Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
I’ve added some new data features to my Solax Solar Panel Plugin for WordPress. This plugin isn’t publicly available for a few reasons, but I use it on this website to display the status of our solar panels and track their performance over time. It’s also used on a small Home Info-Display, which shows data...
Having taken the plunge and upgraded our trusty, boundary-wire-guided Flymo robot mower to a GPS-guided Mammotion Yuka Mini 500, I thought I’d share some first impressions. Scepticism, Satellites, and Software To be honest, I was a little sceptical about GPS-guided mowers. I’ve used GPS in various ways for years, so I know both its strengths and...
The lease on our Hyundai Kona Electric is due to end soon, so it was time to start looking for a replacement. There isn’t a huge amount of choice in Aberystwyth, and since we’ve loved the Kona, it made sense to stick with what we knew. We did research a few other options, but nothing...
Going All-In on Robot Mowers (Again) You may remember that we went all in on robots during the Covid lockdown, adding robot mowers to our collection of robot vacuum cleaners. Since then, Hector (who mows the back garden) and Harriet (in the front) have done a great job. It started as a fun lockdown project...
Having recently posted about the Spring that keeps on giving—where I commented on the amazingly sunny weather we’ve had and its positive impact on our solar production—we’ve now broken another record. This time, it’s the highest daily yield since we had our solar panels installed. The previous record was 29.80 kWh, set on June 14th 2023. But yesterday,...
After a busy couple of weeks with a trip to Fuerteventura and then a week at a conference with work, the spring garden was looking a little overwhelming. Things—namely the goosegrass, dandelions, and stinging nettles—were getting out of hand, and I’d yet to get Hector, our robot lawnmower, up and running. Robot Mowers Harriet, the...
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...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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MTB / Trail Guides / Wales
Traws Eryri Day 2 – Dolgellau to Trawsfynydd
Wednesday, October 7th, 2026
