Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

August 27

Venom was an awful lot of fun. I liked that it was an "isolated" Marvel movie, with no (obvious) links to the MCU, so it wasn't staggering under the weight of epic continuity. Tom Hardy was surprisingly good as a comical loser, given the last thing I saw him doing was being grim in Mad Max: Fury Road, and the interplay between him and Venom was very well done. Brain candy, but good brain candy.

August 24

We are nibbling our way through Vikings and quite enjoying it at this point. I am also nibbling my way through Ulysses (original 1922 edition) and finding it perhaps more accessible and richer than the snippets sent to The Little Review., or perhaps now that I'm sufficiently familiar with them I'm getting more out of the text. Who knows, I'll soon no doubt descend into the confusion that is Stephen Dedalus' disertation on Shakespeare and get lost again.

August 22

Oh! Somewhere back in there I used the homie spec to rebuild my reverse-engineered interface to the EV charger; it's doing all the data collection my first MQTT-based attempt was doing, but also allows me to send a signal back to the charger, specifically toggling the software lock that prevents what the installer described as "the slowest crime in the world", i.e. where someone parks outside your door for 6 hours to steal your kWh. The interface isn't 100% where I want it to be yet - in particular it's using hard-coded credentials to pull data off the charger's API - but I guess I'll toss it into the workshop once I've removed the me-specific bits.

August 21

Been a distracted few days / weekend, including a road trip where I sort of winged the bit about "charging the EV" and thus got to see the car's panicked "you're going to charge me soon, right?" warning box (lowest I ran it was 10%, which is good for about 40km, which is comparable to when your petrol box starts beeping at you that you might want to find a hydrocarbon supplier soon; I wasn't paying attention but I think the warning was triggered at 50km). Lots of people asked me more or less the same questions about the EV, so both for them and to save myself some mental arithmetic, here's a brief summary:

