Okay, so my airing of grievances post had some issues.
So, lets swap it up:
What events are you looking forward to in 2026?
Hopefully trump death
Finally switching to Linux!
Nice. Have you chosen a distro?
I picked cachy because I was always curious about Arch and I’m LoveHating every second of it.
All of them! I have Ubuntu 24LTS on my desktop, prepping Mint for a utility machine, testing Manjaro and Endeavor in VMs, not sure what distro I will move my laptop to yet.
<Insert highly subjective complaint about choice of distro here>
Either way, another soul saved. Great to have you on board!
I still have Azure certs, and Microsoft is still my job. But… if I can make my job moving others off Microsoft, many souls can be saved.
Oh, in that case, and considering the list of devices you’re updating, you might be interested in putting Linux From Scratch on one of the disposable devices:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
I wouldn’t run it as my main driver, but it’s a book that steps you through each package to manually compile until you have a fully working system. It’s pretty error prone but along the way you learn how most of the pieces fit together. It’s probably still a bit much for now but I thought I’d mention it
Nice. Why the spread and not mostly sticking with one flavour?
Not familiar enough with the differences. Plus I’ll learn it better if I have to figure out all the ways to do a task instead of just one. Nano or Emacs or Vim? KDE or Gnome? Too much to choose from! :)
Yeah, there’s plenty to get overwhelmed in. If the overhead becomes a bit, then any of them are probably good enough and either way you’ll work out what you like
A friend of mine did something that might work for you: he used genAI as a linux tutor. It’s one of the better use cases I’ve heard for it, if you’re not ethically opposed. Just make sure to double check something more official before you run a command and accidentally destroy something
Ubuntu 24.04 is doing well for me. I use the cinnamon flavor. Switch the scheduler to performance, before that with multiple apps open while gaming there was stuttering it the CPU load was below a certain amount (Ryzen 5800X). After switching to performance all stuttering was gone.
Liquorix Kernel is something else I am looking at utilizing since I also edit 4K 60FPS video on the same computer.
US midterm elections: November 3, 2026. The most-likely outcome is that the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives, though they won’t actually take office until January 3, 2027.
If they’ll even happen. A certain someone is currently thinking and probably will try to dismantle them.
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Most likely outcome is a rigged election
What elections? Get out of your high horse
The Headline.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It might not launch in the year but after it does launch we should see some new exoplanets and we might get some new information about dark energy. Since it’s scanning the sky we might see some interesting transient events
I’m always looking forward to new telescopes! With the way this disgusting excuse of an administration is going though I’m always afraid for the future of all remaining telescopes…
Gotta free up that budget to cut more billionaires taxes and throw more money at the military ya know?
…
Like the VIPER moon rover? Completely built but cancelled. And a bit hard to square with wanting to put men on the moon since the mission according to Wikipedia was:
The rover would be tasked with prospecting for lunar resources in permanently shadowed areas of lunar south pole region, especially by mapping the distribution and concentration of water ice.
I guess that’s pretty small compared to things like the National Center for Atmospheric Research being dismantled. Actually, its a pretty long list
Waking up from the Nightmare.
In 2025 China installed over 500GW of solar power. That is an insane amount it’s over 1.3 gigawatts a day or a large power plant per day. Sodium batteries have gone into production and gonna be sold at like 50$/kwh. These price points and scales are where it’s cheaper to build 2 times your power needed in solar and have like a week of battery backup so you can power everything off solar and wind. Right now it’s 60/40 fossil fuels/low carbon sources for electricity production, 2026 will be the year it flips to 49/51 in actuality, it might take a year or two before analysts actually realize it has happened.
Spring. Because it’s fucking cold here atm.
Pierre Pollievre getting the fuck out of office, or at least stepping down. he’s fucking pathetic and only seeks to divide the country.
goddamn I wish we had proper vote reform for ranked ballots or whatever, and didn’t get stuck with the Liberals
New Karnivool album
More personal I suppose then anything large. But I’m getting solar installed! Was supposed to be installed last fall but due to weather it was pushed back. I’ll be glad to see lower, if not negative power bills (especially since the price recently jumped). Having 39 panels installed. So that’ll be nice.
I’ve got 7.2KW waiting to go on the roof. 400W bifacial panels with Enphase IQ8A’S. I have 3 panels running now and they generally shave 3kwh per day of my bill right now. In the summer peak the same 3 panels shave twice that off. Just have to get the racking materials and a few other things so I can get started.
I’m lucky that I can DIY the whole system where I am at. Hopefully the battery systems will start to drop in price before long.
Yeah, being able to do it DIY probably saved you a ton. I had been saving for years (didn’t want to pay interest on a loan). But had to pull the trigger last year because the government got rid of the 30% solar incentive. Funny side story, I also told a friend of mine about my plan; her fiancé is an electrician in Germany, and he was baffled why it was going to cost me so much. It would have been cheaper to have me hire him, fly him first class, get him a swanky hotel for however long it took, and pay him like x3 his normal rate.
