Home Battery revisited

 After a full year of operation, time for a checkup.

The App that displays data has been updating and improving.

My spreadsheet says the battery is saving me about £840/year. That means the return on my investment is around 20%. This was much better than I expected! Since batteries last around 10 years, this investment was successful.

The system is ~80% efficient.

Purple line - battery charge. Green - battery. Blue - Grid input. Orange - electricity used.

More gadgets

 My Sony tablet has been running continuously for 11 years. It's still going strong. Batteries wearing out? Oh no they don't!
However, it's OS is old and won't run new Apps well or not at all. So now I have a Samsung Tab A8, not the expensive one in the adverts but mid-range. I don't play Android games, so no problem.
It has some Samsung bloatware, but that can be suppressed. It needed tweaking, mostly to stop the beeping notifications about everything. The battery isn't as long-lasting, otherwise fine.

Having sat on my Sony phone, I also went Samsung for a replacement, the A23. Same comments really.

I do recommend getting cases for these devices.

The gasman cometh

A year ago British Gas sent a subcontractor to our road to replace the elderly pipes with plastic ones. They dug holes. The holes filled with water.

I live at the bottom of a valley and the water table is about a foot down in winter.

 

They filled up the holes, apologised, and came back in the autumn. Success, though it took a week.

Path reconcreted, lawns resown with grass seeds, meters relocated outside the houses, £50 compensation for the disruption.

Would I like a smart meter? I already have an electric one. Sure! It's fitted, but after several months isn't online. I contacted them, they claimed to be working on it but I suspect this was a lie.

Smart Home

 It's been a couple of years since I posted about Tech stuff, so let's catch up.

Phillips Hue smart lights use a wireless USB connected Hub. They can be programmed to switch off at night and can be dimmed.

Tuya is a Chinese in the cloud wifi app that can control all kinds of appliances. I use mine for electric radiators and an air cooler. The app takes some effort to understand but is improving.

Oh, yes, I turned off the gas central heating. Another blow against global warming!

So far so good, but then came the home battery saga. My local authority had a scheme that recommended installers for solar panels/ batteries, so I ordered a small 3Kw battery. Delays and more delays followed, and it took almost a year to complete the installation. The company was too busy fitting more profitable solar panels and kept lying to me about completing the job.
The actual system works fine now, it stores excess output from the panels during the day and then puts it back in the evening. It is modular so more batteries can be added later. The app has one remaining bug, it's not calibrated to zero against the solar panels.

Solis inverter and Pylon battery. Yes, Chinese again ..

 The first Happy Hour at the Rose & Thorn in its new location, across the canal in Rosehaven Laudanum. 3PM SLT, which for First Lifers is Pacific Time.

Graphics Card

Graphics cards have finally fallen to reasonable prices as the chip shortage eases, so I went for a GeForce RTX 3060 which Nvidia recommended as an upgrade for my five year old 1060.

Will the power supply be sufficient? My CPU+GPU combination is here:

https://www.whatpsu.com/psu/cpu/Intel-Core-i7-7700/gpu/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3060

so my 500W PSU is good. 

Next concern: six socket power input, four pin plug. It seemed to only engage to the left? Correct!

Windows came up in an emergency low rez state. Whilst I pondered this the Nvidia driver was presumably reconfiguring since after a couple of minutes it returned with everything done.

My card has a configuration App for overclocking and so on.

So far, no problems. I've been tweaking games up to better graphics

 

Ostara at the Stone Circle

Ultra Wide!

 My older computer monitor was having trouble synching, so time for a replacement.

https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-35wn73a-b

The hardware is fine. Like other LG products however it has no manual! Let's run through this using the product page linked above.

The video refers to speakers - this model has none. No problem for me as the computer has an external sound system.
The USB cable supplied has a mini connection both ends, so it won't plug in to USB HUBs or a PC.

The OnScreen Control app is not available via the LG website, I had to Search for a link to download it.
The assembly instructions are of the IKEA kind - a diagram with no text.

