No, but I will try that and report back.

Ever lived in a small town? Drama and gossip is fun

Yes, I have, and no it’s not. It’s just all there is except for high school football, making more kids, and the same drama and gossip but on Facebook. IMO that’s why small towns are so toxic once you get past the thin veneer of “small town charm”. Couldn’t wait to leave the one I grew up in.

And after re-reading OP’s opinion, I starting to see the parallels.

Check this out: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/20/old-ssds-find-new-life-as-game-cartridges/

Just saw it on Hack a Day and remembered this post. It’s using old SSDs instead of SD cards but is basically what you’re describing.

And they’re using auto launch scripts like I mentioned in my first comment and a whitelist to address security.

Planning on getting an EV eventually but haven’t explored V2H. Could possibly use it as a second level backup or use it as the reserve and use my house batteries fully rather than treating them as empty when they hit 50% (saving the bottom half of them for emergencies).

But yeah, having an EV is still a good ways off (2-3 years minimum) so haven’t thought too much about it. AFAIK, nothing about my setup “paints me into a corner” such that I wouldn’t be able to use that functionality.

We do lose power during the switchover. Same as if a backup generator were kicking in (a backup generator is pretty analogous to how I have this wired up currently)

My WFH office, homelab servers, 3D printer, and the fridge are all on UPSs. Fridge is a long story, but a UPS has proven beneficial to deal with its Samsung-ness. Everything else doesn’t really care since it’s only a literal split second to make the switch.

The only drawback to this manual switchover is the oven and microwave clocks are never right. But to be honest, even before we started switching over to solar every day, the power would flash almost as soon as we set them so we largely just ignore them. Side effect now is they’re both timers showing how long we’ve been on solar that day.

Once I get it installed fully, there will be no cutover. It acts as an on-line UPS, essentially, and the only thing that changes is where the inverter is drawing it’s power (PV, battery, utility, or a combo of any of those). It also, supposedly, has a 10ms switchover time if it has to go into “bypass” mode to feed the load directly from utility input. 10ms is comparable if not the same as the switchover time on my other UPSs.

I’m in the US, lol, just not in a very solar-friendly area. The power company data I have access to is a side effect of both their green washing and constantly rising rates. It’s supposed to help you manage your bill more than anything else.

The batteries and inverter I’m using are Eco-Worthy which is Chinese and available globally. The inverter itself is a re-badged SRNE and has proven to be reliable and well built. Not sure if they’ve passed EU certification, but they’re UL9540 and UL1973 certified in the US

The HomeAssistant module was made for Solarman products but is compatible with others such as the inverter I have (which is itself a re-badged SRNE one).

The graph displayed is from the power company website. It’s showing the power I use from them (uploaded from the smart meter). The relevant bit there is the negative space where I’m not using any utility power.

For local monitoring of the PV system, I don’t have anything yet except for the counters displayed on its LCD (see below).

The inverter has a smartphone app and wifi-module but that requires creating an account and letting it upload stats to a 3rd party server which I will never allow. However, it also has a serial port and speaks the Modbus protocol, and it’s pretty well documented.

There’s a HomeAssistant plugin (ha-solarman) that I’m going to setup when I have time. That’ll pipe the inverter stats to a HA dashboard and can also let me change some of the config options from there instead of having to go to the inverter’s panel and set individual parameters.

Sorry it’s blurry, but had to snap it quick since the display runs in kind of a carousel between different values. It’s showing here that I’m getting 2.3 KW from PV right now, one phase of the output is 0.1 KW (the other is 0.9 KW; it displays them separately), the battery is at 53.6 volts and is being charged, and I’ve generated 267.3 KWh since I installed it. The utility input is disconnected so there’s no arrows coming from it.

I’ve got two 16 KWh LiFePO4 batteries (314 AH @ 53v) for a total of 32 KWh.

