The scanner may be causing problems with my IPFS node. I’ve had to forcibly restart the IPFS daemon on my server several times in the past couple of days since I started running the IPFS scanner continuously. It may be coincidence, because during this time I also started writing this blog somewhat regularly, but the scanner hits the node pretty hard. I am going to try a couple of things over the next few days to see if I can figure out what is happening.
Continuing on the theme I started in my curtailment post, this is a detailed look at a renewable chemical plant centered around a Sabatier reactor, which converts CO2 and hydrogen into methane. The idea here is a floating plant fed with power from wind turbines and solar panels that produce methane that can be used to displace fossil methane from natural gas.
The plant consists of four main units, the electrolysis unit that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, a distillation unit that extracts pure water from seawater to feed to the electrolysis unit, an liquid amine-based direct air capture unit to extract CO2 from the air, and a Sabatier reactor that turns hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane. Not shown is either pipelines to export the methane, oxygen and excess water to shore and a pipeline to import carbon dioxide from carbon capture systems, or liquefaction plants to do the same with cryogenic ships.
I found why the scanner was only producing two pages: HTTP 301 Redirect.
If you look at the Release Notes for v0.5.0 of IPFS, you will find a section labeled Subdomain Gateway that details a feature where the HTTP gateway will generate a redirect to a subdomain when accessing /ipfs/$HASH and /ipns/$HASH using localhost, but not when using 127.0.0.1. My code was checking for a status code of 202 and treating everything else as a failure. Change the domain from ’localhost’ to ‘127.0.0.1’ and it started handling fetched pages correct.
While setting up the git repo for the IPFS Scanner), something I thought would make it more appealing is a client-side git browser written in JavaScript. So, instead of the default IPFS file browser, you would get something that looks more like what GitHub or gitlab shows for a repo.
At this point, it is just a daydream. If it happens, it happens. If not, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
I’ve got the scanner working mostly correctly and have a results page available here. As of the time of writing, the script is only listing two sites, tslil clingman’s personal page and a page that consists of nothing but “Meow”. A little bit of a letdown, especially considering that I’ve seen several other pages when manually looking thru the results of the scanner. I probably need to modify the timeout on the page fetching.
I have started working on an IPFS scanner/indexer. The basic premise is to attempt to resolve the IPNS name of every connected peer, then download the index.html for each of the names that resolve, and create a page that provides a list of page titles and a simple description similar to a search engine results page.
Right now, the scanner is working reasonably well. I have found about 150 names that can be resolved from my node. The problem right now is the index creation. It’s crashing with an IndexError. Both the scanner and the index creation are written in crystal, a compiled language with a distinctly Ruby flavor to it.
One of the six hard drives in my local file server has acted up one too many times and so I’ve made the decision to migrate all the data off it to a new drive. As the system is set up using Logical Volume Management, this is fairly straight forward: add the new drive to the system and the volume group (in this case, an 8TB Seagate), then pvmove everything from the failing drive to the new one, then remove the old drive from the system.
That power outage that looked likely did occur. No grid power for about six days.
The pile of candles, the boxes of matches, the oil lamp, the propane camp stove, flashlights, piles of blankets, refilled water bottles, rain barrels all worked as they needed to.
As soon as the power when out, I ran to the local Big Box Store™ for an inverter. I had previously heard about the inverter on car battery trick from The Survival Podcast, but never got around to picking one up. By the time I made it to the store, exactly one inverter remained, a 750W. The store had price tags for 1500W and 400W versions, but none left.
As happens from time-to-time, my mind drifts to designing a solar-battery-inverter system in my head. This usually happens when it looks likely there will be power outages. With the power flickering periodically throughout the day, it was easy to get my mind to focus on the problem.
There are several main rechargeable battery types used to build stationary battery systems: the lead-acid types (open/closed/agm), lithium ion, and the one that I’m fascinated by: Nickel-Iron batteries.
An article on miniature, dense, fast-growing forests popped up today in Mozilla Pocket, arguing that it is good for biodiversity and helps fight the climate crisis. While I agree that increasing habitat for wildlife is a good for the environment, the wildlife and for humans, I’m not convinced that CO2 is the crisis it’s made out to be. So along those lines, I wanted to think about other reasons that planting lots of mini-forests is a good idea or good ideas that would use mini-forests.