Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 3
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DC Energy Measurement Using INA226
In an earlier post I wrote about measuring DC energy using PZEM 017. If you recall, I ended the article with a couple of remarks. One was that the device was unable to measure current below 0.02 A. But the bigger problem was that the device could only measure current in one direction. It is uni-directional current sensor. I cannot use this device with my UPS to measure charging and discharging current since I need a bidirectional current sensor in that case. After some searching around I found a few options and one good sensor which is the INA226. So here is a write up of my experience with it. This can get a bit technical, so if you are not into electronics, give this a skip.
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Year In Review - 2023 Monthly Expenses
It is about time I reviewed my monthly expenses for the past year. I do this activity at the start of every year. There are two kinds of expenses I track. One is monthly expenses which sort of appear most months like food expenses, internet etc. Then there are those expenses that occur once a year or once every few years. Those are considered as annual expenses. In today’s post I will go over the monthly expenses of last year and how it compares with the budget I made at the start of 2023. Lets also look at inflation since my retirement. Later in the post I will inflate my monthly expenses and set a budget for 2024. Lets dig in then.
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Year In Review 2023
I know I am a little bit late for the “year in review” series but I was busy publishing other posts that were in backlog. Finally I got some time to reflect back on the year that has gone by. Every year at the beginning of a new year, I look back at the previous year and pen down some of the highlights and interesting events that transpired. So here goes. Last year was better than 2022 both in terms of finance and personal life. While a new war has started, it has now become a common place for wars to start and then people forgetting about it. Anyway, COVID-19 and the dark shadow it has cast on us is finally really over, although there are still some cases here and there. But those are all global events. Lets talk about what happened in my personal life.
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Dark Theme In Jekyll
Did you notice anything different about the blog? Well, I introduced a dark theme. Can you find how to change the theme by just looking at my blog? No? If you’d like to switch the theme to dark or light mode, read the last section of this post. Now, some of you may know that I migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. Jekyll for those of you who don’t know, is a tool that transforms markdown text into static websites and blogs. If you are left wondering what all that mumbo jumbo was about, then it will perhaps serve you better to skip this post :). For some time now, I have been wanting to add a dark mode for my blog. But it never came up high enough in priority to give it my attention. That changed with the new year. I decided to add dark theme to my blog in 2024.
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Terrace Gardening Update
There are three places where we have been doing organic gardening. One on either sides of the house, two on the terrace and three outside of our compound wall. I already gave an update on the garden on either sides of the house. Since I’d like to keep you guys up to date, in this post I am giving an update on the terrace garden and the garden that is outside. Now for the bad news. We recently stopped doing the terrace gardening. There are a few reasons which I will get to in a minute. Meanwhile, our outside garden is still doing fine, but not to the level we want.
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DC Energy Measurement Using PZEM 017
You might remember that I have been looking for an accurate DC current measuring device for a long time for my solar project. The hall effect sensors I have been using in my solar project was inaccurate. Basically the zero current point drifts quite a bit depending on the ambient temperature and power supply voltage. While a shunt would give more accurate zero cross overs, I did not want to modify my setup to use it. You see, the problem with shunt resistor based sensors was that they have to be inline with current. Which means I have to remove a bunch of wiring from my battery and UPS and insert these sensors inline. I was not willing to do that. However I recently came across another project which would be a good fit to test out these shunt resistor based sensors. So I tried a couple of them and what follows is my experience with one of them.
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Rain Water Harvesting Update
A long time ago, soon after I retired we build a DIY rain water harvesting at our place. We even made some upgrades along the way. Since it rains a lot here in Bangalore (or I should say used to rain a lot), we enjoyed a few good years of rain water harvest. For those of you who don’t know, there is huge water shortage here in Bangalore and any water we can save is extremely helpful. We generally use about 22 tankers of water in a year. But since setting up the rain water harvesting, it has reduced to almost half. Thus not only saving money but also water.
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Organic Gardening Update
As we progress in life, things come and go. We start out with a plan and later it may fail or we stop executing it for some reason. Take the most common failed plans that most people complain about – exercise. When the new year rolls in some of us plan to exercise routinely and stay fit. Eventually, due to various reasons, some stop doing it. There were several plans I made after retirement, and some of them have either failed or we stopped them intentionally. One such plan was organic gardening. Just after retiring, we started to grow a small vegetable garden in the open space on the sides of our house inside our compound. I even built and programmed an automated drip irrigation system so we don’t have to worry about watering. But we stopped growing vegetables on the sides. So what happened?
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Converting a USB printer into a WiFi Printer
We have an old USB laser printer which was purchased in early 2012. It has been in fine working condition since then. I rarely use it because usually there is nothing much to print. We do the occasional flight ticket print outs. Once our daughter was born there was a little bit more printing. I changed the toner just twice in these 11 years. Anytime anyone in the family needed a printout, they would connect their laptop to the printer via USB and print. Although it wasn’t that much of a hassle, I wanted to make the printer a wireless one. This post is about how I achieved it. As you can imagine, it can get technical and if you are not into computers and software, it is better you skip this one :).
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Blogs I Follow And Why
A reader asked if I can share a list of blogs I follow. So I thought I should write a post about how I ended up with my subscriptions. When I was a kid I used to love to read books. A lot of books actually. Most of them were just story books initially, then I started reading “how things work” and computer related books as I got interested into computers and science. I used to enjoy our semi annual trip to Jyoti book stores back in the town where I grew up. I would go on a long walk through the collection of the books in that large book store while my parents waited patiently until I am done reading a few pages of several books and finally picked some. Not sure what happened, but as I grew up I stopped reading. I don’t read much these days. I have become more of a hands on guys and learning things on the job. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and I don’t mind either.
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