Since the president has zero actual power and is 99.99% ceremonial can we replace the debates/interviews with skill tests. Can they deliver a speech opening a civic centre in the rain? Can they learn the names and faces of 50 visiting dignitaries in 10 minute, then recall them in a receiving line?

Currently an hour into an ESB outage for scheduled work but the entire house is running off solar. Zero disruption. The future is pretty cool

Attempting to enter politics at the presidential election would be like trying to learn hurling while playing in an all Ireland final. At this stage we have enough data to say it doesn't end well.

A good point - everyone trying to run for president now had 7 years to try and get about 20 people to like them, and are still falling at this hurdle. Our elections are not a surprise. I'm a loser with deep social anxiety and even I reckon I could get 20 people to like me over the course of 7 years

Anyone here able to ID this industrious spider. They built a web several meters wide across our driveway overnight.

Have a relative visiting this weekend who is a passionate GAA supporter so a lot of time has been spent watching live streams of various club games on clubber. It's a great use of the internet but my main takeaway is that GAA clubs need a broadband service optimised for broadcast

Digital stamps are a neat way to avoid needing to go buy stamps but then comes the struggle of finding an actual postbox.

It is all the more frustrating because the nation had flashes of brilliance. The folks who built Ardnacrusha would be amazed at the resources available today and appalled at our inability to get anything done.

Got an email today from the franchise section of @dublincitycouncil.bsky.social because they found a duplicate entry for me in the electoral register. In one of my moves over the years a delete got missed leaving an orphaned record behind. I only ever checked that I was registered at a new address.

Please take a minute to sign this today #SpeirGorm

Nice to see @dublincitycouncil.bsky.social putting accessible playground equipment in parks. This swing was a lot of fun

At what point will we switch to treating all these entities as criminal enterprises and send in CAB to cease all the assets.

Solar Statistics time, we had a string of really good days but the month ended with 42.72kWh of generation the 30th. YTD solar has produced 77% of our consumption, not yet netzero but the summer awaits. However the 29th was when export income for the year overtook all costs.

www.rte.ie/news/ireland... the ESB Networks website provides a way to download your smart meter data and sites like energypal.ie can use it to do tarrif comparisons. It worries me that noone involved in writing the report or the media covering it even bothered to check if they were correct.

We exported ~80% of our generation yesterday so effectively removed 4 of our neighbours from the grid. When microgeneration adoption gets into the double digit percentages this graph is going to look even better.

New Gist: Trans rights are Data rights An unusually long Gist on the data protection implications of the UK Supreme Court's decision to define what is the meaning of the word 'woman' in a single UK Act. (Also: the CJEU, colonialism, Joyce's Ulysses and Sinn Féin) www.thegist.ie/the-gist-tra...

Solar stats for Jan-Mar 2025. 56.44% of our energy over that period came from solar. worst day was Jan 5th with 1.01kWh (3.8% of usage) best day was Mar 30th with 32.8kWh (223% of usage) Peak usage was 33.58kWh on Jan 6th, average was 21.2kWh You can see the last week in Feb when solar ramps up.

The perils of using scheduled posts and forgetting to fill in the details in the template.

one of the reasons to have a property tax is to act a counter pressure to increasing property prices. That doesn't work if every time prices go up we just change the thresholds. www.rte.ie/news/politic...

While waiting for a parade to start I spotted this great example of roofs with not enough solar. The marginal cost of covering the rest of these roofs with solar would have been minimal.

This thread on the insanity of hippos is great.

On one hand while house air filtering is great and I like the resulting air quality. On the other hand the monthly filter cleaning is an unfun task. I live beside a 100+ hectare park near the sea in Dublin so I likely have better than average air quality but it still is a surprise how dirty it is.

Yesterday was our first net power positive day of the year. Not too shabby for February in Ireland.

Today I decided to watch David Lynch's The Straight Story with my 10 year old. It will probably be another 10 years before he can see any other David Lynch film

In 2022 the 12sqm limitation on domestic solar installs was removed but ESB still impose a 6kva limit on microgeneration despite most homes having a 12 or 16kva connection with out having to go through an expensive (€1k) approval process, the nc-7. After Eowyn This limit should be increased.

Since storms are going to be a thing for the foreseeable future we can assume that there will be power disruptions for folks living in remote locations. Solar & battery plus a small generator would make these a non event for folks living in rural locations.