Strange: we had snow and rain and low temperatures in January, and yet the total energy production from our solar panels exceeds the average for the first month of the year...

"Thud!", by Terry Pratchett. "Leve het goede leven! Humanisme voor iedereen", by Johan Braeckman. "La loi de 1905 a 120 ans. Cette laïcité que le monde nous envie" (Charlie Hebdo, hors-série novembre 2025).

Hah. Terry Pratchett must have been quite a man - I’m sorry I did not discover his books earlier in life. I have found quotable paragraphs in all Pratchetts books I have read so far. I'll limit myself to the last one: “Thud”. On p. 286 my first name appears in an unexpected setting: A young dragon with floppy ears and an expression of mildly concussed good humour blinked at him.

When my friends planned a cycle tour, they had trouble getting the route they wanted to ride stored on more than one Garmin cycle computer. So I tried to help with those file transfers on a Mac running the Garmin software. But somehow that failed to work, and we can't pinpoint the real cause of the problems: you can have more than one Garmin device in Garmin Basecamp, no?

Ten years ago today, David Bowie (né David Jones) passed away. There will be enough reading and listening material about his life and career, so I won't bother you with that. Richard MacManus (aka. Mister Cybercultural) has written extensively about BowieNet, one of the first interactive fan sites on the Internet. His latest article on the subject is "

It is somewhat unexpected, given the conclusion I wrote down on January 2nd, 2025, but last year was an average year when it comes to sunshine and our solar electricity production numbers. Over the whole year the panels produced over 2000 kWh, and very close (99.5%) to the average yearly production for our installation. So we have no reason to complain about that!

I really should stop buying more books than I can read in a month! It's a good thing I started to write down which books I really read; that motivates me to pick up titles from the stack (that does not get really smaller)... "The Gods Themselves", by Isaac Asimov. "Monstrous Regiment", by Terry Pratchett.

Getting the data from my solar panels onto the hard disk of my computer is not a problem: the Python scripts I have do their work, even if if wouldn't hurt to get rid of one or two bugs in those scripts. Getting the data from my disk onto a spot on-line, allowing me to access them, regardless of whether I'm home or not, is quite another matter.

This blog was started 26 years ago, on Thursday December 23, 1999. I have written this before: I had no idea what I was doing at that time; I only knew it was something I had to try out. Blame Dave Winer for that! The fact that I'm still writing here is entirely my responsibility 😉

I have been told that APsystems has quite nice inverters (and more) for photovoltaic installations. Additionally, their Energy Communication Units (ECU) plus the accompanying smartphone application not only allows users to follow the panel production in detail (and in real time), but also stores the data in the cloud for long term follow-up. But I did notice something strange with the production numbers.

I do have many computers and devices built by Apple, that's true. But there are other operating systems in the house as well: Android, Xubuntu - just no W*ndows 😉 So when I want to transfer files between two machines and Airdrop isn't an option, I turn to LocalSend. You may not like the whimsical names it attributes to your devices (I don't), but it works like a charm - and that is what I care about.

Nothing special to report: according to our solar panels, this November was a pretty average month. The panels delivered 101% of what I expected, and given the numbers we're talking about, that's about as average as it gets 😉 Unfortunately, I discovered a math error in my tables, and had to recalculate numbers for the last few years. That's why you did not see those numbers on December 1st - sorry.

A short list, but lots of reading material. "Feet of Clay", by Terry Pratchett. "De Waanzinnige Veertiende Eeuw", by Barbara Tuchman. The English title of that last book is "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century", and it's absolutely worth reading - even if takes a lot of time! I'll admit: it took me more than two months to finish, but I did read every letter!

I have updated my solar panel monitor machine ( an old Acer Aspire One mini-portable) to Xubuntu 24.04, as a matter of good practice for "staying secure when accessing the internet". Still runs fine, if a bit slow, but that's not really an issue for a machine that is running mainly a few occasional cron jobs. Reading out the solar panels is still OK.

Time flies, as the saying goes. WordPress.com just told me that I started 16 years ago on their platform. My blog is older than that, but due to circumstances I had to migrate to WordPress. That migration took some time, but in the end I'm happy to have done so. 16 years ago it was clear to me that WordPress was the best blogging platform, and I think time has proven me right.

I could not have said it better than Ton Zylstra (on his blog): My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage). Blogging is a feedback loop on one’s sense of wonder. When I look back at what I wrote many years ago, I'm often surprised by what I wrote.

This message should be repeated as often as possible: Trump is responsible for the government shutdown. For more details about these tweets (and more), read the Politifact article on "Before he was president, did Donald Trump say a government shutdown shows a president is weak?"

Nothing special to report when it comes to the electricity production of our solar panels: at 94% they did more or less what we expected. PS. I went up on the roof to check the panels, and everything was fine, including the reflective coating on the roof itself (although that is no longer as white as on the picture - but it still reflects!).