• The battery holds 66.5kWh when 100% full.
• Broadly speaking, this currently gets us between 350 and 450km, depending on what sort of driving is going on - motorway driving, for example, pushes things towards the lower end of the range because it takes a lot of energy to move two tonnes of car at 120kph. Note, this is real distance based on observation (I am a data addict), not estimates or manufacturer quotes or whatever. So when I say "it'll do 350km of motorway driving", that's the same answer as if you ask, "yeah but what'll it really do?"
• This means that 1kWh is roughly 5-7km of range. Handy to know if you're trickle-charging.
• How long does it take to charge? Depends on the charging rate, obviously, but let's run some numbers based entirely on my limited observations for the couple of months we've had the car. These are for "charge from 0 to 100", which is admittedly a bit unrealistic because you'll likely never do that, but it will serve as an outside bound:
  • The "granny charger", aka "plug it into the 3-pin socket and wait", charges at a rate of about 1.7kW. Divide that into 66.5kWh, and you get: just short of 40 hours.
  • The next step up is the home charger, which, with a fair wind and noone using the shower, will pull about 7kW. That's about 9.5 hours for a full charge.
  • The next step after that is ESB's little pole which is rated for 22kW but splits it into 2 11kW feeds: that's clearly just over 6 hours. (I understand ESB may also do a 22kW charger that actually gives you up to 22kW but I have not yet mustered the enthusiasm to become a charger expert. If you find one: divide by two - three hours and change.)
  • Now we get to DC charging. This is basically dumping raw power into your battery without the niceties of conversion between formats. The first rung on this ladder is ESB's 50kW charger; in theory, this will give a full charge in an hour and 20 minutes. However, the few of these I've encountered so far might give you only 36kW (almost 2 hours) or maybe 45kW (an hour and a half) so, ha ha, your mileage may vary.
  • Finally, for my particular bus, the DC circuitry maxes out at 100kW. Ionity chargers can provide this level of power (I think they're rated up to 150kWh?), so that's 40 minutes from 0 to 100%
• Practically speaking, you're not going to run the battery below 10%, and you only need enough charge to get to your next waypoint which in Ireland may well mean that you only need one stop to travel pretty much the length or breadth of the country. Also, the DC chargers will slow down as the battery fills up to avoid damage to your battery. This means you might see a really fast charge up to 80% or so, and then it'll drop down to a trickle for the remaining 20%. If you really, really want that 100% you might actually do better to unplug and move to an AC charger at this point, but again: do you need it?
• The plug is standard. There are three standards in common use in Ireland: CHAdeMO, which basically means "Nissan Leaf" or "Older EV"; Type 2, which is the most common AC charger; and CCS/SAE, which is the DC charger. And there are a bunch of non-standard types, e.g. Tesla. If you're keen you can buy adapaters that allow non-Tesla cars to use Tesla chargers and vice versa. I am not keen.
• Costs: Simples! You pay by per kWh, and the cost varies for convenience and "loyalty". By which I mean:
  • Charging from a home charger or wall socket costs the same as your normal electricity rate. Got a flat rate of 0.25¢ per unit? Your full charge, no matter how long it takes will cost you €16.625. Ok, there's likely gonna be some variance because the system is never 100% efficient, but you get the idea.
  • Charging from a random "slow" charger will likely cost you about 30 or so cent per kWH. So, just short of 20 euro.
  • Doing the same from the Ionity chargers will set you back about 85¢ per kWh. Oof, €56.525.
  • Signing up to the subscriber schemes for the network you're charging from gets you a discount. It varies by network, but ESB for example will charge 30.5¢ for a drive-by charge from some random person they will never hear from again, versus 26.8¢ for one of their loyal subjectsscribers.
  • You may also discover other delights such as parking charges that kick in if you hang around too long, to encourage people not to hog the chargers.
  • ESB runs one of, if not the, biggest network of chargers in Ireland, so you'll likely sign up to them if you're doing any bit of roaming outside the range of your own charger. Mercedes has tried to do a bit of cross-network brokering so you can use a single card with multiple networks, but it's worth being at least mentally prepared for the fact that you may have to either sign up to multiple networks, or pay a little extra if you encounter an alien charger.
• Do I have a charger at home? Yes.
• Is it hard to charge on the go? Mostly, no. If you're going off the beaten path, you might want to put some advance planning into it; some chargers are quite popular and you may have to queue for them, some chargers have multiple plugs but only actually support one car at a time, some chargers are out of order, etc. But if you're travelling along well-worn routes, there's typically plenty charging to be had either on the route or not far off it, usually with something near by to keep you fed and/or entertained while you wait. And, obviously, there's only so far you can go in Ireland before you run into the sea, so unless you're planning a lap of the country in a day you're likely going to be fine with overnight charging.

I should note that there may be some minor inaccuracies in the above, especially with respect to things I don't own or use (Teslas, CHAdeMO), and theoretical figures that various systems might promise as opposed to the practical figures I've experienced.

As mentioned, I'm still not thrilled with the route planning apps. Of the three I'm fiddling with, PlugShare has the most information, but also lacks, as noted, the convenience of picking stops for you to recharge at. I discovered on the drive home that if you're not on a planned trip but just hunting for nearby charging stations, it moves your location dot on the map but doesn't move the map. So after a few km you've driven off the top of the map and have to manually recenter it. ABRP... wants you to pay to use it in carplay mode. Pfft. And the in-car navigation (as distinct from the phone app that comes with the car) seemed not to notice some charging stations when route planning, but was perfectly happy to flag them up when I drove past them. As a result I wound up with one slightly suboptimal charge where I used one of the 11kW ESB charger sticks without realising there was a proper 50kW charger about 4km away, which would've saved me about 40 minutes of waiting. But I enjoyed a short stroll and a snack, so.

August 14

Fiddling with route planners for the EV: "A Better Route Planner" does the work of figuring out your stops for you, but I'm having some issues with the user interface; "PlugShare" seems a good deal more comprehensive in terms of both available charge points and access to more detailed information without subscribing, but doesn't plan your stops; and the EV's own routing app (on the phone) doesn't appear to allow for additional waypoints. None of the three seem to have the concept of "round trip", as in, "I'm driving to this location and will be driving back to my starting point some time after that", which seems... basic? I dunno. Maybe there's a huge cohort out there who just get in their cars and drive, never to be seen again?

