My newer EV has a sticker range of 380 miles, but I’ve no idea how they’re getting that number. The plan was a weekend down in Kilkenny which is about 170 miles from home, but we had to drop the children off in the other direction beforehand adding another 100 miles. 280 is within the predicted range of a full battery, as the car estimates 320mi from 100%. So the night before I made sure the car was charging to 100% and we set off.

The total driving for the weekend was about 620mi, which amazingly took 14hrs but I guess some of that is sat on the drive punching in driving directions, though the heavy Friday rush hour traffic around Dublin plus an accident on the M7 probably added to that too.

We charged on the way down just in case, but frankly after 4 hours of driving needed a break anyway. Annoyingly motorway charge prices are a fair bit more than off-route, so we made a small diversion to a 50kW charger in Dundalk. We walked round the corner to the mall, and by the time we’d found the bathrooms, a cash machine for some Euros, and ordered a sit-down coffee, the car was already a fair way through the charge - we certainly weren’t waiting for it.

The next morning I had time to kill, so went into town for a coffee and finished topping up the car on a 100kW charger, which was impressively fast and I could probably have just gone back to the hotel, but seeing as I had time to kill I played wordle and drank my coffee.

On the way home I found an even faster charger, also in Dundalk, and the peak charge was 150kW, though I probably need to look at the charge curves for this car as by the time I’d got a coffee it was already reducing.

A table of the charge stops probably makes more sense than describing each (assuming you’re as interested in stats as I am). The ESB network in Ireland seems pretty thorough, and £0.50 (GBP) per unit is a fair bit cheaper than the motorway services which are often up into £0.85/kWh

Each of these was on a separate day.

The main argument people make against EVs is the charge times, but at no point did any of these stops feel like a big time-waste. Any time we’ve done long journeys with our children we have to stop every few hours and it’s always half an hour to an hour, so there’s plenty of chance for a decent charge on a long journey.

The cost of EV charging is definitely expensive compared to home - even the cheaper 50p rate above is way more than the 13.89p I get at home overnight. Still, £50 for nearly 500 miles of public charging isn’t expensive.

We got home at the end of our 617mi journey with 14% battery, or about 37mi of range (I was watching the last charge so as not to over-spend on public charging). The cost to finish off the battery back to 100% is probably about £12, though would be lower if we had a sunny day (today was not that sort of day).

So is it expensive? Well, £62 for ~620mi is 10p per mile, which for me is insanely expensive compared to the rest of the year where I’m getting easily under 4p per mile. Perhaps you have a petrol car that can do that rate - my previous diesel would maybe manage that journey on a single tank, but that tank would have cost over £140 to fill at current prices. So yes, it’s still half the price of my previous car.

I posted on social media during the journey and immediately got a lot of replies along the lines of “I can fill 500mi in 5 minutes”, some even suggesting they could get the same price as I was paying per mile. I still don’t know why people feel the need to tell me this - do they think I’ve never driven a petrol car before? Do they think this is new to me? I guess the reply-guys just have to mansplain this to me, a man, along with anyone else posting about it.

The one thing none of them understood though was that this was a special journey - sure the car took longer to recharge than filling a tank, but I wake up to a fully charged car every morning. I also pay under 4p per mile for the rest of the year.

So yes, this was expensive, and took a bit longer, but overall it’s still cheaper. For a whole year it’s a lot cheaper…

I’ve yet to meet more than one or two EV drivers who switched back to ICE cars, and I certainly have no plans to buy another petrol or diesel car. Don’t @ me…

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^strangeparty.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.strangeparty.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ https://www.antonpiatek.dev/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

And now an old url, such as https://www.strangeparty.com/2016/08/22/now-with-added-ssl-fromletsencrypt/ will simply work on the new host as the pages are in the same location

To this end, I’ve moved to Jekyll as it has an easy export from wordpress and can be hosted by github pages quite easily and therefore hosted very easily (including custom domains).

Comments in this case are via Gisgus, thanks to @calanais for suggesting this option.

The move would have been a lot easier had I not tried to several years ago and then ignored it, as it turns out that having old files from old themes checked in is quite a pain and overwrites all your new themes, and causes hours of debugging…

I’m sure there’s loads more to fix up on this, but for now I’ve got what I wanted - something I can easily add posts to, not have to worry about security, and migrates my old posts. Old comments are lost, but probably not really of much interest.

