Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
As a part of my ongoing efforts to optimise and enhance the functionality of my solar panel monitoring plugin, I’ve recently made some significant improvements that have boosted its performance and security. If you’re interested in solar generation data or just want to know how to improve the efficiency of a WordPress plugin, this post...
New Office The technology giants’ marketing has worked again. Having bought the last of the Intel generation of Apple Macintosh computers—a specced-out Intel i9 iMac about five years ago—I’ve been feeling a little left behind. At the time, Apple was about to transition to their own Apple Silicon ‘M series’ of chips. Rather than take...
Let’s talk about a rabbit hole I’ve just tumbled down: custom keyboards. If you’ve never explored this world before, prepare yourself—it’s part art gallery, part engineering lab, and 100% Geek!! As a designer and developer who spends an ungodly number of hours at a keyboard, I never thought much about the device itself beyond, “Does it...
We don’t seem to have had much of a summer here this year. There has been the odd sunny day but no long spells of summery weather, and the solar panels know it! Sometimes it just feels as though the weather has been terrible but I thought I’d check the generation of the solar panels...
I got kind of excited by the release of satellite messaging on the latest iPhones and iOS. It’s a good safety feature that allowed me to send a location update and more importantly send an SOS message should I need to, even when I didn’t have any mobile reception. It’s free and seemed to work...
We’ve been pretty happy with our broadband ever since we were one of the first households in Wales to get Fibre direct to the Property back in 2016. I still don’t know why we got it then, but at the time going from 1.5Mbps download speed to a 52Mbps download speed was quite a revelation....
The weather has been terrible lately, so much rain and wind every day hat it has barely even gotten light. It’s a good job we have the Christmas decorations up to brighten things up a little. The solar panels haven’t been producing much. The daily yield graph for the past 20 days from my solar...
I’ve tried a number of different mounting options for my GoPro and Insta360 camera’s over the years. For certain sports a helmet mount or handlebar mount are obvious, for windsurfing though it keeps evolving. There have been helmet mounts, boom mounts, mast mounts and plenty of variations on this theme. One of my favourites, especially...
Now that we’ve had our solar panels installed for over 2 years, I thought it was time to make sure we could compare the yield from them per year. As you can imagine in a country with such unpredictable weather the yield from the solar panels varies considerably. From day-to-day the variations are thanks to...
It’s been quite calm here recently – unusual for Ynyslas. Of course, it’s all relative as calm here is pretty windy for most people. It’s rarely completely still, so there’s been a decent breeze most days and almost enough o windsurf now and then but never a proper blow. Monday had some decent wind forecast...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
 |
 |
More live data from Ynyslas
Subscribe for full access.
Weather trends, weather extremes and historic data. See what you get here.
Misty Peaks and Boggy Trails: An Overnight Adventure in the Moelwyns
Monday, March 10th, 2025
Coast Path / Fitness / Health / Running / Trail Guides / Wales
The Journey Behind “A Thousand Mile Run”
Thursday, February 27th, 2025
