gone 300 miles on a little less than half a tank of gas. (Needle's above the mid-line, app says 55%.) The calculated mpg on the last fill-up was 39.6, which was less than the 43.6 I calculated on the first tank. But I think I did more highway driving (less efficient) on the second tank. Plus, wasn't using "Eco" mode each time, because I didn't know you have to select it each time you drive the car. (Really dumb idea Ford. Didn't Ford used to think they had better ideas? They did.)
Once we get more or less permanently situated at Winterfell (I'm guessing two years), I think I'd be a good candidate for a small EV truck. Hopefully, they're available and reasonable. We'd use the EV for most local driving, and the RAV4 for long-distance stuff. At least while gas is still available, that is.
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