Turns out that shelflet for the water flosser/brush was just slightly in the way of moving around in that tiny bathroom, so I moved it to the other side of the sink, where it (a) looks better and (b) is less in the way. Sometimes it’s the little things.
Speaking of little things, that little mirror just isn’t getting the job done. It’s too small and the ring light actualy makes things harder to see, not easier. I will need to build something bigger and brighter. I had been hoping I could just buy one that was suitable, but alas, no.
Know anything about British slang? If you do, you may find this amusing…
And while some people may scream for ice cream, I found a place that has a more refined expression of their desire.
I went in and had some. It was quite good. Now Ivanna Nother One.
This photo was meant to capture the soft colors of the sunrise, but caught quite a bit of the office behind me in the reflection. On the one hand, it’s a largely ruined photo of the sunrise, but on the other, it’s an interesting composite, especially how the lighting extends off into the distance.
There is actually one more card to play in the battery game. It occurred to me very recently that if the problem is a firmware update failure, the most likely modality of that is not that the firmware didn’t make it onto the computer but rather that the latest version stores data differently than a prior version and did not migrate that data properly, making it lose its mind as it tried to use that data. This is consistent with the unit not being able to operate in leader mode properly, having lost its sense of what the system looks like. But what about putting it in follower mode? Could it work that way? I have a new leader now. Thinking about how the firmware must be arranged, it is entirely plausible that it would actually run just fine in follower mode – it doesn’t need to maintain any data about the rest of the system, so if that data got corrupted, it no longer matters. Follower mode surely is nothing more than reporting status occasionally and responding to inbound commands from the leader as they may arise. No system context. It’s definitely worth a try! I might actually come away from this with 4 working units instead of 3, if that’s the case. It doesn’t for a minute forgive the treatment I’ve received from altE/KiloVault, but getting a “free” battery as consolation for two months of trouble would definitely make me happier than having to pay to have this thing scrapped or disassembling it and trying to extract its storage cells to get some stand-alone use out of them independent of the corrupted control computer.
I need some cables and some time to fuss with the system to find out, so it’ll be a little while yet til this is known. If it turns out that I can use all four, I’ll need to do a bit of work to make room for it, as the whole room is set up around there being only the three, but it would be worth it for 33% more energy storage.