LG controls differ widely between models - they seem to be designed from scratch every time! In this case there was a hidden button on the bottom that accessed an onscreen menu.

 My color test screen is an Excel spreadsheet (!!) that has primary colors, on defaults they are a match for the smaller LG monitor next to it.

My Nvidia 1060 copes. It runs at 45C idle and at 70C for reasonable game settings.

Ultrawide is 21:9 as opposed to 16:9 widescreen. Most programs react intelligently to this, in Second Life for example peripheral vision increases.

Trikassi Enterprises 2020

The 2019 recession slowly lifted leading to more favourable market conditions. However in 2020 there was a significant raw material shortage that created continuing uncertainty.

As our headline figures below show, there was an overall improvement in growth.

Headline figures (2019 in brackets)

Year on Year Net Growth 17% (8%)
Before PLEX Profit: 28% (18%)
End year corporation book value 348 (304) Billion ISK

TV update

Sony doesn't rush with updates, this is Android 7 to 8.

They have also changed their custom GUI. The 'Discover' button on the wheel which used to do not a lot now tries to do everything. Sometimes it uses the Satellite Box channel guide, sometimes the TV guide. However, there is no need to use it that I can see.

It hadn't occurred to me to try before, but my Bluetooth keyboard pairs up fine with the TV. No more awkward onscreen text entry! The Back button on the TV is actually ESC, I guessed that, and on the keyboard that is fn+SQUARE, the bottom left and top left keys, which is weird.

Trikassi Enterprises 2019

The recession that began at the end of last year continued through most of 2019. Our Raitaru has been the only active capsuleer owned factory in Sobaseki until recently. There are some signs that economic conditions may be improving, but sustained recovery is not yet certain.
Whilst the corporation is still profitable, our growth has been at a much reduced level.
The price of PLEX was high in summer, reducing net profit.
We had one nuisance War Dec that did not affect us significantly due to robust contingency planning.

Headline figures (2018 in brackets):
Year on Year Net Growth 8% (47%)
Before PLEX Profit 20% (109%)
End year Corporation book value 304 (274) Billion ISK

Solar Panels - progress report

See Installation Report from six years ago.
I have had no generation problems apart from a couple of breaker cut outs.
The annual output has been constant.
The investment return has been about 9%, lower than was suggested but much as I expected as the facing is not due South.

One unfortunate snag was that after several years the roof below them started to sag. I called in the builders who installed joists in the loft that better distributed the weight and, ahem, plastered over the cracks. So far, all is now well.

The ongoing effect has been to wipe out my electricity bill with around £20 a month to spare.

Snail racing

Giant snail racing! Some good scenic shots of the Realm of Rosehaven. My castle is the one with the round tower in the opening shots.

Trikassi Enterprises 2018

Manufacturing conditions in Eve have been sub-optimal this past year. Technological innovations in moon mining caused a flood of minerals onto the market, depressing prices with a knock-on effect to manufactured goods.
Towards the end of the year this overproduction was augmented by falling demand resulting in an economic recession in Hisec. The result can plainly be seen locally, with factories being shut down and mothballed.
In the third Quarter we suffered an annoying war declaration which disrupted our activities for several weeks, though fortunately no assets were lost.
The price of PLEX fell significantly in the first half of the year, then rose to its previous level.

On the good side our station remains open, attracting an increasing number of users by having the cheapest rates in system. We acquired Blueprints for several new lines such as Battleships and various Modules. Our old products continue to be profitable though at reduced sales volumes.

Headline figures (2017 figures in brackets):
Year on Year Net Profit 47% (55%)
Before PLEX Profit 124% (99%)
End year Corporation book value 274 Billion ISK

Hi-Fi upgrade

Looking back I see it has been six years since I did this. Time marches on...

So, it's a Sony DN-1080. It doesn't look much different to the previous, just improved software really. It is set up for 4k and has Dolby Atmos and is thus a match for the TV and disk player. Let's test!

