maintenance
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This work changes so much with the seasons. Keeping this running feels much more like tending to plants than it feels like conventional sysadmin work. Did it rain? Did something move, is everything still in place?
We are well into fall here in Berlin, which statistically means roughly half as much hours of sunshine as in summer, again halving to a total of 51 hours of sunshine in November. Empirically it means a lot of grey goo and rain. In addition to changes in weather patterns of course the days get shorter and the sun's position on the horizon stays lower. And this means that this daily dance of walking up the stairs into the attic, opening the door, unplugging the USB cable, waiting a couple of seconds to plug it back in, and checking the pixel soup on the broken display to make sure that things are running, has a different rhythm at the moment.
compost exists in a time and in a place. It is not like some hours of compute that you summon with a click in your AWS management console. Day jobs and other commitments decide when to leave the house and when to come back, and the environment decides what's possible in the first place.
Good mornings, like today's, look like this: The sun is shining and there's no wind. Shortly after 08:00 I climb up the stairs and open the door. I open the slanted window to the roof and pull in the panel to wipe off the morning dew. The panel is not the one we started with, it's a larger, foldable camping panel that was bought second hand, but like the other panel it degraded a lot since we first placed it outside. These camping panels use softer solar panels than those you often see on roofs, and they have a shorter lifespan, during which their surface gets increasingly worn down and they charge increasingly worse. Wiping off the dew means less light is refracted in odd ways and more can find its way to the panel. I prop it up outside again, hanging it down from the window, in a 45 degree angle facing the sun that is now high enough to reach over the roof on the left. I fix a gum strap on the closing handle of the window to hold everything in place and close it carefully. The panel's support is not very stable, but if there's still no wind blowing to fold the panel in onto itself, I turn around and check the pixel soup on the display. And maybe that's enough for the day.