Finally received some light showers yesterday.  No need to water the
garden for a few days.  This will give the well a little time to
recover.  I put a tick mark on the site gauge to measure any
progress on the tank water level:

http://melton.sdf-us.org/images/appended-o4x4.png

I'll explain why the images are black and white shortly.

The image on the left was shot on Sept. 28.  The image on the right
was taken Oct. 1.  As can be seen, there has been some measurable
progress although I'm not sure how many gallons it translates to,
but if I was to take a guess, it would probably be ~ 100
gallons.  It's somewhat reassuring that our conservation efforts are
bearing some fruit.  Thankfully, we have had a good amount of rain
over the last few days.  At least I will not need to water the
garden for some time.

The above images have been converted to gray scale with some ordered
dithering and then joined.  Inspired by some of the low tech (and
low bandwidth) sites that are popping up such as:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

I been pondering the option of creating creating a site with static
pages.  I'm not a technical guy, but obviously images (as well as a
lot of other fluff) are the biggest bandwidth hogs. Converting the
images with an open source app called Imagemagick, yielded a 93%
reduction in image size.  Alas, there is a free time deficit so
this will have to be considered a long term project.  The Gopher
protocol still most likely has the smallest footprint in terms of energy
consumption (both on the server and browser side) although there is
something to be said about having some visual appeal.  I'm sure I
have ranted in the past about the fluff associated with many sites
nowadays.  In a small, but growing trend, some news sites have been
providing low bandwidth equivalents of their full featured sites
lest they should be ad-blocked into oblivion although natural
disasters probably had a hand in the decision process.

A natural bi-product of creating sites with smaller footprints is
the amount of energy consumed to both serve the web page and to
render the web page on the client side.

In the security department, news of data breaches is almost becoming
a daily event.  I am starting to wonder if going back to paper bills
and mailing a check might be more secure.  Even better would be a
money order since even a check will have an account number and a
name. *sigh*  For the time being, I guess I will use the Linux
random password generator 'pwgen' to create stronger passwords for
most of the critical sites I use.

While I am in rant mode, my satellite internet provider throttled my
connection speed since went over our 10 GB limit.  This after just
10 days into the billing cycle.  The culprit?  A new computer with
Windows 10.  The OS kept downloading updates in the background and
before we realized it, we had been throttled.  I wiped the disk
clean and installed Lubuntu (which is what I should have done to
start with), and now we have full control over what happens with our
machine.  Just as well, too much fluff and bloat with Windows.  As
for the throttling, my need for speed is pretty minimal,
consequently the effect has been mild.  Videos I download with
Youtube-dl (a command line video downloader) and I schedule it to
run between midnight and 5:00am when there are no restrictions.  I
just use the plain html version of gmail to fetch my mail (even
works over dialup).  Most of my news and information I get from
snownews (command line, text based feed reader).  Hmm...maybe a
blessing in disguise?