Model 3

I'm finally settling in with the Model 3. I don't drive much since I work from home. Truly an amazing car. The problems I have with it now are very minor indeed. Things like it's failure to play music from a USB with any kind of reasonable resume function, and it rescans the whole drive in illogical ways. But once the drive has been scanned, it does finally play songs on shuffle for the whole device, so that's just a minor annoyance.

I'm comfortable enough with the car now that I've started testing it's performance, and it is like being on rails in corners. Very impressive. I've been trying out Chill mode, which feels like molasses if you switch mid drive, but works fine if you switch at the beginning of a drive. It nicely smooths out advanced cruise control and I'd guess autopilot also, although I barely ever use autopilot so I'm not sure.

Watching the videos online of people saying things like that they can't even manage to break the model 3 free even in snow is pretty funny. It's not even a little hard to break it free from traction in the snow. It certainly does well in the snow, but not actually as well as I expected from AWD. Certainly more than sufficient and certainly more than my single rear wheel drive cars, my single front wheel drive cars or even my two front wheel drive cars have in the past. With winter tires it's probably very good, but I can't afford the car, let alone an additional set of tires for it. I drive well enough in the snow I don't really need the help anyway.

I really want to get a tint job and some sort of paint protection on the car, but I just don't have the money. Maybe in the future, although obviously the sooner the better after it's purchased. Still have to find a place to get it washed also, or maybe I'll stop being lazy and wash it myself. HA!

PowerWalls and UPS

I was having a problem with my CyberPower UPSs, two of which are quite new and the other 2 are a few years old. A friend of mine found this discussion which is extremely interesting and tells me what is going on. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/powerwall-2-ups-connundrum-and-solution.130085/

Now I've got to replace 4 UPSs which is already pretty expensive, and way too expensive when working less than 50 percent full time. However, this made me realize that my UPS plan can be changed now that I've got a PowerWall. It doesn't work as a UPS, however it does condition the line a bit. Turns out not as much as I thought.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/powerwall-line-conditioning.116915/

So now I'm back to replacing all 4 UPSs, but at least I don't have to cover everything for long term power outages, just short blips, so that should reduce the cost of the UPSs chosen, although I have to make sure the frequency range is suitable.

Tesla PowerWall

Between installation and inspection, a part of my powerwall system failed, which shut off all power to my house for hours. Tesla came out and fixed it quite quickly, but then had to come out and do a more permanent job a couple of days later.

Last month the powerwall just stopped functioning. During the day when the sun was out, the app would say that all of my solar generated power was going directly out to the grid. However, my house continued to have power and the PowerWall continued to show it's level of charge. I called and they said they had to order a part. A week later and it just started working again. A week after that they called and said the part was in. I said it was already working, but they could install the new part for free if they wanted.

The tech comes out and says he's going to add a hard wire connection between two pieces of equipment that are less than a foot from each other in the setup for the Powerwalls, and which normally communicated for some reason via wireless. Zimba I believe he said.

A couple of hours later, and a short power outage and everything was back up and running.

Tesla PowerWalls

I recently had 2 Tesla Powerwalls installed. It took about a year and a half to go from reservation to finished installation. The process mostly went smoothly, but there were some pains too.

During the time when Tesla was trying to get permission to do the installations in Colorado the Model 3 came out and there were some problems with Tesla having enough batteries and Xcel being a giant pain in the ass with law suits, etc. Tesla's sales team kept sending me emails blaming Xcel, which was true, but it was also true that they didn't have any powerwalls sitting ready to install. So I finally said "Look, I hate Xcel too, but until you've got two Powerwalls sitting ready to come out to my house for installation, stop telling me it's Xcel's fault the installation isn't happening yet." I got back a nice reply that was basically, "ok, we'll let you know when we can schedule installation."

Finally the installation gets scheduled after 2 full rewrites of the plan without any further visits from Tesla. I requested a walk through because I wanted to be sure my very old garage wasn't going to cause any trouble. During the walk through, we decided on yet another rewrite of the plan.

Two weeks later on a Thursday, the teams shows up with 2 days scheduled for the install, and they finished it in about 8 hours. That was great, and all the techs were great to work with, professional and did a great job.

The next day (Friday) I got a "Payment Reminder" telling me I agreed to have already paid the installation price. Well the installation wasn't finished since it hadn't been inspected and couldn't be turned on. But hey, I'm a nice guy, so I just ignored it.

Sunday, in the middle of the morning, my power went out. I checked all the breakers, none were tripped, so I called Xcel and they said they'd send someone out. I also called Tesla to let them know they might need to come out and take a look. Then I went out to look more closely to see if I could see anything. Turns out I remembered incorrectly and one of the new Tesla installed boxes had a breaker in it which was tripped. I reset it, my power came back on, and I started calling people to tell them things were fixed.

