u/kcimc

And it worked.

- 3x Aiko Neostar 3P54 wired in serial at 123Voc
- 4x 220Ah 12V batteries wired as 2S2P for 440Ah at 24V
- SmartSolar MPPT 150/85-Tr
- MultiPlus-II 24/3000
- Ekrano GX
- Orion-Tr Smart 24/12-30
- SmartShunt IP65 500 A
- 2x Victron battery balancer

This is for a small village on a remote island halfway between Fiji and Tonga. They wanted to run Starlink with a Unifi voucher system, charge USB devices, have some indoor lights, and sometimes run the inverter for power tools or a fridge. It's very difficult to get batteries here, so the system is designed to maximize battery life.

The tool I built tracks components, costs, weight (everything was hand-carried on commercial airlines except batteries and solar panels), port types and terminal sizes, power requirements, current ratings, and other integration tests. It also tracks and stages Amazon purchases and tells me whether things will arrive on time.

I put the most work into the auto-routing and auto-layout system. All the components are positioned and connected automatically using an algorithm that is basically A* pathfinding over a 3d grid with carefully defined costs. The layouts and routes aren't perfect, but they are much, much better than what you might get out of the box.

My design approach for the app is that I didn't want any traditional UI for adding, removing, managing, moving, or routing. I wanted a chat-only interface. So this means there is no way to download or use this like an "app", but if you ask an agent to copy the repo then you'll have a good starting point for building your own system by describing what you want.

The installation is not perfect. The photo is from before the cables were tied down, before the batteries had a protective covering, and a few other details. But it works, and it has been working without a single change for about a month now.

Take a look at the live app here.

I converted some 30 year old video clips into a format that can be watched today. Watch and enjoy a glimpse into simpler times.

In April and May of 1996, radio show host Art Bell received three letters from someone who said their grandfather was on the "retrieval team" for the Roswell UFO crash. The first letter included pieces of aluminum that include some likely prosaic human made objects, allegedly taken from the Roswell UFO. The third letter included a more unusual material, a layered mix of bismuth and magnesium that was later sold for $35k though some suggest it may be leftover waste from a lead refinement process, while AARO believes it was carefully crafted using vapor deposition. In September 1996, researchers Linda Moulton Howe and Travis Taylor subjected the sample to a 500kV electrostatic field using a Van de Graff generator. They recorded an 8.5 minute video, and Art Bell posted two clips from this video to his website.

This was almost ten whole years before YouTube, and video on the internet was complicated. I downloaded the .exe files from Art Bell's site and built a script to extract and convert them.

In the video you can see these two clips:

- 4:20 Bis/Mag moves by itself in considerable sideways motion and falls off insulator cap.
- 5:20 Travis flips piece over so silver magnesium is on top - then there is more sideways motion when his finger enters the field.

One tiny thing I noticed: the sample in the first video seems to have a white spot in the middle, similar to the sample that appears in the foreground in this video.

I hope you enjoy this brief historical glimpse into the earliest days of UFOlogy on the internet ♡

The mods deleted my other post so I am testing another angle.

Today the White House launched an immigrant arrest tracker after teasing "aliens.gov", while they are also engaged in an unprecedented release of documents and videos related to UAP.

One of the recurring themes in the history of UFOs is narrative control. The 1953 Robertson Panel recommended reducing public interest in flying saucers, because public fascination IN ITSELF was viewed as a potential national security problem. Since the 50s, this topic has gone through cycles of debunking, ridicule, secrecy, disclosure, and renaming/rebranding. This whole time, governments and institutions have repeatedly tried to shape how the public thinks about them.

aliens.gov fits right in. The site opens with what reads exactly like a UFO disclosure narrative: aliens living among us, decades-long government coverups, presidents who knew the truth (ok maybe not this one lol), a courageous figure finally exposing it all. But then the reveal is that it’s actually about arresting immigrants. They're borrowing the language, imagery, and emotional structure of UFO mythology and redirecting it toward a completely different political topic.

Was this designed specifically to suppress interest in UFOs? Who knows. Someone probably realized the UFO disclosure story is a powerful narrative framework and repurposed it. But the result is the same: one narrative is colonizing another. The result is a weird kind of semantic dilution where one of the most iconic terms in UFO culture (aliens) gets deliberately pulled away from its NHI meaning and repurposed for a political message.

This is absolutely relevant to the subject of r/UFOs and needs to be discussed accordingly.

i made a system that watches a fixed cohort of business jets and asks: is the number airborne unusual for this time?

it uses ADS-B exchange heatmaps + a filtered FAA registry (matched by hex), and compares the current count to a rolling baseline for similar times of day/week.

most of the time it just reveals a very stable daily rhythm, with occasional spikes.

there was a spike on april 6, around when trump posted “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

i’m interested in what it means to treat something like this as a signal, and how quickly a dashboard can make it feel legible.