We had our 2nd blackout this night, since 20:15 till 21:27. It was planned to be since 20:00 till 22:00, but was for just about 1h10m or so.
It was planned that we won’t have electricity from 12:00 to 14:00, or something like that. But in the morning that blackout was cancelled.
It’s nice to have these announcements, as it’s much easier to handle blackouts, when they’re planned. Even if the notification is just half an hour beforehand (which was the case the previous winter), it’s still useful. You have your time to turn-off the important devices, those that won’t handle power outage well. (For me, those are my computers.)
Recently, I’ve developed quite a nice set of tiny servers out of SBCs, I have 3 pieces in my apartment and I plan to add a few more in other locations too. And I’ve grown used to them, they give me some sense of power. I can enhance the things my iPhone can do singnificantly with just one tiny cheapest Raspberry Pi server running Linux.
When I have no active servers, I feel powerless. I cannot run any of my custom scripts. I rely on them heavily, till I’d develop native apps for iPhone out of them. (Which may either never happen, or will happen in years.) That’s why I want to add 2 more locations, my current office and my in-laws house. Probably, I’d add my friend’s apartment too, if I’d have extra money to invest into hardware and those extra two locations won’t cover all the blackouts. It would depend how badly we would be outaged.
Recently, we started watching Star Wars TV series with kids. It’s been just two days, but looks like the experiment went very well. We watched Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022), and I offered to watch the next one with kids, since it’s too childish anyway. We watch Ahsoka (2023). Hnat likes it very much! It has flying cars, phew-phew lasers and the lightsabers are exactly like the lamps I’ve bought for blackouts not long ago. Also, the picture and the overall aesthetics is so good that I think it’s nice for kids to have these things early in life.
This morning he asked me to watch one extra episode, to which I declined telling him we’d watch one in the evening. We watched just 10 minutes, before I had to turn the computer off, expecting the outage. Which happened 15 minutes later, but I just didn’t want to have my computer being shut down unexpectedly, they don’t like it.
Blackouts apart, I think that could become a nice tradition of our family, to immerse into Star Wars universe during the evenings. Especially long cold winter evenings. They had plenty of this content, the Disney.
What would wait for us this winter is unexpected. If there won’t be any inter-continental missle strikes at our civilian heads, and just blackouts, well, we’ll survive for sure. We have plenty of light with the batteries-powered led-lamps. It’s even cozy to have these at evenings. Our apartment is very warm, we switched off the heating a couple of days ago, and it’s still about 20ºC at home. It’s below zero and snow already. Yesterday we had our first snow.
Also, we have the internet working from a backup battery. It’s from our neighbour, his Wi-Fi covers just tiny spots of our apartment, and our iPhones get the signal only when we’re in beds or sit on the carpet. Which is okay for us. Last year I had a special repeater made out of an expensive 5 antennas router, but I’ve just re-programmed it to be a repeater for my farm needs instead. For that router to work, I need to put a backup battery on it. Which I have, but I don’t really want to controlling that either.
Since we have iPad Pro 12.9 as our kitchen YouTube TV computer, it’s big enough to get the signal just okay to stream anything 1080p from where it lives.
So, in that department we’re covered very well. If the blackouts won’t get worse — which I hope against hope — we’d work through them easy-peasy. If they’ll be massive, like most of the day time massive, it’s getting much worse. It’s unclear whether it’s a good investment to buy backup batteries. It’s money, and it’s the need to store them somewhere. Our current apartment isn’t huge and is very minimalistic. We’d prefer to take a laptop and go visit place with the backup power, be it our offices or our neighbour’s office just below our apartment. Rather than having batteries and cords being somewhere in-between us and kids, taking our drissing room, more likely.
Tomorrow we expect to have two sets of two-hours blackouts, since 8 AM till 10 AM and from 13 till 15. The early one I’d spend walking kids to their Kdg., and the afternoon one is just two hours long, any of my laptops would handle that well.
Also, since I have 3 MacBooks in working condition, but worn-out batteries, I may invest into three new batteries, which would give me a theoretical life-span of my laptops for the entire day. So, we’re somewhat ready for the winter. Also, we have 3 iPads, each of them holds the battery forever, comparing to any other device in the house.
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