Some of What I Care About and Do
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Fighting Climate Change
At Our Electrification Journey, I share many details of electrifying our home (heat pump HVAC, induction stove, heat pump water heater, etc) to help make it easier for others, too.
I’m a certified Rewiring America Electrification Coach and a member of a local coaches group so I can better support those in my community who are interested in electrifying.
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Making our communities better
I volunteer with a non-profit supporting our local library and donate to many other non-profits (including KQED, Meals on Wheels, and our local food bank).
I helped the co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse improve access to the American Dream by designing and launching a $50MM Guaranteed Minimum Income study in partnership with GiveDirectly by giving more than a thousand households $1,500 per month for 16 months to spend on food, business, rent, or whatever they need most.
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Tech, Engineering, AI
I love technology and software engineering (LinkedIn), and here I share my thoughts on software engineering and AI.
Highlighted Posts
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AI is Revolutionizing Interaction Models
How things have been Most applications — whether websites, mobile apps, or desktop apps — are largely hierarchical and static. Hierarchical (Information Architecture) Apps generally have screens with at least somewhat of a hierarchy: a root/home, and some combination of menus, buttons, and links to navigate through and to other screens that contain content; perhaps…
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Extended Range Electric Vehicles (EREV)
EREVs are vehicles that have a gas generator that can be used as a source of power for an electric drive train. That is, the wheels are driven by an electric motor, like a “regular” (battery) electric vehicle, but instead of the energy coming from a battery that was charged by plugging the car in,…
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ILNDNEV
Meet “Island NEV,” our Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. It’s small and super convenient, and with a top speed of 25 MPH, you can think of it as a street-legal, pickup truck-shaped golf cart! It’s great for the vast majority of our trips, whether it’s taking the kids to school (it fits four people, and we’re currently…
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Setting up a VPN for Home/Intranet Access with WireGuard
If you’d like to securely make services in your home network available for yourself — and only yourself (and others you trust) — from outside, using WireGuard, this is the post for you! We’ll be setting up VPN Server on Linux for point-to-site access. Prerequisites Also, just to be sure it’s clear: What you should…
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My Experience with Emporia’s Vue Home Energy Monitor
About my Setup My Home I have solar panels and a battery that feed into a Load Center (LC). Most of my home’s loads/circuits are wired to the “House Panel” (a sub off of the LC) while a few others are wired into each of the Load Center, the Garage Panel, and the Main Panel…
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AI-augmented “Reading” — Many-to-One
In Reader-augmented Writing, I present a way to think about how communication has evolved; how written language, the printing press, and digital media have allowed more people to reach more people with ideas (one-to-many), with readers adding to what authors wrote (many-to-many). Now, with the recent significant developments of large language models (LLMs), I’m adding…
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Our Heat Pump Water Heater – Part II: Our Experience with It
Installation & Initial Heating Choosing a plug-in, shared-circuit model made installation relatively straight-forward for me as I didn’t have to get any electrical work done first (no need for a new dedicated outlet nor hard-wire junction box). I just plugged it into the same outlet as my clothes washer and dryer, which hasn’t been a…
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Our Heat Pump Water Heater – Part I: Choosing a Water Heater
Essential Concepts Crash Course Heat Pump Resistive heating: A lot of heating with electricity works by just using wires that heat up when electricity is run through them. This is called resistive heating, and some common appliances that work this way include space heaters, hair dryers, stoves with coils, and many older water heaters. This…
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More than one (or larger) electrical energy storage battery?
There are various reasons to want a second battery, and a second battery is less helpful to some of those reasons than others, so there’s no simple answer. But if I had to make a general recommendation, it would be to get a second one because it’s an important factor in going all electric; that…
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A look at the production and finances of my Tesla Energy system
There are so many factors that affect how a solar energy system will perform and behave, including latitude and longitude, house construction, house orientation, roof shape, trees, neighboring buildings, nearby mountains, HOA, utility rates and regulations, family size and habits, whether you drive an electric car and how much you intend to charge at home,…
Post Categories
- AI (3)
- Electrify (10)
- Futurism (5)
- Language (5)
- Portmanteau (3)
- Networking (6)
- Other (2)
- Personal Technology (8)
- Software Engineering (7)
- Troubleshooting (3)