Shortly there after the power went out again, so I went to check all the breakers. The new breaker that had been tripped was tripped again, and while I was trying to reset it and failing I realized I could smell toasted electrical equipment. As I'm calling Tesla to get a tech out, Xcel pulls up and I let them know it's not their deal.

Luckily, what I had planned that day could be done with sunlight. After about 4 hours total a Tesla tech showed up and fixed things so I had power. I later learned it wasn't just a tech but the area supervisor. Great guy, very helpful. He fixed it, but said that he'd have one of his techs come out to entirely replace it on Tuesday.

Monday rolls around and the inspection happens. The inspector found a couple of small "You don't have to do these, but they are best practice" kinds of things, and gave approval so we turned the whole system on. It was very exciting! Later that afternoon a Tesla came out and replaced the bad breaker with a new one. No problems at all since then.

It's very interesting in that you get an app that shows a bunch of information about the power flow in the house. Indeed, data much like what I should have been given with the solar cells when they were installed, or at least when I paid a bunch more money to get a DataLogger. The Tesla app is way better, but I wish it wasn't only available via an app. I hate having to have apps on my phone for stuff like that.

The app shows powerflow, fail over history, current powerwall storage levels, etc. You can also have it set to just work as backup, or to go partially or fully off grid. So I have mine set to save aside 25% in case of power outages while there is no solar power. My house draws about 1kW continuous when I'm just doing normal stuff. Over night the powerwalls get down to about 25% left, then are fully recharged by about 1pm on a sunny day.

I've still got a lot of stuff to learn about how this all interplays and how to reduce my power usage after dark, etc. It's been quite interesting and I'm looking forward to not having power outages anymore.

Slice slice.

So many training classes, so many knife drills. People said I was obsessed and I'd say that wasn't too much of an over statement. I liked it and it suited me. It seemed natural. And now it's the only thing keeping me alive.

So many people say guns are better, or something like an axe. The ones that tried chainsaws, having seen too many bad movies, were dead pretty early. But knives don't run out of bullets and in a worst case scenario I can use my knowledge of knife fighting with anything that fits in my hand. Sure there are weapons that are easier to kill zombies with, but almost none that render them harmless as well.

Zombies may be able to keep moving after gun shots and all kinds of damage, but they still require all the same physical connections to function. Cut the wrist tendons and they can't grab you, cut the shoulder tendons and they can't reach for you, cut the Achilles and they can't follow you. More important, cut the jaw muscles and they can't bite you. And of course, cut the head off and they die for real.

I carry a convenient tool steel pick for the death blow, but if I get caught by a group somehow I just render them motionless and keep going. That annoys some people I've run into. They complain about finding clumps of zombies flopping around trying to pull themselves along with one hand or push themselves along with one foot. They generally shut up when I ask if they'd have preferred to find them up and fully capable.

New company, new job, so good it's like being in an urban legend.

Change changing places. Out with the old job, in with the new.

End of November 2015 I was let go from my DevOps job.

Over the next couple of months I realized that the job had been stressing me out radically more than I thought. So, since I had a small amount of money and I was getting a tremendous amount of interest in my resume even without doing a whole hell of a lot to look for a new job, I decided I was going to take some time and be very selective about what jobs I applied for and relax, get stuff done at home, etc.

It was working out great. I had a few really interesting and favorable interviews, but never got an offer which was all good as far as I was concerned. Then a good friend put me in touch with a good friend of theirs and a job happened. So now I'm self-employed working for my own LLC, which is contracted to a company, which is contracted to a company which is contracted to the feds. I work from home, mostly set my own hours and make enough to live on working 30 hours a week. It's like something from a legend.

One of the big projects I'll have with the new job (which started in March) will be moving the environment which is mostly LAMP over to AWS. Adding more monitoring, security, testing, and making everything more consistent, etc. So I'm back to doing what I have tons of experience in (unix/linux/lamp), and what I have more recent experience in (IT security/monitoring) and what I have only very recent experience in (DevOps). So while I'm learning DevOps better (salt/jenkins/git), while I'm learning even more about security, and continuing to learn more about LAMP and the other applications. Oh and python. So! That's awesome. It's an excellent job and even better the cultural fit seems to be exceptionally good.

Asus RoG gl552vw-dh74 halting problems opensuse

The gl552vw-dh74 has a hybrid video card in it (intel/nvidia) and finding drivers that worked at full resolution is problematic.

