Category: Technology
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Decoding ‘scope traces, adding a SmartShunt
With the Titan battery connected to the Victron, I’m able to see what the battery monitor deems to be the current flow out of the battery, with the SmartSolar potentially offsetting up to about 5A of draw on a sunny day. What I can’t see is what’s coming off of the starter battery, and I…
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Finding cross-references in LibreOffice Writer
I’m in the middle of reviewing a ~13,000 word paper written in Microsoft Word. One of the things I needed to do was keep track of when a figure or table appeared, and had no reference in the paragraphs. This could be done with pen and paper, but I wanted to do it digitally. LibreOffice…
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Cerbo GX MK2 and Blue Opal
For the longest time, I’d avoided going the Victron hardware route – they seemed pricey for the offering, and I wasn’t sure I could make good use of the functionality on Blue Opal. I experimented with running the Venus large image on a Raspberry Pi at one stage, while I was trying to get the…
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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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Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT
On a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant as-an-OS appears to run everything in Docker containers, with pass-through of USB and filesystem access. This means that things like the Mosquitto and Zigbee2MQTT add-ons are all in their own docker container. This poses a problem when the default configuration for something like Z2M is “mqtt://localhost:1883”, because it can’t…
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Debugging power gremlins
When I went on board earlier this year, I noticed that my batteries were well below a good resting point. Blue Opal has a 55 Wp solar panel hooked up to a Votronic MPP 250 Duo Digital. With the panel left on deck when I’m not sailing, it should have kept the batteries trickle charged.…