Logbook

Logbook: DTE storm outage and recovery

I'm collecting DTE outage data every 10 minutes. Here's what the outage and recovery graph looks like for the most recent storm, which hit the area on June 10, 2020.

Over all: 72 hours with greater than 10K outages, and a peak at over 160K out.

The left side aggregate shows the state of the DTE grid from onset to recovery, and the right side detail is broken down by zip code. Worst recovery times are 48236 and 48224 - Grosse Pointe and east side Detroit.

The NWS storm report reads

Numerous severe thunderstorms occurred across southeast Michigan on June 10 as a strong upper level wave swept over the Great Lakes while an unstable low-level air mass was in place. This warm and moist environment was brought into place by the remnants of Tropical Storm Cristobal which tracked through the western Great Lakes the evening before. Wind damage was widespread across the area with hundreds of thousands of customers losing power due to downed trees and wires.

The data is currently gathered with Prometheus and Grafana and a few tiny shell scripts that scrape details from DTE.

Logbook: thermals

Best investment of the day was a $20 box fan from Stadium Hardware. My old heavy noisy box fan (from 25 years ago) finally gave out, and the replacement is the same design except only half the depth, half the weight, and much cleaner.

I finally made sense of how to cool off the corner of the house that has all my little single board computer-heaters in it. Open the window, set up the box fan on a pedestal, have it send cold air towards my desk. The difference in this case was startling, and I have the screen capture to prove it!

The big success here has been cooling the Pi 4. When I started the cooling journey, it was the hottest device in the menagerie, and now it's one of the coolest. Between having a couple of little USB powered muffin fans blowing on its big heatsink and a big fan blowing generally on the desk, I took the temps down from 65C to 32C.

My plan B if any given computer gets really too hot to use is to attach it to the grill of the and blow a box fan full of air onto it directly.

I'm a fan of box fans - "boxy but good".

Logbook: June 2020 blogroll

Some people who I like I will miss when I don't read their posts on the birbsite. But life goes on and you adapt and there's a lot to read elsewhere.

Here's some of it. I'll update this list in June 2020. Maybe just maybe it's a blogroll, or we could do a webring, or something else. I'll just add things to this list until it's useful, or until the month is up.

• logbook. You're reading it, this blog.
• Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor. My radio blog; every post about radio.
• covid.house, from genehack. Daily log of life in quarantine.
• kb6nu, from cwgeek, Dan KB6NU. Ham radio.
• Les Orchard is typing.... From Les Orchard, serial enthusiast.

Corporate and polished blogs

• Reliable Insights. "Monitoring, scale and operational sanity." Brian Brazil.
• Tailscale Blog. Software-defined networking topics.
• Official Raspberry Pi blog. Daily Pi news.
• Writing Slices. Reading the books that teach you to write.
• rtl-sdr.com. Software-defined radio.
• AGU Landslide Blog, Dave Petley. Landslides, rock slides, dam failures and other geology topics.

Some more things in blog format, not quite so frequent but still chronological.

• w8rp, ARROW ham radio club.
• London Shortwave, shortwave radio listening.
• Hypriot, containers and Kubernetes for single-board computers.
• WCBN 88.3 FM, freeform student radio, University of Michigan.

Logbook: deleting my Twitter password

I'm not ready to delete my Twitter account, though I should be - but I did delete the saved password from my browser, and that should be enough to slow me down just a little from being drawn to its flame like a moth.

I had previously logged out of Facebook for the last time about 18 months ago, and that went pretty well. No one is counting on me to do work for them on my personal Twitter account right now, so I feel quite confident in leaving it untended.

It's a tough one to know whether to delete the account entirely, or simply to erase every tweet and leave the account blank.

I'll miss the ability to stay in touch with some people, but all things considered, it's better to disengage from that medium (and all of its sadness) and focus on building something better, or even not building anything at all.