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Yep, I'm old.
My son turns four in December. My wife thought it'd be fun to have a robot theme for his party because Thomas is into robots these days. I hatched up a plan to turn one room in the house into a spaceship. This wasn't going to be anything near Disneyland-level entertainment; I just thought it would be cool if the entrance into the room looked like part of a spaceport, using some black sheets, a black light, fluorescent paint, sound effects (a low-frequency humming and beep-boop computer sounds), and maybe a logbook that the kids signed before they boarded the ship.
I spent about an hour searching for the perfect sound effects on Amazon -- you know, the occasional burst of random square-wave notes -- and kept getting frustrated when the sounds that claimed to be "computer sound effects" were mostly keyboard clacking and mouse clicks, with a few caricatures of Windows alert messages.
Then it hit me: These are proper computer sound effects; moreover, nobody born after 1980 could possibly understand the kitschy theme I was going for. When I see an old movie showing a refrigerator-sized appliance with spinning tape discs, I have fond memories of the 1970s characterization of computers. But to my kids, there isn't any characterization of computers, whether in cinema or in real life. There are just computers; they're an ordinary part of ordinary life, and there's no need to glamorize or fictionalize them.
I'm now starting to appreciate the allure of dinosaurs and pirates. Giant monsters and guys with swords will always be popular, and they're not subject to Moore's Law.
RoofRay lets you calculate your home’s Solar Power potential!
RoofRay is a site that let’s you calculate your home’s solar power potential using the power of GoogleMaps.
It’s very interesting as the site will caculate the solar power potential based on the roof area and the slope of the roof.
It’s probably pretty accurate as most data is using direct satellite images off GoogleMaps.
The greatest part about this site is that you can find out how much energy you will be able to make with new solar power cells. Then you calculate how much it is to install new solar panels on your roof to see how long it will take you to payoff the panels itself.
The RoofRay site allows you to specify location, size and slope of your roof via Google Maps. It then uses this info to estimate how much energy can be generated from your available exposure.
via make
Brought to you by: Zedomax.com
RoofRay lets you calculate your home’s Solar Power potential!
Related posts
Tell me about your digital music collection
If you have a lot of CDs and have set up a good home system to listen to them online (i.e., on a hard drive rather than having to pop each physical CD into the player to listen to it), I'd appreciate some advice. If your goal were to put the physical CDs in the attic forever, no matter what fancy encoding technology appeared in the future, which format would you choose? Would single-file-per-album FLAC plus embedded cuesheets be sufficient? Or is there reason to drop to an even lower level, such as ISO or BIN?
I don't care about file size; if it takes 747MB per CD, so be it. I do care about the archive format being usable; hence the attraction of FLAC, which my Squeezebox can play, versus ISO/BIN, which are cumbersome as an audio source. I don't care about hybrid data/audio CDs. I definitely do care about gapless playback.
I made a mistake back in 2005 and ripped my collection to a lossy format. My penance is re-ripping the whole batch. Please help me do it right this time.
Declutter user manuals
Lately, when my family buys anything with a user manual, part of my unboxing ritual involves going to the manufacturer's website, downloading the user manual as a PDF, and putting it somewhere safe. Then I throw away (er, I mean, recycle) the paper version. Less physical clutter, and searchable product documentation -- no matter how the manufacturer reorganizes its website in the coming years.
How to make an omelette
The essential part of the Cheap Eats article is add a little bit of water to the eggs. It's amazing what a difference this tip makes!
The little person in the fridge finally has some work to do
There was supposed to be a light inside the refrigerator that came with our house, just like every other refrigerator in the world. But instead there were just a bunch of dangling wires. Fast-forward several years to last week, when I finally got around to putting in a switch and a light. Lemme tell you, having a light in the refrigerator really freaks me out. I can't get over thinking that there's a hole in the back with sunlight shining through every time I open it. And yes, I do peek through the crack as I'm closing it to make sure the light really does turn off.
Portrait of Mommy, by Thomas
Thomas drew this picture of Mary the other day. He explained it to me: she has legs, eyes, a mouth, arms, and eyebrows. You have to squint a bit to see the resemblance, but I think overall it's pretty good. Incidentally, Mary generally looks like this when Thomas spills yogurt on the couch.
