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  • BushMoot: Come along to the amazing Summer Moot 31st July - 5th August (extended Moot : 27th July - 8th August), a festival of bushcrafting and camping in a beautiful woodland PLEASE CLICK HERE for more information.
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    Plug & Play Solar

    Its being sold as plug and play, but there are nuances. The kit itself is pretty much plug and play - you buy the box, plug in some panels, then plug it into a mains socket. Simple. Its what comes next after you plug it in that is being glossed over. If you have a nice new house, with modern...
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    Plug & Play Solar

    This is what is blocking me, I believe. We have an old circuit board with RCDs that aren't designed for current flowing back to the grid. Plus, we still have an old style mechanical electricity meter.
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    WiFi area extender

    I have a dead spot reaching into the garden. As such i use a Linksys power line wi-fi extender. One power line plugs into the mains near my router. The other plugs into a socket on the first floor, in the bedroom that backs onto the garden. Works a treat.
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    LoraWan

    It has huge promise as a decentralised messaging system, running on very low power kit. However it's very immature and unstable. There is a growing user base, but before it can become really useful it needs to mature. To mature it needs more adoption - there are too many holes in the mesh. But...
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    Verifying browser and redirecting?

    It's very probably a browser challenge or app monitor. Whoever runs the site has probably installed something but it might be misconfigured. Because it's intermittent then it's probable a cache or load balancer issue. It's there to try and stop things like bots, agents and scrapers. I am on...
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    Best Concerts Youve Ever Been Too

    The Enid. Now there's a name from the past. I met Bob via Barcley James Harvest. Nice chap. They also had a recording studio (the lodge in, i think, suffolk) that we used a couple of times.
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    LoraWan

    Currently running a heltec v4 repeater and a v4 node. Able to reach from down on the south coast up to Yorkshire. Sometimes... This is meshcore rather than meshtastic.
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    Best Concerts Youve Ever Been Too

    As an ex roadie, bit spoilt for choice... Lots of Hawkwind / Motörhead Most "sh*t was I part of that": Led Zeppelin at Knebworth Most bizarre : The Tubes Best light show : Blue Oyster Cult Loudest : Motörhead (obviously) I could go on...
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    I, Robot , I Soldier.

    Best bit of work I have done in years :p
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    I, Robot , I Soldier.

    There is a lot of nonsense being talked about AI at the moment, plus a lot of stuff that is not being talked about, that ought to be. Until very recently I worked in the data and AI industry. To the extent that I managed to AI myself out of a job and took early retirement..... There is a view...
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    Eggs,

    Apparently it's because the chickens that lay white eggs tend to be smaller, so the (strained) argument is that they use less food. So they therefore use less energy... A more cynical view might be that smaller chickens lay smaller eggs, so there is some cost savings in handling / processing etc.
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    Swedish preparedness pamphlet

    In the event of a regional outage - substation goes down or wider - then the infrastructure will go as well. Some cell base stations have battery backup, but it won't last long. Few years back we had this happen - local substation went. Took out half the town. Everything went down - internet...
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    What did you buy today?

    Outdoors - The Scandinavian Way by Lars Falt - Summer Activities
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    Off grid Living - modern feasibility.

    Have a look at https://www.woodlands.co.uk/ They have a lot of resources that cover a lot of what you can and can't do. A lot though depends on the local council, as mentioned.
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    New Expandable Power Station - Aferiy P280

    Just picked up one of these in the Aferiy sale. So far, really rate it. It has lots of features and can be expanded up to 10KWh. At 2.8Kw out, I can run just about every appliance I have (not at once, obviously). Only downside is that it's pretty heavy.
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    Plug & Play Solar

    Ah, lot of history there... In the UK we use ring mains. This is a carry over from post war shortages of copper - it enables you to provide more current using smaller cables. For most of the rest of the world, they use radial distribution - lots of single spurs coming from a distribution box...
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    Fuel Shortages

    Its the ethanol content. E5 has up to 5%, E10 up to 10%. Ethanol is hygroscopic - it attracts water (via the atmosphere). After time you get separation - the ethanol/water mix sinks to the bottom of the fuel tank (where the pump inlet normally is) and its non-combustable. The ethanol depleted...
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    Plug & Play Solar

    I would very much like one, so that I could feed the solar panels on the shed into the house. But after looking into it, I would need: To have a new electricity meter installed Get a new distribution panel so that it can take a modern size RCD (or have a second panel)3 Get a spur added to the...
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    Plug & Play Solar

    Provided the inverter is G98 compliant, and you know what you are doing, then technically you can do this. However, there are loads of gotchas. The Gov announcement to allow for plug-in "balcony" solar generation will allow you to buy a complete kit that you will be able to just plug into the...
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    Petrol - stabilising

    I've used fuel stabiliser for many years, mainly when storing things like lawn mowers and generators over winter. Means I don't have to drain anything and, in the case of the generator, its available for immediate use. Just got the generator out of storage yesterday and it fired up fine after a...