I initially started with opensuse 13.2 KDE live disc and that worked fine with the full resoluation 1920x1080. Installing from that got me 800x600 resolution. Poking at it over about a month when I had spare time, googling and whatnot I could occasionally get it up to 2048x1024 I think but it wouldn't last through reboots nor updates. After a while I was messing with something else on the box and bjorked it up and was doing a re-installation so I thought I'd just go ahead and try out Tumbleweed 13.3 and Leap 42.1.

First install of Leap 42.1 provided reliable consistent 1920x1080. I was quite happy. I started putting the few pieces of additional software on it that I needed and started using it. That's when the halting started. No log messages, no error messages, no indication of a problem other than the interface just not responding. Halting to the point where it wasn't even a pingable device.

Soooo.....very annoying. Googling around indicated nothing that was the same, but eventually I came across some indications that Plasma 5 had some halting problems. So I switched to Plasma Desktop. Both halted.

Doing various confounding issue reduction troubleshooting it seemed that it only happened when the system power management or screensaver kicked in. (I was rather stupidly testing battery life at the same time at first). So that sent me down some paths.

Adding acpi=off to the boot options made the laptop only capable of 800x600 resolution again. Taking it out restored 1920x1080.

seemed to work for a bit but that was apparently coincidence.

Opening firefox in safe mode and loading up a playlist of movies on youtube would generate a message saying something like "youtube has disable power management" and then it would happily sit there and play movies for however long I left it on (more than 12 hours).

Well! That certainly seems like a good lead, right!? Oh no...power management was turned off regardless of youtube playing.

Cross testing and power management still turned up nothing. No set of those options would keep the box from locking up.

Youtube did though. Oh...youtube in firefox with safe mode. Firefox, without any addons, would still sometimes crash the box.

So...no resolution yet, but I'm still digging in between work tasks.

DefCon

Wow, I'm terrible at keeping a blog.

So, I got to go to BlackHat and DefCon this year via my employer. It was an amazing experience, the only part of it I didn't like was it being in Vegas, but I can live with that. I definitely intend to attend from now on. One of the things I really feel I did incorrectly from a lack of knowing what was going on this year was that I just went. I didn't participate to any meaningful degree. One thing I did that was an excellent idea was cough up the cash for the video for the presentations.

So next year, I intend to participate more and definitely buy the presentations so I can watch them later. The experience was an even stronger social shock than when I first started going to science fiction conventions. Even more of the people at defcon seemed to be my kind of people than at scifi cons. But again, there are many aspects of the group that I don't seem to fit in with. I'm used to that, I don't seem to ever really fit into groups and that's ok.

Next year I hope to get in on some of the excellent learning opportunities including lock picking and some of the hacking classes. I need more hands on information to go with the theoretical knowledge I have.

Battery storage for the home

Someone is finally starting to do something with an idea I thought of a while back. House sized electrical storage using used EV/Hybrid batteries.

We'll have to see how much used EV batteries run for and if they are even purchasable. And how difficult it'll be to build a controlling system to power the house overnight/during blackouts. Solar panels, at least here in Colorado, aren't allowed to power your house while it's attached to the grid if the grid is down. This is blatantly stupid and their excuse for it when questioned is also transparently bullshit. Gotta find some way to use the power I generate only here in my house.

I'm participating in Movember.

Donate some money to help Men's Health issues and research. Check it out here.

And if you want to donate some money toward my mustache you can do that here.

3 year mark for solar generation

In the three years I've had solar panels I've generated 32.6mWhs of electricity. In addition, this year I installed a 12kWh equivalent solar thermal panel installation. I'm generating a bunch of power, I just need some way to store it.

I also purchased a 2012 Toyota Camry Hybrid. Wow that is one hell of a good car. Really enjoying it so far. Averaging 40-44 mpg without changing anything about the way I drive.

Solar power.

I appear to have forgotten to post several important things.

The first is that I've now generated 38.1MWhs of electricity.

The second is that after just about exactly 4 years my electric meter rolled backwards.

And third and largest, I had a solar thermal system installed on the house also. Here's a link to the pictures.

Construction 2012

Solar generation

I forgot to post that I am up to 28.9kwhs of electricity generated. My meter is down to about 200, so I expect it to roll backwards this year before winter hits. So next summer it should be significantly negative and possible never go positive again. Of course, if I convert my Camry to a plug-in then that's going to changed things pretty drastically but we'll see what happens.