So You've Gotten Yourself Lost
My two-year-old son is able to understand these instructions, and he promises to follow them next time he gets separated from us:
1. Look around.
2. Find a mom.
3. Tell the mom, "I'm lost."
Step 1 usually solves the problem quickly; chances are Mary or I are nearby but out of Thomas's immediate field of vision. Step 2 is the brilliant part: every kid knows what a mom looks like, and a mom is very unlikely to exploit a lost kid. Step 3 is actually superfluous. Most moms will intuitively figure out that this strange kid who's suddenly latched on to her is lost. But it provides the social lubrication for the kid to approach the mom and break the ice.
Earthquake scorecard
An earthquake of magnitude 5.6 shook us yesterday evening. Actions taken by my family:
Mike: looks up from studying. Yells "Earthquake!" into family room. Returns to studying.
Mary: runs outside.
Thomas: no visible reaction.
Emily: exclaims "We should get under a table!" and starts pulling Thomas with her.
I'd say Emily wins this round.
"Gotfor."
Mary and I are keeping a list of funny or whimsical things the kids say while they're still tots. I'm not going to publish the list yet because most of them are "you had to be there... for two years straight"-kinds of things, and I want to test the staying power of their humor before sharing them with the world. But one's worth writing about now, because it's just plain weird.
About a year ago Emily began insisting that we "gotfor" various things. "Dad, you gotfor your keys!" "You gotfor me! Wait for me!" We applied our usual corrective method: stopping the conversation and asking "Emily, is it 'gotfor' or 'forgot'?" After about 400 repetitions of this drill she broke the habit, and since then we're accused only that we "forgot" something.
End of story? Not quite. Along comes Thomas, 17 months younger, and about two months ago he independently invents "gotfor," which he's been diligently using ever since. A quick search shows we're hardly alone. There's a small contingent of the blog-o-web that believes this is clear evidence of dyslexia, but for now I'm just going to find it amusing and leave it at that.
Knock-knock jokes (continued)
After a false start, both my kids have the knock-knock joke template down pat:
Speaker 1: Knock knock!
Speaker 2: Who's there?
Speaker 1: [set of words]
Speaker 2: [set of words] who?
Speaker 1: [set of words combined with other words in a way that is designed to make Speaker 2 laugh]
Emily sometimes says "What, [set of words]?!?!?" instead of "[set of words] who?", which can ruin the gag. But otherwise they get great amusement from them. Unfortunately, their appetite is as voracious as their memory is strong. If I'm driving them anywhere in the car, they demand knock-knock jokes incessantly. Not recycled ones from yesterday, but new ones. And let me tell you, it's hard to come up with new knock-knock jokes every 30 seconds.
But occasionally it's worth it. One of Emily's best friends at school is involved in the joke below. See if you can guess her name:
Dad: Knock, knock!
Emily: Who's there?
Dad: Mad!
Emily (concerned): Mad who?
Dad: Madison!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I tell you, if Emily hadn't been in her car seat she'd have laughed herself right onto the road. I think there were three factors leading to this success. First, it was a genuine, simple play on words. Second, the tension of hearing me say "mad" (usually bad news) was palpably eased by turning it into the name of her friend. Yep, funny joke.
Oh, the third thing? Ah yes, the third thing: my daughter is four years old and still thinks anything I say that is supposed to be funny actually is funny. Good times. Enjoy them while they last.
Updated 9/19/7 to fix joke template. I knew something was wrong but couldn't quite put my finger on it.
Boiling water
According to the web, and informally confirmed by my personal observation: an uncovered pot of water takes 50% longer to boil than a covered one. In other words, if it takes $1.00 of energy* to boil a covered pot of water, you'll pay another fifty cents for the luxury of leaving the cover off (in addition to having to wait 50 percent longer).
And this should be obvious, but if you boil twice as much water as you need, such as two cups of water for one cup of tea, then you're paying twice the going rate for boiling a cup of water for absolutely no reason at all.
*Today it costs less than that. I'm using a round dollar for the sake of simplicity.
"The skinny gray one."
A watershed of 21st-century childhood development: following your directions, your toddler retrieves the specific remote control you need.
I miss Hurry Curry
It's been almost ten years since I left Los Angeles. One of my best L.A. food memories is a little restaurant called Hurry Curry. I always ordered the same thing: steamed rice with a bowl of Japanese chicken curry poured over it. You had to ask them to make it about 10x hotter than their spiciest in order to get any real kick, but once you did, boy was it delicious.
