Thanksgiving/Christmas/End-of-year travel – Charge ahead?

With the recent massive increase in electric vehicle sales, combined with free fast charging included with particular new car models this year, you may be wondering if the current charging systems can handle it?? This thanksgiving weekend had quite a line on specific stations like the one out of Arizona, as you may have seen in the news and forums! but what about major holidays in general such as Christmas? Let’s look at some of the recent busy days and see if it’s as bad as some have presumed…

Continue reading “Thanksgiving/Christmas/End-of-year travel – Charge ahead?”

Learning from previous mistakes – pulling historical vulnerability information from various plugins

If you keep a watch on software security newsletters or blogs like the Wordfence blog, you’ll know there are a good number of new detected defects and vulnerabilities on a regular basis, even on well known plugins and software. It’s worth looking into the details of how this happens especially if you work on PHP software from time to time. Thankfully there are public records which let you compare to look at how these are fixed:

Continue reading “Learning from previous mistakes – pulling historical vulnerability information from various plugins”

Where are the big roofs for Solar? A mathematical look at pulling data from OpenStreetMap

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about solar and more renewable energy. In USA the recent IRA has provisions for extending solar and renewable energy, and the Florida governor last year supported Solar benefits which turn out to be helpful in many natural disasters, making an energy grid more easily self-sustainable after hurricanes that are common to that state. What if we could go over a map and see what buildings are the best candidates for solar generation? OpenStreetMap has not just street maps, but many other features, including building coordinates, which can give us polygons that can calculate areas for potential solar!

Continue reading “Where are the big roofs for Solar? A mathematical look at pulling data from OpenStreetMap”

ChatGPT is bad at math? Turns out, so is Microsoft’s assistant.

Recently it was noted, by Arstechnica and others, that ChatGPT doesn’t seem to be great at math questions – recent tests have found one can get wrong answers much more often than a calculator, and even apologize if you insist that it is wrong (suggesting it doesn’t know math after 2021… lol). but what about other similar assistants?

Continue reading “ChatGPT is bad at math? Turns out, so is Microsoft’s assistant.”