• 13 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • V2H unfortunately isn’t broadly available as a concept in the US yet.

    For what it’s worth, most of the Kia/Hyundai V2L plugged into your house shenanigans aren’t as convoluted as they might seem. Basically there’s something called a Transfer Switch that you can get installed into your house’s circuit breaker. It tells your house to stop pulling power from the grid, and start pulling it from whatever you have plugged into the switch. It’s technology that’s been around for ages for gas generators. You can hire an electrician to install it. The big issue with the current Kia/Hyundai V2L and transfer switch setup is 1) the car’s doesn’t put out enough voltage to power an HVAC system in certain power outage situations, and 2) You don’t any of the novel back and forth charging where your house / the grid can use your car like a cheap reserve. Folks have used Ioniq 5s to keep a fridge and some lights going for days though.

    At this point your options are be a Lightening early adopter, wait, or buy whichever electric car you’d like now and maybe look into a generator.



  • I can’t help much on the power draw side of this question, but one thing to look out for with a UPS is some sort of communication option. (Usually NUT over ethernet, but there are some USB options too.) Most modern UPS brands will have a plugin you can install on your Raspberry Pi and Mini PC that allows your UPS to signal, “Hey, I’ve got 3% of battery life, you actually need to gracefully shut down now.” It’s mostly useful for NAS applications with spinning drives, but it could help save your Pi’s SD card potentially.

    It’s a pretty standard feature these days, but the cheapest of the cheap will omit it.









  • CARROT’s big premium selling point is letting you pick which weather data provider the app references. Darksky/Weatherkit went through a perceived slump after their acquisition, so folks turned to sites like https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ to figure out who was providing the most accurate data in their region.

    Other than that, it offers up a few more detailed views, push notifications, and other UI tweaks. They’re one of those companies that tries jumping onboard with things like Apple Watch apps or home screen widgets ASAP.

    You probably don’t need CARROT, but if you don’t like the stock Weather app, CARROT probably has something for you.




  • It’s probably worth mentioning that the book’s a police procedural / crime novel. 👍 It takes place about 25 years after the fictional pandemic. The story starts off with a robot-piloting protagonist’s first day on the job as part of the FBI’s robot-crimes division. It almost won a Hugo and is worth taking a look at if the premise sounds interesting.





  • It’s Lock-In by John Scalzi. After a ~weird flu~, a large portion of the population are left paraplegic and can only interact with the world by remotely controlling humanoid robots. It’s still fairly early on in the tech, so most folks are walking around in generic of the shelf units that are only a few generations removed from the Boston Dynamics or Atlas robots.

    It was a really weird novel to be reading during the first week of Covid shutdowns.