I visited Pasadena recently and thought I was hallucinating when I saw a Hurry Curry across the street from the downtown Coffee Bean. But sure enough, they'd opened a second location, and it was just as good as the first. It made me miss L.A. even more.
If you know of a place on the Peninsula that sounds like Hurry Curry, please let me know. Meanwhile, here's a recipe I made up that is a fast-food MSG-laden facsimile of my favorite curry dish:
White rice
1 chicken breast
1 cup of water
2 cubes S&B Golden Curry, hot
Steam the rice. Fry the chicken. Boil the water and toss in the curry cubes. Reduce to simmer. Slice up the chicken and put it in the curry. Let it bubble for about 15 minutes, and then pour it on the rice. Makes one serving. It's possible that you can skip the chicken-frying step, but I'm not sure how much longer you'd have to simmer. I fry the chicken so I'm sure it's cooked all the way through.
Roll-your-own piecemeal solar: silly idea?
I'll be going camping soon in a sunny place, and was thinking of using this trip as an excuse to start on a long-term project of building my own grid-tie PV (photovoltaic) solar system at home. I'm asking you, person who probably arrived here via a search engine, whether this is a workable idea.
Allow me to play the part of Basil Exposition for a moment: "As you may know, gentle reader, grid-tie systems are connected to the electricity grid, which generally means that they supplement a home's electricity, rather than being the sole source of it. A typical system consists of some PV panels that convert solar energy to DC electricity, an inverter that both converts the solar DC power to AC and connects the system to the power grid, and optionally a charge controller that delivers power to deep-cycle batteries, which store excess power for use at night time."
For the camping trip, the basic strategy is to buy one of each part of the system that can be bought piecemeal, and then buy inexpensive, relatively throwaway versions of parts that are expensive in a full-blown system. I'd buy one 120-watt panel (about $600) and a cheap charge controller (about $50). I'd then use a couple deep-cycle batteries and a little inverter that I already own. On the trip I'd use this power to charge various battery-powered devices, such as a laptop computer. (We'll ignore the annoyance that I feel knowing that 12-volt DC gets converted to 120-volt AC and then back down again to around 12 volts to charge batteries, no doubt losing at least 40% power in the process.)
On my return, I'd put the panel on the roof of my house and try connecting my desktop computer to it (via a UPS so I get a warning if power's low). I use that computer for perhaps a few hours a day so it should work.
Eventually, after research, and hopefully your feedback, I'd shell out money for a real grid-tie inverter (at least a couple thousand dollars) and charge controller (also thousands of dollars), and then add a few more panels and batteries. If the efficiency worked out, then I'd scale up the system -- having already bought inverter and charge controller capacity to handle the extra power.
The alternative is just coughing up $40,000 and having someone come in and install a complete system this weekend on my roof.
Advantages of the roll-your-own approach? It's an interesting hobby project; it commits less capital up front. To the extent that PV panels come down in price as technological advances occur, I get the benefit of lower prices in the future.
Disadvantages? It might fail because I don't know what I'm doing; I get the worst possible return on the large components until I fully utilize their capacity.
What do you think? Silly idea?
Rechargeable USB devices
Some time in the past year or so, all my family's geegaws and gadgets suddenly became mini-USB powered. Instead of my Nokia phone using one kind of wall wart, and my Sandisk MP3 player using another kind, our Motorola phones and my iRiver MP3 player are all recharged by the same kind of cable.
This is convenient because I got rid of all the proprietary power adapters, and it's now possible to carry a $2 USB-to-mini-USB cable with me and plug into just about any computer in existence for a quick device recharge.
But the downside is that computers have now become the most expensive power adapters on Earth. In the past, I've left my computer on overnight solely to charge my phone -- and as a bonus once I forgot to re-enable the hibernation feature when I was done, so I actually left it on for a couple days after that. Assuming the computer consumed 100 watts for three days, that was 7.2 kilowatt-hours at around 35 cents each, or $2.52 to charge my cell phone. Granted, that's not a fair calculation given the extra couple days of accidental on-time, but I'm sure it's quite common these days to leave a computer on overnight to charge a device, so that's at least 42 cents spent versus the few cents of power actually consumed for charging purposes.