Atmos is good if the sound engineers take the trouble to set it up. If they just pick a few sound effects and put them behind the listener but otherwise use the old surround positions, not so good. There are Demos on YouTube that show what should be happening.

It comes with the two current surround systems, Dolby Surround and Neural:X. In different ways these do the same thing, spreading the sound out to all the available speakers. In my case that is 5.1.2, with the 2 being front height. The A/V uses a sound test to work out where these are.
As with Atmos, results are variable. A lot of prestigeTV programmes and movies are broadcast in 5.1 these days.

And one by one they faded away ...

The Rosehaven 12th Anniversary Ball. As befits Halloween the grid failed and one by one the guests vanished!
Clever GIF by Princess Selena

War! No one killed shock horror

Finally, I got the "nice space station you got there, shame if it should get blown up" message.

In EVE hi sec, within the territories of the big NPC empires, there are police. However a contribution to their benevolent fund will cause them to turn blind eyes to shenanigans. These are called WarDecs.

The rules for blowing up space stations are intended to prevent Corporations in different time zones from making surprise attacks when the other guys are fast asleep. First, attackers have to knock down the station's Shields. A week later, they can come back to destroy its Armour. Finally after another week, and that was today, they can destroy it.

Now my corporation specialises in arms dealing not combat, we are small, defenceless but wealthy so we hired mercenaries to defend us and the extortionists backed off without a fight. Hopefully they won't try that again, it cost them money and a complementary Bounty on their heads. It cost us a few million ISK as well, mostly in lost production, but we can make that up in a few days.

... and 4K disks!

It's Sony again, the X700
This is the budget player so it has some esoteric features removed, mostly stuff a smart TV has anyway.


4K disk buyers beware! There is a lot of 'Ultra HD' in the shops that isn't 4K at all, it uses HD masters and upscales them to 4K which is what a 4K TV does anyway.

The player has been updated to Dolby Vision but weirdly via a settings switch. Since most providers don't say if they are using Vision this is a chocolate teapot.


YouTube has 4K demos such as
Wildlife in 4K

Spacesheeting 63

The transition of EVE downloadable data from XML tables to SWAGGER has reached the point where the old system has been discontinued, which leaves me no choice but to convert.

SWAGGER is more complicated as it uses temporary tokens to get access to private data. This allows third-party apps to display your secret stuff without having access to your password, and that isn't easy to implement with a spreadsheet! However, a nice person wrote a guide:
SSO_Authentication_in_Microsoft_Power_Query

Right now I have the tables up and running, the next task is to get the many spreadsheet references to point to them. Which, with INDEX MATCH arrays, is a pain.

[added] Finished! Took six weeks!! Everything seems to be back to normal, updating generates a lot of error messages but these can be ignored.

New TV

Santa gave me a new TV this year, a Sony Bravia KD55XE9005
It's pretty, but let's quibble!

The control system is labyrinthine. The most used bits are in an "Action Menu", the rest is buried at the bottom of the Android Home page that has the Netflix/Amazon pay us $$$ links I don't use.

The best advice for Video settings is to leave them alone unless there is an obvious problem - and I've not noticed any.

The computer's graphics card is willing to display 2160p but with my present three screen setup (!!) runs hotter if it does, more so with games. EVE would be unplayable anyway due to tiny text, a known problem.
Setting up the computer for HDR has to be done at both ends to work properly. Windows 10 will tell you if everything will work.

The previous TV couldn't cope with 1080p, no problem with this one. 4K is presently only broadcast by subscription. There is plenty of it on YouTube, including some wildlife and travel channels.

The Humax Satbox and Sony disk player link in OK. The TV comes with an "IR Blaster" that ingeniously attaches to devices and replaces their remote controls to some extent. I have it attached to the Satellite box so the TV's programme guide can operate it.


Mirroring from tablet to big screen is easy - one button.
Tablet remote control app? Fine!