The Linux distro to watch is Vanilla OS. It uses immutable base images, like what many people are using. I like it because it has a Debian base, which is going to really growing from here on out after the years of Ubuntu fuckup and the solid Debian 12 release. Vanilla recently completed the bulk of the switchover from Ubuntu base to Debian base. Now they just have to complete many months of bug fixing to get all of the new features in line.

The big deal is the distrobox utility. It allows you to run overlaid Linux containers over your system. This is different than Docker because meant to be integrated into the desktop and server usage instead of being completely isolated. I looked at crazy scripts and it's possible to include or not to include literally everything in the integration. You can pass in sound pipes, or not. You can give it GPU access, or not. Plus many systemd permissions. It's all rather rough and wizardry right now, but in the following years it will have a lot of tooling and good defaults around it.

The main thing though is being able to run the programs of any distro within your main host. The integration might feel somewhat like what Microsoft has been doing with its rather good Linux integration that many serious people have been using for several years already.

This is eventually going to be another totally different take on security like the distro that Edward Snowden uses calledQubes OS. Their approach is always a bit too slow to support the hardware that I'm using, and their desktop stack is always a bit out of date.

Outside of security though, the big thing will be having these separate base images that can be totally tuned up differently. One base root image can be made real time for your music studio, and another for peak gaming and then office work. You just have to choose which base image and then reboot. Your data and custom program layers are then overlaid on top of it. You could try out the new alpha version for a night and then just reboot into the normal stable version. If an update goes bad then you can just choose the previous image.

These layers are going to be just massive for kernel and desktop development. Most users won't really be a part of it, but they'll definitely be enjoying the increased throughput of the industry over the years.

The reason why is that someone could make weeks of changes to several different intersecting open source projects such that all of the changes are needed to be in place at once for it to work. With these new immutable base images they'll be able to just send some a month's worth of work to evaluate it as a cohesive experience, and without needing to compile it or to have an extra computer. It will turn a single computer into an entire small laboratory.

As it is now it's all done pretty much stone age and slowly. It can be absolutely maddening to have made many changes to things only to have people be too busy to evaluate it all. I once cussed out and left a project for this reason. Say that you aren't being paid for it, and then there is a gatekeeper who is just too disinterested in looking at it while others don't understand it or have the ability to put the pieces together. That happens a lot. We only really notice it when people freak out to then be sent to commie reeducation in order to learn how to be a stoic bitch about it.

With immutable images you can deliver an entire work-in-progress stack to a community so that they can check it all out. It's going to reduce a lot of friction around things that people really ought to be more pissed off about than they even are. The way that a lot of software is being made just sucks.

As an example of something that could be going on, think of a 50x open source developer that is capable of fixing things spanning many thresholds. So a 50x developer could be working on a udev rule for a device, and he's made some patches to pipewire (for sound and video piping) all just to be able to fix some bugs in the desktop environment so that it's able to properly run an actual user program say like a 3d rendering program. There are developers out there who are so fucking smart that they can fit multiple projects into their head at one time, but nobody else can really keep up with them.

One example of developers whom are so outrageously talented are the Asahi Linux guys who are bringing Linux to the new ARM based Apple hardware. Some other developers whom are also mostly all rockstars are the emulator guys at Yuzu for Switch emulation and Dolphin for Wii emulation.

Desktop software and the desktop environments (the windowing system) are going to be moving at blistering speeds in 2030 compared to today. We're basically doing it with punchcards now.

Suffering stoically is the not the way to do it. If you had to work with fucking punchcards now you'd be just so pissed off that it would make your blood boil. It's not fun, and it's not cute. Imagine wasting your life with that only to have someone too busy to check your work. That's a time to get angry, not to suffer stoically. #BiteTheCode

Hopefully in about two years we'll start seeing Servo html rendering engine embedded in alpha builds of interesting projects.

Webkit is just not the future. In terms of building it, it's just a huge ball of shit tied together by countless hours of some of the best engineers. It's so problematic that many Linux distributions with a niche purpose in mind end up not even building it off of their incomplete TODO list. It's such a pile of shit.

So what ends up happening is that it's provided by a the universal Linux flatpak system. Flatpak ensures that they can spend almost all of their time ensuring that Chromium (open source Chrome) is building properly. It's a huge bullshit fucking effort that can be done once for everyone on all systems.

