Ramblings
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Holiday 2024 – Dun Laoghaire to Girvan
An easy drive north, though working out how to get a 2024 Seat Leon reconfigured for miles per hour instead of kilometres per hour took longer than it should have – Enterprise apparently believe their customers do not need the manuals for the vehicle, and it wasn’t in the car. Stopped off in Belfast to…
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Responding to a Mayday Relay
The other Saturday, K and I decided to make the most of the warm weather in Ireland, and sailed to Killiney Bay, dropped the hook, and had lunch. As the tide turned, the movement became a bit uncomfortable, so engine on, anchor up, sails up, and we started heading back. Glorious wind and boat speed…
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Solar upgrade
As noted a while back, the solar panel I have on Blue Opal wasn’t working well with the Votronic MPPT solar charger. The panel I have is a 55 Wp panel, and the testing I did led me to the conclusion that it basically can’t put out enough voltage that the Votronic can buck down…
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Fedora Core 40 and SELinux
Somehow, something broke my Linux desktop yesterday. Booted up early in the morning, everything worked fine. Downloaded some updates, browsed the web, and then rebooted. Post-reboot, all I got was a black screen when SDDM was meant to be executing. Fedora Core 40 locks the root account, which means the rescue option in GRUB doesn’t…
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Fuel senders
It turns out that Blue Opal has had an electronic fuel sender since I bought her, it’s just never been hooked up to anything that can display the signal. I’d noticed the wires going to the top of the fuel tank, but had concluded that they didn’t do anything useful. As it happens, this conclusion…
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Jammed single line reefing
The other day I discovered the single line reefing setup on Blue Opal had jammed in the reefed position; we were able to go sailing anyway, with the reef in, and it didn’t interfere with our sailing (other than reducing the sail power in the lighter airs that were present). I figured something had jammed…