Absolutely. Already replaced the roof, plumbing supply lines, and electrical systems. 18K houses need work but the payoff is huge.
Right now I’ve got about 5600 invested in my solar system. Mainly the racking and then batteries. Once it’s in place I have the option to add another up to 4.8KW. Local power rate sucks for the area. Mid summer the power is around .20 per kwh, the co-op nearby is less than half that. House is all electric and I run a couple servers so it adds up quick.
Google is building a datacenter in the next county over and a few more are coming in elsewhere, they are supposed to provide most of their own power but no one is sure if they are or not. I’ve seen a couple high renewable line upgrades and additions for power equipment which seem to be upgrades for reliability and filtering in the local grid. All the original 230kv lines have been upgraded to 345kv.
I’m in town but my house is ideal for a small vertical axis wind turbine. Generally at times wind is up solar is down, but gotta figure a few things out. One of the turbines that sit along a wall would be great but I have to figure out a design I can make and will be practical.
Official start of WW3. Its been going on forever and we should finally acknowledge it. All this pretending we live in peace makes me sick.
Getting my backup situation under control so I can be less stressed…finishing my basement studio and maybe starting on my gaming room finishing. Id love to have more people over for playing some old console games and ps1/2 (which are a new console btw).
The state of the world I choose to ignore
Not really an event, but I installed a small trial solar setup (800W with 1 kWh battery) this past autumn that I am quite pleased with (despite the utter lack of sun since November).
In the spring, I’m planning to expand that to something like a ~7 KW solar array, 10 KW inverter/charger, and hopefully around 16 kWh of battery.
Screw you, AEP and my rate nearly doubling year over year
Where did you buy the equipment? In my local area theres a ton of scammers for solar. But the tech is VERY good and outside my local area, I know it works. Still looking for a good supplier.
Locally, there’s nothing (not even scammers). I got 4x200 watt panels from Amazon and am using those with an Anker Solix C1000.
For the expansion in the spring, I’m probably going to order more of the same PV panels. For the combo inverter/charger, I’m looking at the ones from SungoldPower currently as well as a few others. Battery is still in the research phase, but the inverter can auto switch between solar and utility without the battery.
The wiring I can handle but will probably have an electrician do the wiring from my main breaker to the subpanel that’s fed from the solar inverter (grid tie is too caught up in expensive red tape to bother with here).
awesome thanks.
So one of these? https://www.ankersolix.com/products/c1000?variant=49702371524938
The product page says a smart phone is required. Is that accurate, or is it easy to use without it. Does that mean it needs internet in order to work? How has your experience been when the internet is out?
Literally that one, but I have the Gen 2 version.
Smartphone is not necessarily required, but if you want to change any of the settings (AC charge rate, maximum discharge depth, etc), you’ll need to use the app. You can use the app to connect to it via bluetooth directly. That said, it’s possible to use it without any app at all with the default settings and it works fine.
The app tries to steer you toward making an Anker account and connecting the unit to wifi (some features like WeatherGuard, time of use charging, etc require that) but you can use it without an account and connect locally via bluetooth. That’s how I do it, so no issues with a cloud connection as it’s not even using it. Though I did complain to support about how the app treats that use case as a second-class citizen. (When you open the app, it always lands you on the signup/login page and you have to click “Skip” in tiny text at the bottom to use the app locally via BT). The app also nags you that Google Play Services is required but it works fine without it.
I do use the app for remote monitoring and once to set the max discharge depth from 1% to 15% but otherwise it works fine standalone. The only thing making me slightly consider setting up the cloud connection is the HomeAssistant integration; there’s a module to tie it into HA, but it uses the cloud API rather than connecting over bluetooth :(
Thanks that gives me a ton of info. Appreciate it.
I forget where I heard, but the only issue ive heard about with one of those all in one inverter/battery units is that the modern ones are heavily app focused, locking features out without using an app. And one of the reasons you would use a battery in the first place is if power or other essential services are out. In the case I remember the individual was frustrated because without the app, you couldn’t modify anything on the device…which seems very bad.
I may look into this further, again appreciate it! Ive been looking for something for my shed for close to a year, but I dont want to drop $500+ on something only designed to work for a couple of years.
I remember the individual was frustrated because without the app, you couldn’t modify anything on the device…which seems very bad.
Sadly, that’s how this one is but the defaults are sane enough that you could get by without it. I didn’t buy it for the features that need the cloud service, so if those are unavailable, that was fine for my use case. The consolation is that configuring it can all be done with just the app over Bluetooth.
I’m hoping someone reverse engineers the Bluetooth protocol. I did a HCI dump while it was connecting and streaming data, but I can’t make the slightest bit of sense of it.
It looks like there is an eclipse for anyone in Spain, Greenland and Iceland:
Probably will be overshadowed by the Greenland War …