Electron is a monstrosity that will hopefully go away by the end of the decade. Or it will use something other than Webkit.

This brings me to WebRTC, but "OMG-god-ass though he just went on to another idea without a computer graphic and seamless transition - he's so schizophrenic that I just can't even". So anyways, the big-fucking-problem with WebRTC is just that it's just this giant shit pile of code that Google dropped on the world. It's just a particular code base that utilizes available protocols without standardizing or generalizing it. That means that everyone who wants to Zoom and Google Meetup on any system just has this giant ball of Google shit compiling into their browsers. It's weird, and it's not cool.

The future with this stuff is most definitely Rust programming language. One big part of that is the relative massive simplicity of compiling and cross-compiling (for other operating systems and CPU architectures). The other part of it is simply the superiority of Rust, however that isn't even the main issue though because this part can simply be handled by throwing many expensive engineers at a situation.

Understand that the web cannot be controlled by massive corporations shitting out massive code ball turds upon everyone such that everyone needs to spend all of their free hours frantically keeping up with their ability to even integrate it. It's the software version of regulatory capture. This is simply closed-source Flash in the modern era, but without the obvious rallying points.

The future that we want to live in is not giant code turdballs dropped upon us by incomprehensibly large corporations.

Servo Browser Engine Continues On Its Path To Be Embed-Friendly

@WokeDown cc: @MentORPHEUS

This is really helpful. The rough science of it isn't very difficult to understand, but compiling this information by scratch would have been such a massive deviation from my project goals that it wasn't worth it.

It's pretty obvious that anything lithium is just so vastly superior to endurance discharging than anything else. The problem though is that these batteries are expensive as fuck for me right now.

It's probably something that I'll put off for a year. It's just that I have to keep pushing construction forward while also buying nice things for pleasure. I've already almost permanently put off buying a car in order to develop my property.

In 2024 I want to buy a $300-500 electric scooter that doesn't require a license. I also want to buy a ding-ding 1 to 3 gear bicycle with a large basket on the front and rear for going to the nearby markets. Also two nice sports bicycles. The ding-ding bike could be used by a guest for going to the river with us, or I could go with two bros. I also need to buy two decent fishing poles.

I'm thinking that instead of wiring up my house for battery pack access that it might be better to base this out of the future greenhouse. This would allow me to just simply go over to it to charge some things, it would be temperature controlled, and it could be used to power necessary things like greenhouse ventilation, hydroponics circulation, and even emergency chicken heating.

For example, with just an extra cable I could power the two 25W or two 50W UV light bulbs to make sure that the chickens are always warm in the most dire weather with total outages and complete fuckups going on.

So I could bring these cables into my house, but at the moment it seems shitty because it would be me punching holes in places, and investing a lot into things that don't increase my happiness, when I still need some of those things. Also if I wanted to do that then I could more easily bring a cable in from the greenhouse to the future large room expansion so that a small portion of the house would have access to battery backup. I definitely don't want to create this giant automatic failover switch with the main grid power that would be all complicated as fuck. The house is heated by gas, and there is a fireplace. Power in the house is not essential at all.

About the greenhouse, my wife is black Colombian from sweaty cocaine and sugar cane growing regions. So that is why I want to make the very expensive tropical greenhouse expansion to the normal Northern Italy / Northern California Winter climate greenhouse. This tropical section is fairly relatively damn expensive because it needs a geothermal temperature tempering underground conduit system, as well as a 2m cold sink. It will be externally insulated with triple paned windows. It's a damn lot, but it will be nice when she can hang out there in her tank-top chatting with her sisters amongst bananas as she creates her bags.

So basically that would be a good place for me to retreat to in order to continue working during a power outage. So basically the power would be out, oh, sad times. I'd be working in basically-effectively-ass my underwear surrounded by banana trees , on my cell-phone hot spot or 4G router (that is even cheaper), giant lithium battery backup with modest solar recharging.

So then later when I make the home expansion with office above it overlooking the greenhouse then I'd just have the main house there and the office with a single socket that is directly connected to the battery backup. I like that because it can be built in pieces, and the final last part doesn't take hardly any resources or planning at all.

