fidzu : belgium

It's been 1,067 days since I last posted something on this blog. And instead of writing the blog post I wanted to write, I did everything else.

30 Dec 2025 9:51am GMT

Lopen er gangen van de (Belgisch) Limburgse mijnen onder uw huis? Dat kunt U misschien aan de hand van onderstaande "ongeveer juiste" kaart zien, die ik uit nieuwsgierigheid op basis van de kaart van de Facebook-pagina van de "Kempense Steenkoolmijnen - vriendenkring" maakte. De positionering is op basis van de loop de Maas gedaan en zou dus min of meer correct kunnen zijn.

Source

30 Dec 2025 9:51am GMT

My solar-powered website just crossed 500 days of uptime. It took the biggest snowstorm in nearly three years to put that streak at risk.

Winter storm Devin is burying the Northeast of the United States right now. There is over five inches of snow in Boston. Thousands of flights are cancelled, thousands more delayed.

I'm writing this from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, my own flight home delayed. I can't see whether the solar panel on our roof deck is buried in snow or still catching a little light. All I can do is watch my solar dashboard from across the ocean and wait.

The view from Schiphol airport.

The dashboard says the battery is below 15%. It's still night in Boston and well below freezing. Even when the sun comes up, the charge controller won't recharge the battery if it is too cold.

When I started this experiment, I wrote that some downtime for some websites should be acceptable. I questioned why we obsess over 99.9% uptime for personal websites that don't need it.

The irony isn't lost on me: I wrote that downtime is fine, but I've refreshed the dashboard three times while writing this.

My website might go down, or it might stay up. Either way, I love that it will come back on its own whenever the sun breaks through. Both of us waiting for the weather to clear. Me at the airport and the Raspberry Pi under a snowy roof in Boston.

30 Dec 2025 9:51am GMT