2012 Camry Hybrid

Saturday 8/18/12 I bought a 2012 Camry Hybrid. Simple statement, but it was a long complex decision process in which I looked at every hybrid and EV that is readily available (and a couple that won't be available until later this year, or only in some states) and compared a huge amount of data on the vehicles. I read reviews, I looked at reliability data that was available. What I really wanted to buy is the new Toyota Rav4 EV, but unfortunately Toyota has chosen to make what in my opinion is a monumental mistake and price this vehicle at $10K more than it's nearest competitor putting it between the other EVs on the market and the Tesla market space. This is a terrible mistake, I think a lot of people were looking forward to a Rav4 EV with a base price around $30K, possibly as high as $40K but in fact the base model is going to be about $50K. Far too much money for something with a 100 mile range. For the same price you can get a Tesla Model S with a 160 mile range and half the 0-60 speed.

So after a bunch of comparisons of various kinds, it came down to 6 vehicles in the last set of comparisons. 3 of those don't have conversions available to be plug-ins. The last 3 on the list were all Toyotas. Prius V/Prius plug-in Camry Highlander

The Prius plug-in is smaller on the inside in pretty much all ways than the Prius V. This is really unfortunate because I'm a big guy, and the Prius V ends up being too small for me. I was really intending to buy a Prius Plug-in since I couldn't get a Rav4 EV.

I spent several days debating between the Highlander and the Camry. The Highlander had everything I wanted and more, but it was $12,500 more than the Camry and only got 28mpg (combined) whereas the Camry doesn't have 4wd, doesn't have much cargo capacity especially for long objects, and is only as easy to get into as my Saturn SL1 but it gets 44mpg combined and is radically cheaper. So...I spent several days debating, asking friends for alternative view points, etc.

Then I went back over with some specific things to check out in detail. After driving the Camry and trying some things out it basically came down to the advantages the Highlander has don't make up for the initial cost, let alone the over the lifetime of the car cost.

So now I have a fantastic new car that gets great gas mileage and if the cargo capacity gets to be too much of a problem that I can't just rent a solution for, I'll put a roof rack and carrier of some sort on it.

And as I jokingly suggested, the company I started with a friend and that my good friend Bryon still runs sells body lift kits for a 1"-3" additional lift, and a bunch of aftermarket things I could add to the car.

Speaking of adding on to the car. It looks like I could get a 4kwh plug-in conversion kit for the car for about $4000. I think I'll start saving up for that.

solar and a drive problem.

27.6 MWh generated so far as of this evening. My main drive failed it's backups and I didn't notice. The drive failed before I got the new mirror set up. So...the drive that held a significant portion of my accumulated data since 1992 crashed to the point where it is not recoverable by me. The data recovery place teased me with a $400 bottom price (which would have been expensive, but I lost some important shit) and then told me it was going to be $1900 and no guarantee. Oh, but if it failed, I could send it in for the really expensive treatment. Sigh. So...I'm trying to recover my drive. I've lost all my solar data that I didn't put in this blog.

more solar!

25.3GWh generated total. 1.1kwh generated this month. That's a pretty good total for March. I really think I'll roll my electrical meter back below 0 this summer.

I'm seriously considering building a porch over my back patio specifically so that I can put a solar thermal installation in that will drastically reduce my heating costs for water and space. But it's a bit more expensive than I was hoping. On the other hand it'll last pretty much forever.

Monthly solar generation

24.2MWh of electricity generated so far. I'm hoping to get a much better way of monitoring my electricity soon. I asked for a good monitor to be added to the system when it was built, then after it was done, then again a year later, but REC was appearently completely uninterested in selling me a monitoring system. So since then I've been trying to get ahold of the money and enough information to buy a monitoring system and just haven't managed it yet. I am determined that this spring I will have a good monitoring system though.

Envia Systems claims 400 watt hours-per-kilogram battery

They claim to have a 400 watt hours/kg battery that they have produced and is ready for production, or at least will be ready for production in a year and a half. So I'm guessing they already have the batteries built, but don't have a factory to produce them at industry numbers.

They say this more than doubles industry energy density and halves the cost, but I'm betting they really mean that doubling the energy density will halve the cost of the battery, not that it's a X4 gain. Still, that's a very significant jump forward and affects all kinds of things, not just EVs. You could use the same batteries to build your house sized UPS also.

http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/End_Use_Electric_Transportation/A-cheaper-EV-battery---for-a-300-mile-range-EV-4531.html

The emperors new security system

An excellent story of despair and horror. The despair and horror of our cyber security and how our government does a crap job of protecting it's citizens.

http://assassinsmace.squarespace.com/blog/2012/2/9/the-emperors-new-suit-the-us-response-to-cybercrime-cyberwar.html

Tesla Model X

"Musk says the standard version of the Model X crossover gets to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds. " 200 miles or so on a full charge with the big battery pack, seats 6 and accelerates like that? Now that's a true cross over vehicle.
http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072794_2014-tesla-model-x-unveiled-electric-luxury-crossover-with-wings

Damn that's a sweet ride. I wish I could afford a Tesla.