Month: December 2024

When will the sun finally shine again?

Since my storage unit was replaced with the SENEC P4, there have been no more "good" sunny days, so I couldn't really judge how the new storage unit would perform. On December 27, the time had finally come - there was enough sun to fully charge the 4 installed cells.

Over the course of the day, 16.9 kWh went into the storage system and gradually came out again over 6 hours from around 3 pm. Of course, this reduces the costs enormously, but there was still no real grid feed-in and it should of course look much better when the sun is in the sky for longer.

I've also started using Home Assistant to find out what the biggest consumers are. It's no surprise that the geothermal heat pump draws a lot, especially in winter. My network cabinet is also doing "very well". The dryer, washing machine, coffee machine, etc. are also always doing well. I work here with Shelly Plug S plugs for power consumption measurement and the HACS AddOn PowerCalc. How all this works, including measuring the consumption of the heat pump, will be explained in subsequent articles.

Public Listening: a train journey that is ... informative.

Today I'm once again traveling a longer distance by train, several hours towards the capital. I'm always amazed at how open some people are about conversations, phone calls and their laptops. Having recently read the book "The Abolition of Death", which explains the concept of public listening, I paid particular attention to it this time. A public listener is someone who simply listens in order to gather sensitive information. In the book, this was done deliberately, but for me it happens accidentally (and involuntarily). I usually actively listen away or use headphones with noise cancellation, but today I was curious.

What can you collect in one go?

  • What are your fellow travelers working on? Are they shopping (what, where, how much)? Are they just watching a movie? Or are they working on a report (the logo on the report makes it easy to see where they are working) that you can easily read?
  • How do you get into the laptop? Fingerprints are difficult, but very bad passwords are still often used. Ditto the simple access codes on cell phones (1234) or the Z or L if you can use the line guidance.
  • While this still requires a certain amount of personal effort, phone calls and conversations are "for everyone". Sometimes I can't believe how openly people talk about highly sensitive projects, customers, etc. here (I'll leave the disclosure of privacy out of the equation).

My conclusion: when I travel in public, I always use a privacy screen, both for my cell phone and my laptop. I generally don't make phone calls at all and if I do, I let the other person know that I can't talk freely and that we should leave it until later or use a chat application. If it's a business trip, talking business with colleagues is simply taboo for me. It's all really simple, but few people take it seriously.

When it comes to noise-canceling, I use Bose Quitcomfort Overear products (which provide a certain amount of isolation due to their design) or Apple AirPods.