Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Switched on the Solar Router

October 7th, 2017

My dad and I finished the cabling and battery work yesterday and I switched on the Freifunk router on the DC-DC adapter at 9PM yesterday. I figured out the battery can last 7 days or so without the panel charging it. We'll see how that goes. Here is an image of the setup now.

You may recall an earlier article where the entire panel was shown from the backside. Just in case you don't I'll provide it here.

The forecast around here is not that rosy so I'm hoping for sunlight between 2PM and evening at any chance to charge the battery. We'll see. So far this project has cost around 550 EUR, but I got all the CE certified devices and there was very little custom cabling being done. What I don't have is an AC-DC battery charger, I hope I can do without with this 100 Watt panel. But who knows what the future holds. I'm very happy how this all turned out.

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Ported delphinusdnsd-current to Linux

October 4th, 2017

I have ported the new code to Linux. This is in anticipation of snapshot downloads happening because of this message on delphinusdns.org:

On October 4th, 2017, a fix went in fixing CNAME's with DNSSEC. 
Symptoms for recursive DNS servers with a CNAME pointing to an A 
often returned with a SERVFAIL. Please download a snapshot after 
12 midnight CEST on this date to remedy.

Instead of waiting for a 1.1.1 release (which will never happen, it's too late in the year), just go with this snapshot tomorrow if you're using delphinusdnsd. I did not port to FreeBSD or NetBSD yet, I hope there is not too much to do and I'll check them in the coming days. It compiles and works on Linux and OpenBSD (where it's developed on).

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I said something like that...

October 3rd, 2017

Today is germany unity day, so it fits that I talk about a report that a german government institution (dlr.de) who recently replaced all their Cisco routers with Lancom equipment. Lancom is a german manufacturer of network equipment. Roughly shortly after the Snowden revelations it became obvious for me to be careful with american network gear. (That didn't however prevent me from buying a used Ubiquity Networks router this year). I think what DLR did was a good strategic move, as europe wants to go to the moon in the next 10 years and surely is exploring secret technologies to do it.

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Are you colonizing Mars? A comparison with Mercury..

September 30th, 2017

I took a look at Moon and Mercury today and noticed that both Moon and Mercury are thought to have in excess of 600 km^3 of water-ice in craters of eternal darkness. This is wonderful! Instead of going to Mars maybe we should go to Mercury and live in the dark craters which we'll light with artificial lighting (no heat).

	Mercury	Mars
Suitable position	polar craters (cold)	equatorial (liquid water)
Gravity	0.38 (1 == EARTH)	0.38 (1 == EARTH)
Atmosphere	absent at poles	yes (carbon dioxide)
Water	suspect of having ice in craters	yes
Distance from Earth	0.6 AU	0.6 AU
Difficulty of reaching	costlier than mars	less costly than Mercury

I read a little about colonization of Mercury on wikipedia and it is said that Mercurians could send solar sails into the outer solar system powered by mass drivers from Mercury and the push of the suns current after that. What a nice idea. Once an industrial process is established to make thin sail fabric it could be flown to Venus to make a giant sunshade! Ie. cooling Venus as in terraforming.

The gravity of Mercury is interesting to say the least. It is more than the moon and not less than Mars's. If they think that Mars's gravity can sustain a human without problems over the course of years then take a look at Mercury! I think this is a really great candidate for colonization and I'd consider it over Mars, any day.

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The space race to the moon

September 30th, 2017

Russia and the USA want to erect a space "gateway" in Lunar L2 behind the moon. Here is why I think that is a bad idea. We don't have too many "rocks" in earths vicinity that are shielded from electromagnetic spectrum that the earth emanates. The far side of the moon is prime property for radio telescopes which constitute a larger spectrum than visual. Once we're able to put radio telescopes on the far side of the moon, there won't be a need to have them on earth anymore. But we may want to erect huge arrays in order to make use of the entire backside of the moon. The bigger the better. With a space station orbiting above in L2, there will be radio interference. However since it is easy to move a space station from L2 to L1 (or any Lagrange point that is) I'm not overly worried, just sayin'.

I have included a drawing from my textbook "Fundamental Astronomy" which nicely shows the entire spectrum of electromagnetism.

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Two crows waiting for sunrise, watching

September 30th, 2017

Saw these two crows on the sirens this morning, it made a good photo.

Shortly after this picture the sky turned yellow not red due to the sun rising. It was miraculous.

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Autumn in full swing

September 28th, 2017

I played a bit with the brightness/contrast for this photo. But this is almost like it is viewed with my own eyes.

'Tis lovely.

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With these books I hope to program C++ on Windows

September 27th, 2017

As you know over the course of the last 7 years I've been aquiring a lot of books. Here is a picture of the books that I hope to be using to learning C++ and program Windows (under vmware on Mac OS X) with them.

This is for a project that is upcoming for me. Who knows perhaps I'll land a job some day as a windows programmer. That's all that is around this region anyhow in terms of jobs.

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Open Letter to Tim Cook at Apple

September 27th, 2017

From: "Peter J. Philipp"
To: Tim Cook
Subject: How about a slimmed down version of Mac OS?

Hi,
You don't know me but I have a lot of apple products. I'm running El Capitan still on my 2015 MacBook Pro because I don't like Sierra and I don't like High Sierra. I don't want all this Artificial Intelligence SIRI on my computers (with open microphone and all). I don't like the cloud functions. So I was wondering if you'll offer a privacy edition to a newer Mac OS? A slimmed down version. It's what I'd gladly want, I'll even pay for it if it's 29.95 or something. Thanks for listening. -peter

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Not as disappointed as last election, but it's bad...

September 24th, 2017

As you can see my Party made it into parliament. Yay! Finally I'm part of something that made it. My party is the smallest party in german parliament. Also what's noticeable is that the AfD got 13.2 percent. Unfortunately these people are mostly racists and right wing populists. As far as the SPD is concerned, they are moving into the oppositions which leaves a black-yellow-green coalition for government or a black minority government.. we'll see how that works out.

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