I had a load cell under the collection jar that would adjust heat input (via PWM to SCR) to achieve a steady output rate (dW/dt) via outer PID loop, then lower the heat to just below boiling when it got to 700mL to keep it hot but pause output. It'd play a tone, I'd swap in a new jar then resume ignoring the whole thing. (I'm lying, I'd sit glued to that thin little stream of sanitization precursor teeter on breaking up the entire time.)
I stopped messing with it right before starting to measure/vary water supply through the condenser coils so I could more directly manage reflux ratio. Also had planned a float/load cell to calculate specific gravity.
All sorts of little side quests and fun mix of art/science to get into.
You know, if any of those other hobbies start to lose their lustre. :)
(for real though, the nodered on pi controlling a squadron of esp32 workers over wifi/mqtt was really nice, in case you would have any use for such a thing in any domain)
I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)
The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.
I use it as my main platform right now both for work/swe stuff, and person stuff. It works pretty well, they have the full suite of tools I want from general LLM chat, to notebookLM, to antigravity.
My main use-cases outside of SWE generally involve the ability to compare detailed product specs and come up with answers/comparisons/etc... Gemini does really well for that, probably because of the deeper google search index integration.
Also I got a year of pro for free with my phone....so thats a big part.
the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better.
This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop
agreed. I haven't done LFS, but ive done arch and plently of other distros for a good while and I definitely wouldn't say I have a rock solid understanding of the fundamentals.
Quite easy to make apps with it and GNOME Builder makes it really easy to package it for distribution (creates a proper flatpak environment, no need to make all the boilerplate). It's quite nice to work with, and make stuff happen. Gtk docs and awful deprecation culture (deprecate functions without any real alternative) are still a PITA though.
There's a surprising number of GUI apps built using Vala, if you've used Linux long enough, there's a chance you may have used a Vala based GUI and not even known you were. It's just such a nice language, it's a shame it's not more prevalent since Gnome libraries can compile basically anywhere.
