Working towards goals.

Today I didn’t really feel like lying on the ground under the bus doing the necessary wiring and tightening a few nuts and bolts so I worked inside instead. Because my extraction fans have such a high current draw they have been defeating my house battery. All is not lost however. 

On eBay I found this nifty little battery protecting circuit. My current thought is to power the fans directly from solar power. I can install a simple bypass relay that will route power to the fans straight from an external solar panel. The current switch is just there to prevent the fans from starting before there’s enough power to run them properly. In the event insufficient power gets to the motor, the coils could heat up and burn out.

So far all I’ve done is set the threshold voltage to 11.5V to turn the power off and 18v to turn it off again. Just in case the panels provide too much power!

I had a go also at installing my DVR for the rear camera. I tried a splitter since the video feed through doesn’t seem to work with my system. Bizarre but there you are - this is how Chinese stuff works or doesn’t work. One thing I did was to snip off the microphone connector since there’s absolutely no reason to have a microphone or an audio track. If somebody shoves their car under my back bumper all I need is a video file showing they did it and that I was not reversing.

I ran into a snag, however. It seems my power drills are too big to fit into the space available. I could drill the mount holes for the unit with no problem. The problem came when I wanted to drill the hole for the cables to go through. In the end after hunting online I found that 90 degree drill converters were available. Locally they were $20 or more. Online I could get one for $6, shipped. I ordered one.

In other news I’ve been having problems since 2014 with my 2007 MacBook. It started with the screen going dark and needing the brighter and darker buttons to be toggled. Then the battery died so I thought it was the battery. I bought a $20 battery on eBay and it worked - for two weeks then that battery died. I semi-retired my MacBook and started using tablets. I went through a huge number of Android tablets before finally, 3 years ago, finding an end of line iPad Mini. That I’ve been using ever since. It’s good but the memory is minimal and it needs regular flushing. It’s also not something I can do much with other than web consumption and blogging. Even with a keyboard it’s not that great.

Recently I had another go at my MacBook. I bought a new battery but not an actual Apple battery - I didnt want to spend $200. Then I found the hard drive wasn’t reading correctly so I got a new hard drive for it. Then I couldn’t find the operating system disk to reinstall the operating system. I bought a new disk and tried to reinstall but it didn’t go well. It needed an update and refused to update over wifi. I bought a cable to connect directly to the router. It still wouldn’t update. I downloaded the update onto a memory stick using a windows system. Then I tried updating that way. Again, no joy. It refused to update.

With a lack of ideas I put a Linux CD in and installed Linux. That kinda worked but the screen kept going dark so I could not see whaat was on the screen without shining a bright light at it. All very strange!

Ok. This is a bus blog so why am I prattling on about my laptop issues? Simply because in the beginning my updates were all done on my MacBook and because I find computers far easier to use than tablets. Now the reason I had a Mac was because I really find Windows is user unfriendly. It seems though that I’m looking now to replace my MacBook with a new computer. I know how much money I have and how much I make and how much I can afford. The problem is I really hate spending money. While at a stretch I could probably afford a MacBook (and I did see B&H with a 2017 mmodel for less than $1,000), I’m thinking more toward a $200 Windows 10 model and installing Linux instead of Windows.

I saw this one in Best Buy. It looks like it could be a good deal but only if I can be sure of ripping Windows off it and putting Linux on it. I just don’t like Windows and Windows has been bloody awful in so many of its incarnations. Let’s look at them...

1. Windows 3.1 - This was actually quite good and was before the centralized registry
2. Windows 95 - This crashed an awful lot and introduced people to losing loads of data as being ”normal”.
3. Windows 98 - Continued the same crash ridden, data losing as Windows 95.
4. Windows ME - Not quite sure what improvement this was but it still crashed and lost data.
5. Windows SE - pretty much the same as ME but with a different name.
6. Windows NT4 - pretty good actually save for a problem with bigger hard drives and no USB support.
7. Windows XP - introduced a centralized permission slip. If microsoft wanted to kale the operating system they could by simply not allowing me to use it. Big brother strikes.
8. Windows Vista - bloody slow and probably some kind of joke Microsoft played on the public.
9. Windows 7, 8 and 10 - no experience but I imagine they will show all of the truly stupendously evil traits of the previous Microsoft operating systems. 

When Vista came out in 2007 I upgraded to a Mac. Now my Mac is probably beyond redemption and since its creator is now in the next world, it’s probably time to try Linux again. I did use Linux quite seriously a few years ago. I used it as a server and I used it as desktop computer. It worked really quite well. I gather the Asus was designed to be used with Linux but hasn’r Been sold with Linux installed. Given the price of $200 as opposed to $1,000 or more, you can see why I’m looking at Linux and this little Asus!

Remaining to do are little things like a solar input at the back, wiring up the new battery holder and installing the recorder for the back camera. While I’m at it, I’ll install a recorder for a yet-to-be-installed front camera. I did have an idea of using a camera that I took out of my car afte it blew a fuse. That needed a new USB connector to be soldered on. That connector arrived in the post today and I duly soldered it on. Whoops! It was the wrong gender!

Somewhere I have a gender changer plug but I’m pretty sure that is also the wrong gender. 

Today seems to have been a day when nothing really went to plan. I’m hoping tomorrow is better. It was almost warm enough to go under the bus. I just didn’t feel like it though.