Already checked, and we only have to involve the power company if any of the following:

1. Feeding any power back into the utility grid (i.e. grid-tied / micro-inverter / “balcony solar”)
2. Using a “make before break” transfer switch that, no matter how brief, briefly couples locally generated power to the utility provider’s grid.
3. If the project requires disconnecting the meter or shutting off power upstream of our main disconnect switch

As is, this system doesn’t touch the grid at all since it’s using a “break-before-make” transfer switch from an old Generac system - it completely disconnects the utility input before connecting the generator/PV’s output into the home wiring. I’m also fine once I have it fully installed because it cannot feed power out of the utility input connection, so it remains isolated (unless I would just happen to hook it up backwards which would be a whole other set of problems lol).

Same. That’s when my original account was created here.

Ugh, I wish I could add “reasons” for my user blocks as well as have the dates I blocked them available. Would make this easier. But yeah, Striker is in there.

I’m inclined to believe it’s part of the “group”. Every post I can see of it’s is a question which is the same thing seen with the others in the list here; none of them have a single post that uses a declarative statement as the post title. That’s more than a little sus given the context here.

Regardless, I tend to block accounts that I feel camp out and/or abuse the “ask” communities.

Ah, the War5oldier account is banned on its home instance and I guess they just didn’t re-use the name with another alt.

The only one of those that wasn’t in my blocks was raptor, but I guess I didn’t notice them as much. Comparing raptor to one of the others in that list, yeah, the posting is pretty similar.

Yep, I recall blocking at least Dan for the same reason as the other two. Not sure about the other one but can’t recall seeing posts from them anytime recently so probably did.

Are two of them “commander graves” and “war soldier”?

Because I noticed similar and blocked them ages ago

Oh, yeah. SSH from laptop or Termux on my phone.

Not sure if there’s a CLI way to deal with captive portals or not. Maybe a text-based browser like Lynx/Links2 if the portal isn’t super fancy, but I’ve used the MAC cloning method for ages and it’s just my “go to” for dealing with that. Honestly, I don’t deal with them very often since I just use a hotspot much of the time with it.

I’ve only had to go through a captive portal once with it but MAC cloning was sufficient

how goes the mesh

By the wayside LOL.

That was a last winter project that kind of plateaued. I keep my everyday carry node with me and I built that NWS/EAS Alerter relay a month or two ago, but I’ve mostly been working on getting my PV system installed since spring.

Is it the ordering of the options? I just put them in top to bottom, left to right (except the free space) as I thought of them.

I started to do a 5x5 one but the text ended up being too small to read, and I couldn’t think of that many things to fill it in with.

I looked but there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to do that in Linux. I was thinking a udev rule but it would be clunky since the low level details for media like SD cards aren’t available. At best, maybe a generic rule that mounts it and looks for an autorun.sh or something, but that’s basically reinventing Autoplay on Windows and would have the same security implications.

I read Hack-a-Day frequently, and I’ve come across several projects that use NFC readers so you can tap a card to play specific songs or start playlists. Maybe something like that but launch a specific game instead?

e.g. https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/a-music-box-commanded-by-nfc-tags/

Security is pretty minimal, not gonna lie.

There’s a 50 GB LUKS partition that stays locked unless I’m actively using it. It’s got backup copies of my important/critical documents and password manager exports but the rest of it is just media and doesn’t really merit encryption.

All applications have local accounts but I’m not using LDAP or any kind of SSO like I am with my main stack.

At home, I keep the firewall disabled on the interface configured as “WAN” so I can access its services directly via their hostname (I point its wildcard DNS record to its local “WAN” IP) but do enable firewall when I’m using it on an untrusted network. Granted, I have to manually remember to do that, so that’s kind of a security risk if I forget. Generally, though, when I’m using it remotely, it’s using my secondary phone as a USB-tethered uplink so even if I leave its internal services exposed to WAN, the NAT from the phone blocks that. One of my goals, eventually, is to automate some of the firewall rules depending on where I’m using it.