My storage tanks are also the settling tanks - the pickup for household supply is about 5cm above the floor of the tank, all the dust and bird poop just settle to the bottom, and I have that cleared out every couple of years. No other treatment. It sounds icky, but I prefer to think of it as keeping my immune system active and healthy, plus I'm getting lots of minerals. My last blood test showed all mineral levels good, except for slightly low calcium - so I have to east more cheese, dammit.

Seriously, though - we don't tend to get sick, and we HATE the taste of treated town water when we've had to buy it in.

I understand there's different rules in different states about rainwater harvesting, but surely if you have a "dry" cabin, i.e. no piped water supply from the local mains, you'd want to catch the water falling on your roof?

If you're in a rural area, and not near any other major source of air pollution, surely the rainwater is potable?

I've been living on rainwater for almost 20 years, we only buy a truckload when the dry season lasts longer than usual. We could overcome that with another tank or two (currently have almost 50K litres of storage).

But do they use ROT-13 as well?

"Other option is the system just does a reset every x days."

Makes sense - reset at 9am on a Saturday (few or no students or staff around) , and you'll know by midday if the reset failed, giving you the rest of the weekend to get started on a fix.

That reminds me of:

http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/...

Only getting fixed wireless to your house, huh?

I'm in the same boat, only I've too many trees in the way, and I'm not about to cut them down.

OTOH, I saw a fiber conduit being installed only a few streets away - for FTTN/VDSL. I'll still get high-speed internet, it just won't be FTTH, or fixed wireless.

BTW, Malcolm Turnbull is just about the only politician in the current lot with even an ounce of brains. Yes, he's toeing the party line, but he's the only one that understands even the basics of the technology.

Maybe, but not mine. We've only had a 2K projector for 2 years....

Yep. People overlook bitrate when talking about resolution, colour depth, etc.

That's one reason why a blu-ray and a DCP look different, even though they're both 2K.

I've done the water thing - well, if it's the water thing I'm thinking about.

A long-lost post from some group on usenet told of how the ABC radio jocks would play vinyl: mix up a litre of 50/50 water and alcohol, add ONE drop of dishwashing liquid, and apply to the surface of the vinyl - not dripping-off-the-edges wet, just enough to make the surface thinly covered. Now play the record. Make sure you dry it before putting it away, of course.

I tried it, and it works - it's not perfect, but it seems to eliminate or at least reduce lots of the usual unwanted noises. Probably reduces wear from friction, too.

But who plays vinyl these days? I get nostalgic about once a year and trawl the collection, maybe listen to one or two albums before going back to CDs or streaming.

Tweak firefox with:

new tab, type "about:config" into the address bar.

find "network.http.pipelining" and set it to "true"
find "network.http.pipelining.max-optimistic-requests" and set it to 8
find "network.http.pipelining.max.requests" and set it to 32 if it isn't that already. Don't take this one too high.

Perhaps he should seek Kay Sievers' input.

Hint: it's a GENERAL PURPOSE operating system. It has to be broadly appealing, and that means a range of applications - calculator, CD/DVD playback, basic word processor (Wordpad), and so on.

Have a look at the top 3 linux distributions on Distrowatch - they've all got lots of application software included, and they've all got their own instabilities.

I appreciate the concern (really), but it's been working for >20 years now without any fires, and as I gradually replace the incandescent and halogen bulbs with much lower wattage LEDs, the load and risk reduces accordingly.

The house was dual wired with domestic 3-core 240 VAC 10amp cable - live, neutral and earth. Cable leading to light switches and sockets was powered from the DC bus, i.e. directly from the batteries, and only used 2 of the 3 wires, for positive and negative. Cables leading to conventional GPO sockets was powered by the AC bus, i.e. from the inverter, and was wired up according to code - live, neutral and earth.

There are many more DC cable runs than you would otherwise expect, because each run was designed to carry only up to 10 amps, which would have been no more than 4 x 60-watt bulbs (24 VDC nominal). I was able to replace some of the conventional bulbs with lower-wattage-for-the-same-light-output halogen items, and reduce the amperage load further, and now that drop-in LEDs are available, there's bugger-all load on some of the circuits.

In practice, the DC circuit voltage is lowest (24 to 24.2 volts) when there's little load on the lighting circuit (about 10pm to 7am), and highest in the middle of the day, up to 30 volts until the batteries reach float, where they stay at 27.4 volts until late afternoon when the sun goes down, dropping rapidly to about 25 volts, then slowly over the evening falling to about 24.2. So the higher practical voltages of the circuit mean even lower amperage for a given load in watts, and this also compensates somewhat for the voltage drop at the far end of some of the circuits.

240 watts will run a LOT of LED lights. I'm typing this by the light of a 14 watt drop-in LED - so I could run 17 of those off a single cable run and not exceed the cable's load rating.

It's not about replacing every AC item with a DC equivalent, it's more to do with replacing low-load AC items such as lights, phone and laptop chargers, etc with DC, where there's less conversion losses.

Sounds good. I thought our system would be compromised by high trees in the west, but an audit showed otherwise. The auditor used a special data logger - place it face up on the center of the panel array, it logs lat and long, then uses a small fisheye lens to take a picture of the sky from the panels' perspective. It then processes the data in the picture to calculate an efficiency rating. I think it considers blue sky and cloud as a plus, and anything dark, such as a tree, to be a minus. It also takes into account that daily insolation forms a bell-curve or sine-wave shape due to the changing angle of the sun's rays across the flat plane of the panels, so that an obstruction near the eastern or western horizons isn't nearly as important as an obstruction in the northern horizon (that's for the southern hemisphere - if you live in the northern hemisphere you'd be wanting to remove obstructions in the southern skyline). Our situation was given a 94% efficiency rating.

BTW, what sort of compressors are in your fridges/freezers? The Danfoss 24VDC compressors are great.