My only regret in all of this is that my house is not going to have a door that walks in directly to a greenhouse (like an Earthship). That is just not possible with my layout. However, I was listening to a master architect who said that as he's aged he's realized that externally connected spaces of less than about 20m or so are quite nice, and even better for relating different segments of a property together than the massive contortions that are required to make everything connect under a completely sealed in environment.

Basically we're not living on Mars, and we're not in the Arctic. It basically doesn't matter how cold that it is here, I can just walk in my underwear outside for 20m from one location to another as long as it's nice and pleasant on the other side. I mean that walking naked in -15C for 15 seconds has almost no effect on me.

With that in mind, it's very nice to be able to leave an environment to go to another with a completely different sound profile, and feeling.

I feel like that it's already neurotic enough of an experience just to build out a nice property, and that it's really good to separate concerns based upon frequency of need so that things aren't overbuilt in ways that aren't really endearing or necessary. I choose to overbuild for things that directly bring pleasure like making an extremely nice chicken house so that they can live like expensive parrots, rather than treating them purely like the stupid shit-stained animals that they can be made to be.

I feel like a premium battery backup situation is a direction that could majorly sidetrack me without really offering a lot of utility until I already have some more plausible needs for it, such as a really involved and complicated greenhouse. So then I could piggy back my own personal once-in-a-long-while needs on top of that actual structure.

@destraht For that use case one Group 27 or equivalent deep cycle battery and 2 100W panels, one banked east and one west, at the appropriate inclination for your latitude, will serve you well. Better to go slightly over capacity on panels so you don't notice partially cloudy days. You can always parallel in more capacity to the limits of your charge controller should you come to need it. Generator is great for cloudy day backup. A constant voltage charger is the best way to recharge your battery on shorter runtime and without damage. Midtronics makes really good ones. Regular line voltage chargers are prone to overcharging and damaging your batteries, and you can't run these through your solar charge controller.

Electric blanket is a really energy efficient way to stay warm without having to pour in thousands of BTUs/hr to keep the entire room temperature up.

Your outdoor kitchen setup sounds sweet!

@MentORPHEUS I really think that your system is a lot more than what I'm looking for. I think that I just want to buy a single large batter that can power my 100W laptop and a 4G router. I probably need to continue setting up my previous laptop as a drop-in work backup because it uses less energy.

I'm not looking to power my entire home with a centralized setup. I really just need it to be able to continue working.

Actually what I maybe need is something that can put out 100W of USB Type-C PD (Power Delivery spec). The problem is that I've bought two or three of these before and they all burnout fairly quick. They're smaller and made for travel. I need something like that but larger.

It would also be good to convert USB-C power to something that a router could use, with the adapter and all. It's kind of crazy to turn it to AC and then back to DC.

There is the fridge backup situation, but I think that it's too complicated and expensive to blend that with the laptop power. Probably just something that could power the fridge for an hour on a manual hook up would be enough.

The power is stable here in a sense that it doesn't just go out for a day or two or something like that, but they're fairly often taking it down for some hours for maintenance or a test. So probably five hours is the sweet spot. I wouldn't even need to turn on the fridge until after several hours.

One super gay-ass thing about my induction stove is that it doesn't function when the power is out. The solution isn't to make a gigantic site level backup power, but just to low-tech it with wood and gas. The new wood stove will be going into the new room in this Winter.

I want to get a portable gas stove for these situations. It will also be very useful later when I've bought car.

In the future I'll have a full-on outdoor Summer kitchen.

1) It will be powered up and with water (since the chicken run trench brought it halfway already waiting underground) and so an induction stove out there will be useful for lazy moments. I already own a $50 single plate, and $100 double plate model. They're very good and impressive. I used them in the apartment and garage. I'll have one of these out there in a cupboard because I already own it.

2) There will be a large propane tank and gas stove for doing things like making soup, and boiling water to pluck chicken feathers. It seems pretty gay to boil water with wood. Gas is so nice for that.

3) There will be a wood stove / pit for less lazy sheshlique (BBQ). Wood has culinary value, and it's also the most basic solution that can't go wrong.

I'm not out in the boonies so hard like what you might think. I want the redundancy though simply to not have to worry about the bumps. For any type of serious outage though, the easier solution will just be to go to the apartment office. Those buildings have centralized coal fired heating and hot water. It's done via an old commie boiler factory nearby. It's kind of cool actually.

