September 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
How To Scroll In Lion
jessiechar:
Step 1: Pretend it’s an iPad.
June 2011
2 posts
February 2011
1 post
3 tags
Shitty 2010
2010 was a difficult year.
This post is mainly for myself. It’s not an excuse; just a brief chronicle of why I didn’t really accomplish many of the things I planned to in 2010.
January & February:
Started working hard on SousChef for iPhone, when the iPad was announced I realized that was the perfect device to bring SousChef to. Stopped iPhone dev, started working on iPad...
December 2010
2 posts
The Indie Mac Gift Pack →
6 top Mac apps (including my own SousChef!) for just $60. They’d normally retail for $272!
Food dehydrator.
Thinking about buying a food dehydrator…
Either the L’Equip FilterPro or the Excalibur ED-3500. Both provide a lot of nice things that your typical round $60 dehydrator doesn’t come with. Temperature control, timers, air filtering, etc.
I’ll be ordering it from Everything Kitchens because they have a great deal where if you link to them they give you $10 off on your...
November 2010
1 post
2 tags
The Water Exchange: clean, easy, awesome. →
After doing some reading about the negative side-effects of fluoride, chlorine and other heavy metals and chemicals in municipal drinking water, we realized using a Brita wasn’t really cutting it and Catherine decided we needed a real water filter. This was last fall. After using a Brita for a couple years I’d come to a couple conclusions:
Filling up a pitcher, no matter how big, is...
October 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Solar: Year one.
So I’ve been meaning to write a post that wraps up our first year of having a solar array…
This is some of what I wanted to cover:
Total Production: 6.2 MWh
This is 1MWh lower than estimated by our installers. I believe part of this way due to an exceptionally overcast October and snow falls in January and February that covered the panels for long periods cutting production for...
September & October
This is where things get shaky for a bit. August through December of last year I didn’t keep track of solar production so that it was aligned with our electric meter readings. This means that while I compare *over-production* I can’t compare actual usage which is a shame. In addition I only have partial data for September of last year since our smart meter wasn’t installed...
May 2010
4 posts
3 tags
CO₂? How about energy?
So looking at the amount of CO₂ created by producing solar panels is one thing, but there’s also the idea that the amount of actual energy used to create the panels somehow larger than the panels will be able to pay off. In reality, this thought is actually very similar to the CO₂ question addressed in my previous post; since CO₂ is just a byproduct of energy production (be it a gasoline...
2 tags
Usage Update
Quick update for May’s (4/12 - 5/21) usage data.
Electric bill: - $2.15
PV Production: 602 kWh
Net grid usage: - 131 kWh
Total Usage: 471 kWh
2009 Usage: 540 kWh
Usage Reduction: 69 kWh (13%)
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Offsetting Carbon Dioxide
I was tweeting an update on how much energy and CO₂ the PV array had generated/offset. To date it has, according to SunPower’s monitoring system, generated 4,151 kWh of electricity and “offset” 6,882 pounds (3,122kg) of CO₂. This is equivalent to burning about a ton of coal.
To find this number I did a little number crunching. Coal used for electricity in the US consists of...
Solar Effect
When we got our Solar Photovoltaic (PV) array installed I hoped that it’d do two things:
Produce enough electricity to cover our personal electrical needs.
Offset most of the increased electrical consumption due to having a relatively large amount of computer equipment always running due to my business.
The array was installed in August of last year and to-date it has produced over...
March 2010
2 posts
30+
Yesterday produced the most energy from the solar panels.
Evar.
30.78 kWh
Chilly, sunny, march day. Odd.
Our monthly billed usage has only been over 200kWh once since we installed the things and our average monthly billed usage just keeps on sinking (currently 434 kWh).
January 2010
1 post
Avatar 2 →
seoulbrother:
The trailer for Avatar 2
FADE IN: Int - Day - Pandora Na’vi village Village life as usually among different Na’vi and humans.
CUT TO: Na’vi child playing with friends he looks up as the shadow blots out the sun.
CUT TO: Human teaching Na’vi some human thing and stops as the shadow blots out the sun.
CUT TO: Jake Sulley and what’s her face playing...
