Yesterday, I went out. That doesn’t happen very often, but I met up with some neighbors for a protest and a show. I was also leaving my nascent load management software unsupervised for the first time, with the risk that it would malfunction and drain our house batteries, leaving the compound in the dark.
Cell service is really spotty on the island and I don’t like to be that guy always checking his phone anyway, so e-things were going unsupervised for the evening.
twoprops.net is syndicated to Mastodon — a summary of every column I post gets sent to my Mastodon account @twoprops@defcon.social. I use the excellent MastoFeed to accomplish this.
Unfortunately, when I arrived back at the compound last night and checked in, I discovered that my latest column was getting re-posted to Mastodon every hour. It must have been super annoying for the thousands hundred dozens sixteen folks who follow twoprops.net there. I deleted the repeated post and my MastoFeed link — with luck I got to it before too many people were inconvenienced, but my apologies to those of you who were. I’m just glad I’d set MastoFeed’s posting interval to 60 minutes instead of the default 5.
The problem post had a single-quote (’) in the title. My strong suspicion is that the quote confused MastoFeed’s parser or the Quartz code that generates my RSS feed. I removed the offending character and am going to re-activate the MastoFeed syndication and keep an eye on the results.
Fortunately, the solar plant’s load-management software seems to be working well. The car got charged, and the house batteries had plenty of power left over.
—2p