Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

#POV #train #TGV
You’re traversing a continent at nearly 300 kilometer per hour, in relative silence, high comfort and with an incredibly high level of safety.
This is a double-deck double-train, so around 900 passengers are enjoying the same journey.

This specific Lyon-Paris line was opened in 1981, one year after I was born. From the rolling stock to the infrastructure, most of this technology is more than 40 years old, with small incremental improvements here in there.

« You're not doomscrolling, you're hopequesting.

You need those tiny pieces of joy from seeing friends and strangers share their art, their good news, their wacky unique selves.

We need light to live.

And we find it in each other. »

I have also added a WN30 remote temperature sensor to the system to monitor the temperature inside the fridge and it made me realize quickly that our fridge is dying and can't maintain a temperature below 10°C which is not at all acceptable for food safety.

I plan to add a second one to monitor the freezer separately.

Overall, I'm quite pleased by the Ecowitt system so far. It's basic, mostly unencrypted, open-ish, low-cost and low-friction.

New weather station installed at the family home. Hardware is by Ecowitt, it's quite low-cost, I'm curious to see how robust it is.
For Europe they recommend to order the 868 MHz version but because it's low-power and each sensor sends only a few bytes every minute, I've chosen to order the 433MHz version. I have thick walls and metal shutters to go though, so I thought it would help to use a lower license-free frequency. So far, it's working great.

The GW2000 base station (connected to the internet router) gives temperature, humidity inside the house and atmospheric pressure. I have chose the GW2000 because it has an Ethernet port and can be plugged into my router instead of the cheaper GW1100 that can only work through wifi.

The sensor on the left of the picture is a WH32 outdoor sensor giving temperature and humidity, it's under a radiation shield. The one on the right is a WH40 rain gauge with additional protection against birds. In the future I plan to install a wind speed and direction sensor (WS68 most probably) but they will be separated from the rain sensor and mounted on the roof, a must to get accurate wind measurement as the garden is full of trees and big shrubs.
Ecowitt has several "all in one sensors" but they won't work for me: if I put them on the roof, it becomes hard to clean the rain gauge regularly (and this is more or less mandatory), if I put them in the garden the wind measurement will be garbage.

All data is pushed to https://www.ecowitt.net/ in my private account and I can decide to share some of the channels on the public map.

Chicken tractors in an agroforestry meadow. Quebec, Canada.

👽

🎶 Machines Create Machines 🎶

The RX/TX way naming of nets is inherited from a previous era, when there were a clear distinction between DCE and DTE, terminals and modems. Now that all electronics systems are like matryoshka dolls of smart-ish subsystems and that it's not always clear who is "in charge" of a serial communication, shouldn't we use different names altogether to put the old way of naming things to a final rest?

How about ASI/ASO for pins and ASAB/ASBA for nets:
- Asynchronous Serial In
- Asynchronous Serial Out
- Async Serial A to B
- Async Serial B to A

ASO --> ASAB -->ASI
ASI <-- ASBA <-- ASO

Short, unambiguous, we just have to pick arbitrarily who's A and who's B amongst the two sides of a given interface.
No "crossover point", over a jumper or a connector, where the TX net *has to* become the RX net for the communication to work.

Also, no collision with the recommended new terminology for SPI https://www.oshwa.org/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-names/

#netZero #carbonOffsets #carbonCreditPrinterGoBrrrrrr #bullshitingOurWayToHothouseEarth

I've made a small schematic of the idea, representing 6 desks, from 'A' to 'F'. Desks B+C and D+E are mobile, guided by high rails, with wheels on the floor, connected to mains + networking from ceiling junction boxes. Desks A and F are fixed, and suitable for plumbing, hoods with extraction, etc.

Assuming 90cm deep and 2m wide desks, a 90cm "alley" to roll through with a desk chair and a 90cm "access" alley on one side of the room, that would result in 10.8m² of usable desk space + many cubic meter of accessible storage in a 18.3m² room.

So, for all those different tasks and tools, having dedicated desk space, or zones, seems really useful. But, unless you live in a large detached house or can rent additional space, it's hard to find room to fit all that.

Here's my proposal: assuming you're working alone, and nobody but you needs to simultaneously be in front of several of those desk areas, what if you used the principle used by high density shelf storage for your workshop? But instead of shelves, you have desks with storage space on top.

On December 1st, 16:00 German time, there will be a presentation on Lora application to Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) that could be relevant for lots of environmental monitoring projects happening in the wilderness.

It will be live on Youtube (possible to catch it later).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTsFzihRWc

Time for a short #bookReview 📖

I finished reading #TheDawnOfEverything by D. #Graeber and D. #Wengrow.

It's quite a long book that took me way more than a month to go through, but worth the read and the last fifth of the book, post conclusion, is notes and references that can be skipped without losing too much. Overall very interesting, I warmly recommend it, even if some chapters were going a little too deep into the archeological record for my non-specialist tastes.

It was illuminating, specially as I had previously read #GunsGermsAndSteel by J. #Diamond and #Sapiens by Y. N. #Harari, both very popular books, and both adopting a very deterministic view of past human history.
I'm not 100% convinced by the interpretations of Graeber & Wengrow, but they appear to make a real honest effort at understanding our past, they base their reflections on recent archeological records, and present a much more nuanced "story of the human civilizations" than the previously cited books.

The book doesn't really provide any actionnable advice on how we should collectively go forward, but at least it tries to set the record straight on what was previously attempted ... with various level of success.

Did you know that #CO2 can be used as a #refrigerant gas in #heatPumps? And that it's very efficient at it.
It requires significantly higher pressures than typical refrigerants gas but it doesn't require a chemical plan to fiddle with fluorinated products, and that seems to be a huge plus. Also, it is cheap, guaranteed not to have any undesirable effect we might discover later, non-flammable, non-toxic and has a GWP of 1.

With a COP above 3, the global #efficiency of a combined-cycle methane power plant + transmission loss + point of use COP gives a higher efficiency than burning the methane directly even in the best furnace money can buy.
And we know very well how to store hot water, so spreading daily peak heat demand without massive *electricity* storage is much more feasible.

This weekend it's