My solution? I'm going to try something like this: yet another geegaw that will probably consume less than 5 watts, assuming 30% efficiency (still 3.6 Kwh/month or $1/month), if I leave it plugged in all the time.
Two steps forward, one step backward.
Update: It turns out those Motorola bastards use a special cable for charging their devices. I could easily make a cable with the required 165K resistor, but this defeats the purpose of having a single power source and plug for all my devices. Meh.
Second update: It pains me to admit this, but at least other devices are compatible with the screwy Motorola power adapter. So I can use that for charging all my devices.
Math genius in our midst
The other day I asked my daughter, who turned 4 a few weeks ago, what 1 + 1 was. She promptly replied "Two!!!" This surprised me because I wasn't even sure she knew what "plus" meant. But she also knew what 2 + 2 was, and we made it through all the combinations up to 2 + 5 before I stopped. I'm always surprised when my kids learn new words or say things in a conversationally adult way, but this new skill shocked me. I have no idea whether she's been practicing at school, or whether at a certain age kids suddenly know how to do arithmetic. Either way, pretty cool!
Thomas and the bean bag
My son's first joke
Thomas: Knock, knock!
The Mark: Who's there?
Thomas: Thomas!
The Mark: Thomas who?
Thomas: Me!!!!
(Thomas runs away, laughing hysterically.)
Integrated home entertainment by Sony
Its not pro audio but there taking all the ideas from a pro audio perspective. Like making there units rackmountable.
The Sony New Home Solutions are built into your home during construction, which allows you to incorporate features that would be costly and impractical to add after your house is built. (Even if your home has built-in structured wiring.)
And everything is neatly integrated into your home’s architecture; there’s no visible wiring or component clutter to spoil your deco
they even provide the right tv to use if you can’t make up your mind on that too. With up to 5 diffrent systems there is something that will fit your needs but if your looking for a bargin then you might as well stop reading and move on to the next article.
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Features:
- 7.1 HDMI home theater
- Twelve additional HD video zones (six additional HD video zones for NHS-1040 and NHS-2040);
- Built-in support to add an HD cable or satellite receiver;
- An 80 GB music storage and management server;
- A 400-disc DVD changer with management system (NHS-2040 and NHS-3040);
- AM/FM tuner;
- XM Satellite Radio(TM) support;
- Single-disc Blu-ray disc player;
- Three additional auxiliary inputs; and Three zone expansion.
The NHS-3040, NHS-2040 and NHS-1040 will be available in the third quarter of 2007.architecture, clutter, deco, digital, effects processor, frequencies, google, home construction, home solutions, perspective, sony, spoil, structured wiring
My son's first joke
Thomas: Knock, knock!
The Mark: Who's there?
Thomas: Thomas!
The Mark: Thomas who?
Thomas: Me!!!!
(Thomas runs away, laughing hysterically.)
Thomas and the bean bag
Yesterday I bought a yellow bean bag for the kids to play on at home.
I walk in the front door and plop down this big blob on the living room floor. Emily and Thomas scream in delight and four seconds later Thomas has unzipped it and spilled out the stuffing. We press pause. Thomas and I have a talk.
"The stuffing needs to stay in the bean bag. Don't let out the stuffing, OK?"
"OK."
"The zipper is not for playing. Don't play with the zipper, OK?"
"OK Daddy."
Put the stuffing back in, vacuum up the rest. Press play again.
I leave the room for another four seconds. I return and Thomas has unzipped the bean bag and spilled out the stuffing.
No more bean bag in the living room.
Raccoon advice?
Anyone have advice how to get rid of a raccoon?
Every night he knocks over my trash can. I run outside, swinging a stick and yelling at him. He takes a cool five or ten seconds to size me up and then saunters away, leaving me to experience my son's dirty diapers all over again. We put all our food scraps in the garbage disposal and worm composter, so I don't know what he's interested in getting out of our trash can.
He's about as big as my son, and probably about as smart, too. I don't really want to kill either of them, so poison and traps are out.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Update 3/25/2007: Thanks for all the suggestions. I screwed a hook into the fence, looped a bungee cord through the can handle, and hooked the cord onto the fence hook. There is about an inch of slack in the cord, so pushing over the can just makes it spring back into place. I've heard the raccoon rambling around the trash can, but he hasn't knocked it over since.
