I went down a rabbit hole on solar power in the UK.  Most UK homes use gas for heating.  The amount of heating varies through the year because of climate.  The climate varies partly due to the amount of sunlight. That should be a clue that solar isn't really a great choice for heating.

This chart shows how my gas (heat and hot water) varies through the year.  My peak requirement for heat is approximately 14kWh per day.  That's approximately the capacity of a Tesla Powerwall 3 and that doesn't include the electricity used.  This also implies the need to completely charge the Powerwall every 24 hours.  However to provide electric heat the most likely solution would be a heat pump.  A heat pump installed correctly would use about 1/3rd the power, so about 5kWh.  If we add in the electric my total consumption would be about 6kWh per day.

Domestic solar panels don't generally track the suns path through the sky.  In the UK they are pointed south at about 30 degrees.  This is a compromise that gets the most sun while keeping the install simple.
I snagged these images from Viridian Solar's website.   You can link to the relevant pages here:

• Average daily light energy through Year
• Effect of orientation and inclination

What should be obvious is that the amount of energy available from solar is significantly less in winter and the orientation of the panels is important

If we assume a target of 6kWh electricity consumed and a Powerwall or similar as a buffer battery how many panels do we need?
​I assumed the panels could be placed ideally.
Using this calculator I reverse calculated required installed peak power kWp to be about 70.   

Now we need to figure out how many panels are needed to get to that 70kWh figure.  Obviously it depends on a bunch of factors but it seems like the answer is around 160.  I've seen some widely varying figures for the number of panels needed btw. 

Here are a couple of example websites suggesting the number of panels needed:​

• www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/how-many-solar-panels-do-I-need
• https://heatable.co.uk/solar/advice/how-many-solar-panels-do-you-need

Obviously this isn't practical for most homes and would be very expensive. 

Maybe we need to think more about home design and try to go for something like the passivhaus standard which claims to barely need heating at all.  Hard to believe and a topic for anther day. 

Also it isn't all doom and gloom. A moderate solar system like that installed on many homes will reduce the amount of gas burned over the year to generate electricity and will also save some money for the owner. 

The conclusion I'm drawing (assuming no solar or incentives) is that a heatpump will emit significantly less co2 but it will cost the user more because electricity is a lot more expensive than gas. 

​Maybe a sensible solar installation could make up the cost difference between gas and electric while providing another reduction in co2.   If you could generate 1.5kWh per day from solar in the winter rather than 6 that would cover the cost while reducing co2 by another 25%.  You would still need a sizable solar array to achieve this.  Possibly as many as 30 panels. 

I use this blog mostly to collect things I think I might need later.  It's kind of like a notebook. 
I'm not a professional. 
I know less about houses than most people I know. 
Prices vary a lot over time.  Solar panel technology gets better over time. 

​There's a good chance my numbers are off somewhere or I've misunderstood something, in which case, let me know and I'll update. 

​You should probably do your own research, starting by being clear what your motivations and goals are. 

Quick way to make something that looks like a road by making an array of tiled objects follow a curve.
https://youtu.be/lRK8UMudejg?si=HSlzAosdWp5yMX-q

Camera follow path
https://youtu.be/hsOPnBWjDkU?si=LtUmMB9OpDMlpXft

This guy is using damped track constraint which probably works best for flying objects.
I used track to instead. 

https://blenderartists.org/t/camera-roll-when-using-damped-track/589296


I'm sure I've learned this before.  Several times :-(
​

​I’m basically a vegetarian for climate change reasons but I still eat some chicken, fish, eggs and cheese. Also I never learned to cook meat. I don’t waste a lot of food which the chart assumes.
I’m going to estimate my food footprint at 1800 kg  of co2.
That's significantly more than my car and my heat combined, which is crazy.
​The article gives a nice chart of various food co2 impacts per kg.

​​Are you as surprised by this, as I was?

For context a return flight from London to San Francisco in economy is 2600Kg of co2. 
​That's more than my food and heat combined. 

Initially I wasn't sure how to replace the roller wheels on my Brompton with larger Rollerblade style wheels. There are some kits online but they are expensive.

You follow this recipe at your own risk. Not my fault if you break the bike, break yourself or blow up the universe.

The roller wheels are just bolted to the bike, nothing fancy, just standard righty tighty, lefty loosey on both sides. I think I was expecting something more complex.

If you don't have a rear rack adding wheels that are too large will make the bike a slightly wobbly in the folded position which is why I went with 60mm.  The bike is still fairly stable when folded but can also be rolled along train station platforms and the like. 

The wheels and bolts I used are as described below:

• 1 pair of 60mm dia replacement wheels for a roller suitcase
• 1 pair of M6 40mm bolts with button heads

It's very simple to bolt these on.  The bolt holds the bushing in the center of the wheel bearing so it's ok to do it up tight, it won't affect how the wheel rolls.  Probably should add some thread locker just to ensure it can't come undone, or at least remember to check the bolts are tight once in a while. 

Button head screw caps have a low profile so they are less likely to snag or get snagged on stuff.
With bolts/screws M6 is the diameter and 40 is the length of the threaded part.

The suitcase wheels are probably better than rollerblade wheels since they are actually designed for this, but also you can buy them in pairs, not packs of 6. 

I quite liked this guys videos on sculpting.
This is basically just a book mark for me :-0 

I didn't even know this existed.  But it seems to work pretty well for scatter stuff.

Yet again this was a case of youtube to the rescue. This wasn't the approach I was going to take. It's better.

I made a Halloween Movie using Blender, Mixamo for the character models and animation and speechify for the voices.  It's quick and dirty.. just like me. 

Using the AI speech generator is transformative since I could change dialogue deep into the edit, not something that would be possible with human performers, where even a small dialog change would require re-recording the entire sound track. 

Most game engines let you blend between a series of textures on a landscape to add detail and hide repeats. I didn't know how to do that in Blender and now I do.
In the shader node, scale up the UVs to make the texture tile and then use a generated texture as the factor on a mix RGB node between the textures you want to use.  Simples.
Now to figure out how to control where rocks are spawned using a texture... 

​Obviously I wasn't smart enough to figure this out without watching a bunch of youtube videos like this one...   :-0 

Take my love for the film Alien, add little John Carpenter and some Turin shroud nonsense and you have one minute and seven seconds of shonky CGI.

All the cgi was done in Blender, with texturing in Substance Painter. Edited in Vegas.  I used text 2 speech tools for most of the characters. They are still a bit limited even with the emotion controls, but if you pick the words carefully the results are ok I think. 
When I started this project, the idea was to bang something out really quickly. I thought I could do it in a couple of weeks, but actually it was probably more like 2 months solid work spread out over the summer.  Will he ever learn? :-0  
Different to most of my other films, I didn't make storyboards or even have a script until I'd made most of the shots, but because the scope is so limited it didn't burn myself as I've done in the past, so that's a kind of progress I guess.