So we'll basically always have hot water within a 35 minute walk, and a 10 minute drive (when including time to pack into the car).

Also let's say that it's Winter and the power is out for a few days. We can just take the food out of the freezer, place it in a box outside. That's now our freezer. For the fridge I'd place it inside of the stone shed. Perfect fridge, although it possibly freeze.

I'm thinking that what I need within a few years is a tiny diesel generator. That could low-tech the situation much better than anything else, and it's movable. So like if someone had to work in a field it could be extremely valuable. Then I get to be the cool guy who lends it, which makes people unable to tell me what an asshole that I am.

@destraht You might consider having two inverters on your system; a small pure sine system for your laptop, routers etc; and a large 2000-4000 one to run things like the fridge and tool battery chargers. A bank of parallel deep cycle batteries can handle the motor start current of a fridge just fine, but if you plan to heavily use something like a table saw, plan with marine type batteries.

Also decide upfront if you want to build a 12v system which offers the most variety and price competitiveness. More serious systems are set up as 24 or 48v which halves/quarters the gauge of wire you'll need, and I'm pretty sure the inverters are more energy efficient as well. You can always start with a basic 12v system and upgrade.

Lithium batteries are more expensive and tempremental, and on a stationary system I'm not convinced they're the bigger better deal compared to traditional flooded lead acid. You'll need a purpose built charge controller for lithium too.

You'll want your battery bank in a temperature controlled but ventilated space. Room temperature to say 95f is ideal. Many batteries have a vent nipple so they can be externally ventilated through a tiny tube. Even with this you don't want a hermetically sealed battery space. They generate hydrogen and oxygen during charging especially during overcharge events. I've had to help hold a crying grownup's eyes open to flush the sulfuric acid off his corneas after a battery explosion. It's rare especially with proper precautions but serious when it happens. Nothing compared to a lithium fire though! Elevate them even just on a piece of pallet; never sit them on a cold concrete floor. Temperature extremes greatly affect performance and longevity.

@destraht

I've read that lead-acid is not good at powering something for many hours at like 50-100W because they're designed for higher loads for just minutes to a half hour.

This is true of standard car batteries, because the design of the plates is optimized for a short large current draw to crank the engine, then to get recharged once the alternator is spinning and recharging the battery while providing all the power to run vehicle systems.

You want deep cycle batteries for an off grid system. These are built with thicker plates that handle longer, deeper discharge cycles between charging.

Marine batteries are a compromise between the two, meant to be capable of cranking an engine while also providing lots of capacity for discharge between engine-on periods, such as fishing or overnighting.

It's down to the plates inside, which repeatedly convert sponge lead to lead sulfate and back. When a standard car battery gets deeply discharged frequently, the plates become "sulfated" to a state where they lose the capacity to accept a charge molecule by molecule. As sulfation progresses, the plates become brittle and eventually pieces flake off and bridge/short the stacked plates, resulting in a "dead cell" thus ending the battery's usefulness.

AGM and Gel Cell batteries are much less forgiving of voltage excursions than traditional flooded lead acid. Avoid these for a stationary home system, there is no advantage for the higher price. Many off gridders seek out used forklift batteries that can be had for scrap prices. They are huge and can work for years for a modest home backup system's needs, long after they've gotten annoyingly weak to continue using in the forkliift.

Lead-acid batteries are rather unforgiving of voltage getting too low during discharge or too high during charging. Luckily, Chinese solar charge controllers are cheap as sand; you can choose a variety of starter versions suitable for a 2-3 panel system for under $20. The one I'm running now even has 2 USB ports that are handy for phone charging.

The so called "Solar Generators" that are popular today make a convenient form factor especially if you want to use it on the go. For a home backup system, a guy like you can do much better choosing and assembling components. Better battery capacity and better output numbers.

The inverter is one of the more costly components of the system. Most generate a "modified sine wave" that is fine for appliances and lights but finer electronics don't appreciate. True Sine inverters cost a lot more for a given capacity. You want to watch quiescent current as well. Cheap inverters have an annoying fan running constantly; better ones like the Vector one I'm running use soft start fans that only run when actually needed. This factor will greatly influence the runtime from a given battery bank.

(to be continued)