Posts in category "project" - page 4
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DIY Newton's Cradle
It has been a while since I wrote anything about the projects I do with my daughter. Actually we haven’t built anything in a long time. I was doing some small cardboard projects but nothing to write home about. However, recently we built a newton’s cradle just for fun and I thought it might be an interesting project to blog about. I think my daughter came across Newton’s cradle somehow in one of her videos and she was explaining to me about this toy where balls would swing like a pendulum. I immediately understood what she was trying to explain and decided to built it.
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Solar Panel Output Under Various Conditions
In a previous post I talked about how my sensors tell a story regarding our power usage. There are still many more stories that the sensors can tell us about how we use electricity and how much solar power is being generated. Have you ever wondered how the solar power output looks like during the course of a day? Let me give you a hint – it almost looks like a half-rectified sine wave. It was a really interesting discovery. How about the output of solar panel when the day is cloudy? I have answers to all these questions and more in this post.But first let me walk you through the whole setup that I have at home.
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Sensors Tell A Story
After having set up my solar panel, I installed a bunch of voltage and current sensors in various places to collect data about my power usage and also to keep track of how much solar energy is being generated. The plan was to optimize and maximize solar power usage. I want to eke out every bit of power from the panel and optimize the hell out of solar energy. I also wanted to build some visual artifacts (graphs) out of the data. If you are like me, crazy about data, and data analysis, then this post is for you.
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Migrating From WordPress to Jekyll - Other Things
I already explained a few things about how I migrated from WordPress to Jekyll. A few basic things that come for free in WordPress are not available out of the box in Jekyll. Comments section is one example and you already know that I am now using Commento as the comments engine. Another thing that came for free with WordPress was pagination which was missing from Jekyll in the basic form. A few other things that one could add to WordPress using plugins was setting up analytics, rss feeds, site-map, ads, subscription service etc. Here is how I went about adding some of those features in Jekyll.
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Commento As Comments Engine In Jekyll
Last time I wrote about my adventures with moving comments engine from Disqus to Remark42. This is a continuation of that story. While I liked pretty much everything about Remark42, one thing that did not work out for me was spam protection. Remark42 does not have, or at least it did not have a proper automated spam protection mechanism in place at the time I tried it out. With the default WordPress comments engine, you could add Akismet for spam protection. I could not figure out any way to install spam filters in Remark42. The only way would be to hold the comments for approval. Then I have to approve each comment manually. This would be too much work for me. Not that I get a lot of comments on the blog, but still, why should a human take care of such things when an automated system could do it for me?
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Acer Aspire 7 After Two Months
It has been exactly 2 months since I purchased my new laptop - Acer Aspire 7. During these two months I upgraded the laptop and have discovered a few interesting things about it. So this is a quick post on what I noticed about the laptop which might help you make the decision of whether to purchase the laptop or not. If you already purchased it, then my findings might help you fix some issues or maybe you can let me know how I can fix mine :).
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Remark42 As Comments Engine In Jekyll
After having used Disqus as the comments engine for my Jekyll website for a week or so, I started to dislike it quite a bit due to several reasons. One of which is the requirement of creating an account with Disqus even if the user is logged in via one of the social logins such as Google or Twitter account. The other issue is the privacy aspect with Disqus. Seems like it is tracking too much information about the users. So I decided to use Remark42 instead. The only problem however is that I need to run a server to host it. It defeats the whole purpose of me going absolutely serverless. But I don’t have a choice since some of my readers want comments section.
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How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save?
It has been more than 6 month since I installed my lone 320W solar panel. So I wanted to check if it was doing me any favors and how much money is it saving. Normally one should wait for a full year to make any kind of useful analysis. But I get easily excited when it comes to doing any kind of data analysis and here I am at it again. It is a very small installation and hence the savings aren’t huge, but at least I am able to verify my predicted numbers (units of electricity) against the real numbers. Did I have any savings or was this whole solar panel project a waste of my time and money. Let’s find out.
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Adding Comments Section To Jekyll
As you know, I have recently migrated from Wordpress to static web hosting using Jekyll. But a couple of things were missing on my blog at that time. One was comments section and the other was a search feature. Since I moved to static web hosting, adding a comments engine was not possible. I did not want to add comments section anyway because there weren’t that many comments to start with and I also did not feel like a lot of interaction is happening anyway. Unfortunately a couple of folks noticed that the comments section was missing and were asking me about it. I thought no one would notice, but I was wrong. So I decided to add it grudgingly.
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Installing Linux On Acer Aspire 7
It is now old news that I purchased a new laptop. While it proved its mettle as a gaming laptop for what ever casual gaming that I do, its primary purpose is for work. And work I cannot do in Windows. I had to install Linux. Some of you might know that installing Linux is not quite as straight forward, especially on new hardware. There is a saying that you should buy hardware that is 6 months old for Linux to have all the drivers working and quirks ironed out. The reason is that many companies (read Intel, AMD, Nvidia etc), write drivers for Windows first and then they may write one for Linux. For when there are no drivers, some one from the open source community will have to reverse engineer and build drivers. This has been the state of affairs but Linux is now catching up. Anyway, in this post I will cover all the things I had to do to get Linux working on Acer Aspire 7 with Nvidia GTX 1650.
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