December 2009
4 posts
1 tag
Avatar
That was a movie of stunning insight and lack there of.
Insight:
1) “Our only choice is a preemptive strike.”
2) “Stock holders hate a bad quarterly report” (this is why I don’t invest.)
3) Basically the idea that relocating some people group is never a viable solution. It didn’t work for the native americans, the Masai, etc., etc., etc.
Lack of Insight:
...
2MWh
Hit 2 megawatt hours a few days back (2043kWh on 12/18 to be exact). It’s amazing how passive the solar array becomes. There is literally nothing I can do to make it produce more or less energy. It just sits there and chugs away.
Our first MWh took about a month and a half (August 14th-October 2nd), of which the first part was amazingly sunny. The second MWh took about two and a half...
ATSGenx: XML Generation for Cocoa →
This is an Objective-C wrapper I just wrote for Genx, a really nice C library for generating canonical XML. You can download it off my company’s blog.
Reid Says Deal Resolves the Impasse on the Public... →
Oh Hell. Often I feel like democrats are spineless idiots.
November 2009
6 posts
2 tags
Sigh. Ohio.
Let’s just say I’m a bit disappointed with you, Ohio. After the past two elections I thought maybe you were getting the hang of things. Vote down Casinos. Vote in a Governor that isn’t obviously crooked. Ban Smoking. You even did a decent job not being racist in the presidential elections last year. But what happened? I thought we had an understanding here. Remember 2007?...
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The Meaning of Information Technology →
One generation of technology solves the problems of the previous but causes problems of its own. The next generation of technology repeats this story; a story as old as mankind itself. This is the dialectics of history.
Unfortunately a problem, most likely, will not solve itself.
I feel that what social information technology misses is that it is trying, at it’s core, to replace actual,...
October 2009
15 posts
3 tags
The Public option.
Let’s take a quick step back here. Does anyone here think that the insurance industry—medical insurance in particular—doesn’t really provide any real service other than to spread the cost of bad things across their subscriber base. Yes? Ok, well this is a fairly socialist concept to begin with (people paying for other’s expenses), but we’ll leave that for...
1 tag
“Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as...”
– Mahatma Gandhi
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2000 Apple Licenses
Just ran my 2000th free NFR license for Apple employees. Took a little under a year. My guess is that that is a little under %10 of their employees.
MGTwitterEngine
Just implemented a tweet UI using MGTwitterEngine last night. I had heard it was easy, but I didn’t think it would be that easy. I think it took me about 10 minutes to figure out I had the wrong code revision and about 2 to actually implement the twitter bit. It was so easy I ended up adding bit.ly support to the UI as well. A note on that is that just because you get a response back in...
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Xcode user script to create properties from... →
4 tags
Ohio Solar Tour →
Our house is on this year’s solar tour. We’re somewhat frantically trying to clean things up and finish projects. Stop by if you’re interested, we’re open Sunday 1-4p.
Address is 101 S. May Ave., Athens, OH 45701 if you want to look us up.
3 tags
No rails.
Looked at Ohio’s light and high-speed rail plans. The first phase is a Cincinatti ➝ Dayton ➝ Columbus ➝ Cleveland light rail. This makes sense to me. However connecting two different ways to Ft. Wayne Indiana makes no sense when you have the whole of south-east Ohio unconnected to the system by anything but “bus feeder lines”. I think it makes little sense to forego connecting...
2 tags
933.6 kWh
PV array output to date. The array (6.3kW DC) went online the 15th of August, 2009.
Got our first electric bill since the system was installed: 28¢ credit. Should be more, but the utility companies rip you off for the electricity you produce by only buying it at wholesale prices instead of giving you credit for it that you could then use against the electricity you use off their grid.
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My business: Acacia Tree Software →
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends...”
– Upton Sinclair
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This.
I’ve wanted a place to post stuff for a while. I thought the Acacia Tree Blog might the kind of place I’d do this, but it ends up most of the things I want to post are somewhat random and/or personal in nature. I then thought I might use F-book for posting things of this nature, but it hasn’t ever happened. Therefore, I’ll be posting—in no particular order of precedence,...