August 13

Managed to cherry-pick the slightly broken debian box into installing a reasonably current version of SpamAssassin, which was about the most critical thing it was missing after last weeks' upset. I'm still debating how much effort to put into recovering this vs. setting up a new box from scratch with the user data preserved.

August 9

Started watching Vikings; as with other stuff we've watched, it's included for "free" on PrimeVideo and there are at least a few seasons - although it looks like only half of the series, alas. We'll see how it goes.

August 6

Sort of understanding what happened to the server:

• Originally, it was a debian box, running whatever flavour of debian was current when it was built.
• Then it was a debian + unstable box, so it was getting "unreleased" packages added.
• Then I decided to remove the unstable source and let the stable source catch up, if it would, with whatever the installed software was.
• Then whatever happened t'other day happened; this resulted in removing a large number of packages. Many of these packages appear to have been from unstable, and did not graduate to stable at any time.
• So now it's a bit of a frankenbox and some of the previously-installed packages can't be installed without re-enabling unstable. I'm debating at this point whether it's worth the effort of just outright upgrading to the next debian release, or just building a new server and porting things over to it.

August 4

Still not clear on what broke but the server is more or less back in working order.

August 3

Wrapped up Blacklist: Redemption. Not terrible, and while there was a bit of a cliffhanger and no more episodes because the show was cancelled, things were well enough wrapped up to not be annoying.

Had a minor oops with a server I manage where what should've been routine maintenance broke the box's connectivity. Fortunately I have scripts lying around to help recover from such incidents, but I'd forgotten I'd made them kinda slick:

$ ~/src/sh/ec2-drive-swap.sh -p awsprofile -s hostname
21:12:00 Collected sick instance ID 'i-deadbeef' for 'hostname'
21:12:02 Sick device '/dev/xvda' is 'vol-deadbeef'
21:12:03 Collected recovery instance ID 'i-feedbead'
21:12:06 Will attach sick volume as '/dev/xvdc'
21:12:06 Stopping i-deadbeef:
 waiting for 'i-deadbeef' to reach status 'stopped': ...done
21:12:33 Detaching sick volume vol-deadbeef:
 waiting for 'vol-deadbeef' to reach status '': .done
21:12:37 Attaching vol-deadbeef to i-feedbead:
 waiting for 'vol-deadbeef' to reach status 'attached': ..done
Sick volume is attached to recovery instance. Log in to i-feedbead and do your stuff, then exit the shell to continue
[drive recovery - exit when done] $ 
    

On top of that, when I logged in I discovered I'd left scripts on the damaged drive that mount and unmount the relevant partitions to allow it to operate as a chroot environment. Slick, I tells ya. And when I log out of the recovery shell, it reattaches the volume to the correct instance and restarts the instance. SLICK.

(just don't look at the code.)

At this point I've partially recoved the server but I'm still trying to figure out what actually went wrong, so if anyone still uses the DSPsrv and is wondering why they can't connect... that's why.

August 1

Weird failure on one of the decrepit macs: a file created in ~/Desktop didn't show up on the desktop, so I figured maybe logging out might be good (I have experienced failures in the past where the desktop process has become disconnected from its security context, or something like that). Logging out... hung. Since I had a shell connection to the same machine, I rebooted it. That hung, too. So hard power off, and... booting hung. At this point I was envisaging the annoyingly stereotypical "mac claims hardware is in full working order right up to the point it catastrophically fails"; however, I managed to boot to recovery, nothing looked amiss, and then booting verbosely showed an awful lot of errors that seemed symptomatic of problems in the signing infrastructure. But no, eventually it came back to life. I have no idea, and I am not helped by the fact that there's a good deal of alarming-looking log messages that are apparently safe to ignore.

Finished round one of my battle with the Variorum edition of Ulysses: I have read, after a fashion, the original publications from The Little Review. It's tough going in spots, wildly amusing in others. I am now looking at what I think is the original 1922 print of the novel itself, so let's see how that goes. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..."

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