Wednesday, January 4, 2012

LOARTP

or Lack Of Anything Relevant To Post.
 Photo from this morning's sunrise.

Something that just caused me all sorts of grief! I assumed flash drives would far outlast a hard drive, but The one I've had PortableApps on for about the last year crashed day before yesterday and when it did I lost a LOT of important info. If you use these for storage and expect them to last for ever forget that. Of course I'm bad about not keeping recent backups, but from now on I may have clones of these in case one of them decide to take a dump.

And back to the charger. After several cloudy days after I returned from Odessa I managed to finish the charger good enough to keep the battery bank topped off on real cloudy days. I'd run it a couple of times, but didn't think to check the solar panels until a couple of days ago. Turns out that they were covered with a thick layer of adobe dust and we hadn't had any recent sand storms. Not only that, but the panels in other places were missing the dust. This was after I cleaned the panels and just dusting them off this time didn't work. Had to break out the Windex and paper towels.
Turns out that when the charger was running the whole assembly was vibrating and digging in to the ground. This was kicking up a lot of adobe dust that was collecting on the panels. Not sure how I'll cure this, but will probably bolt the charger to a wooden pallet and see if that cures the dust problem. I eventually plan to have this on a hybrid ATV (If I ever build it) That way I could use it not only to keep the batteries charged, but to ride to.

10 comments:

  1. Great photo of the sunrise, sure makes me wish I was out there drinking a cup of joe and watching it come up.

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  2. Q K, According to Dizzy Dick I missed a meteor shower last night, but that goes with the territory of not being able to keep up with events like that down here. Would have probably been spectacular. Meteors really stand out down here. Of curse if a person stays out late at night its rare not to see several of them about any night. Some times even a few UFO's are seen. ;)

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  3. There's more meteor showers to come. That's such a beautiful morning shot. You guys are so terribly lucky to live where you do.
    With regard to those backup thingies. I used to backup on the Internet and then backup the backup to the other backups. Any more I really don't care what the heck happens to what I write. The grace of getting older I'm afraid. ;o

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  4. Always with the dig on the UFO's, I still think that's what we saw! lol Glad to hear your feeling better, kind of funny about the charger kicking up dust like that. :)

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  5. RJ, There was just a lot of info that I needed on that drive and some of it wasn't backed up. I'm going to have to come up with a better plan.

    Dale, after watching what ever that is last time I'll have to go along with UFO to because there isn't anything on this earth that could move that fast and then split and head two different directions at a opposing sharp angles.

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  6. O wow, love to hear about real UFOs.

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  7. hope you are feeling better...or maybe worse since you are seeing UFO's..??

    what kinda cigs you smokin' these days..??

    B'foot

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  8. TnT, you'll have to come down here some time and see them. Really quiet interesting (And mind boggling)

    BF, I'm having my ups and downs. Found out that I can no longer get Primatene inhalers because Big Brother says they are harmful to the environment so I guess I can just suffocate which will help the environment even more. One less person breathing their air!

    Now I'm smoking filtered cigars, but am doing my damnedest to quit so don't go thinking about sending me any. Hopefully by the time I go through the two cartons I have I'll be quit.

    As for the UFOs, I keep signaling them them with a flashlight trying to get them to come take me away, but they just won't do it. They probably figure I'm too old and screwed up to abduct?

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  9. The morning sunrise picture is absolutely beautiful.

    The weather channel was going on and on about the meteor shower and the more I wished I could of been in Terlingua to be able to witness its full splendor :(

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  10. MsB, I've missed all of the meteor showers that have been down here so far because of the time of night they were at. Also its a lot more fun to watch something like that with company. (Which I didn't have at the times)

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