Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
Back in November 2021, I wrote a post about how I built my own Solax WordPress plugin to display data from our inverter in real-time. It worked extremely well for years, and for our setup at the time it gave an accurate picture of our solar production. However, towards the end of 2025 we added an additional battery...
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...
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...
I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT. If you haven’t heard about it then it’s a text-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it’s surprisingly clever! You can ask it questions, ask it to generate text for you and even ask it to write blog posts and essays (which is proving a bit of an issue for those in...
Capturing the thrill and excitement of windsurfing can be challenging, but with the rise of action cameras, it has become easier than ever to record your sessions on the water. I’ve had a GoPro for many years. I got my first one back in 2010 when they released the first HD version of the camera....
I’ve recently updated the solar monitoring app that I built. It started out as a monitoring app for the solar panels and can be seen on this website from the link at the top of the page. The app/plugin currently consists of a couple of pages: The Solar and Battery Overview – which shows the...
I added to my solar monitoring systems over the Christmas break. I’ve already built a Solax WordPress Plug-in. The plugin corrects the data from our inverter and displays that info and lots of other data on our website. I wanted to see this data on a constantly active screen in the kitchen too. So, I...
My hand was forced last weekend when my trusty Garmin Fenix 3 finally stopped working. One of the buttons fell off and soon after it failed to start up. So, I had no choice but to upgrade to the Garmin Fenix 6X. I had been hoping to hang on for the release of the Garmin...
Time for a bit of a technology related, geeky post about how I’ve recently automated part of my workflow thanks to Mail Rules, Folder Actions, Automator and AppleScript. As you might know from a previous post, I’m in the process of transferring to a new accounting solution called Wave. As part of the transition I...
I’ve needed a new phone for a while. I did have a nice iPhone 5C that did the job well enough but very kindly swapped with Morgan for my even older iPhone 4 so that he could Pokémon while that was all the craze. Needless to say he hasn’t been that inclined to swap back...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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