One other thing I wanted to acheieve in the move was preserving all old blog urls, and you can setup the posts to reflect the same wordpress url layout, so I’m hoping I can simply write an apache redirect url pattern to forward to me new blog domain

There are a lot of scripts for powering letsencrypt, but getssl looked the best fit for my use case as I just wanted a simple script to generate certificates, not manage apache configs or anything else. It seems to do a pretty good job so far. I swapped over the certificates to the newly generated ones and it seems pretty smooth sailing.

There’s going to be some interesting learning, things like DVB are pretty much completely new to me, but at the same time it’s lots of Java and C++ with similar technology stacks involved. Sadly less perl, but more Python so maybe I’ll learn that properly. I’m likely to work with some more interesting Javascript frameworks, in particular Angular.js which should be fun.

The job is still Software Development, and there should be some fun challenges with things like allowing a TV set top box to do on demand video content when all you have is a one-way data stream from a satellite, for instance, which make for some interesting solutions. I’m working in the Cobalt team which deals with a delivering data from the TV provider onto set top boxes, so things like settings, software updates, programme guides and on demand content and even apps. Other teams in the office work with the actual video content encryption and playback and the UI the set top box shows.

The local office seems to be all running Fedora, so I’m saying goodbye to Ubuntu at work. I already miss it, but hopefully will find Fedora enjoyable in the long term.

The office is on the other side of Belfast so is a marginally longer commute, but it’s still reasonable to get to. Stranmillis seems a nice area of Belfast, and it’s a 10 minute walk to the Botanical gardens so I intend to make some time to see it over lunch, which will be nice as I really miss getting out as I could in Hursley and its surrounding fields.

I suppose my career with IBM really started as a pre-university placement at IBM, which makes my time in IBM closer to 11 years.  I worked with some of the WebSphere technical sales and pre-sales teams in Basingstoke, doing desktop support and Lotus Domino administration and application design, though I don’t like to remind people that I hold qualifications on Domino :p

I then joined as a graduate in 2005, and spent most of my time working on Integration Bus (aka Message Broker, and several more names) and enjoyed working with some great people over the years. The last 8 months or so have been with the QRadar team in Belfast, and I really enjoyed my time working with such a great team.

I have done test roles, development roles, performance work, some time in level 3 support, and enjoyed all of it. Even the late nights the day before release were usually good fun (the huge pizzas helped!).

I got very involved with IBM Hursley’s Blue Fusion events, which were incredible fun and a rather unique opportunity to interact with secondary school children.

Creating an Ubuntu-based linux desktop for IBM, with over 6500 installs, has been very rewarding and something I will remember fondly.

I’ve enjoyed my time in IBM and made some great friends. Thanks to everyone that helped make my time so much fun.

A quick look on online and I decided that some strip LED lights and a 12V PSU should do something to change the situation. You can pick up either for a few quid from banggood.

White 12V self-adhesive LED strip

12V LED Power supply

Of course I didn’t want to be turning lights on and off by hand, as knowing me I’ll just forget to turn them off, so a spare micro switch on the 12V side seemed the appropriate option

Micro switch to turn off lights when cupboard is closed

I think the final result is pretty good, though it does bug me that theres a dead set of LEDs on the top shelf – didn’t notice that before putting them in…

The finished result

One piece of advice I do have is that it is worth buying the little self-adhesive cable tidy anchors for this sort of thing. While the LED strips themselves are self-adhesive, there’s a fair bit of wire linking them all together and trying to stick them out of the way with a hot glue gun like I did is just a recipe for getting very hot fingertips and a mess of hot glue everywhere.

The Department of Dirty is working with internet and mobile companies to stop the dirty internet. We are committed to protecting children and adults from online filth such as:

• Talk to Frank: This government website tries to educate young people about drugs. We all know what ‘education’ means, don’t we? Blocked by Three.
• Girl Guides Essex: They say, ‘guiding is about acquiring skills for life’. We say, why would young girls need skills? Blocked by BT.
• South London Refugee Association: This charity aims to relieve poverty and distress. Not on our watch they don’t. Blocked by BT, EE, Sky and VirginMedia

We need you to help us take a stand against blogs, charities and education websites, all of which are being blocked [1]. It’s time to stop this sick filth. Together, we can clean up the internet.www.departmentofdirty.co.uk