Author: Robert
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My Phone Photos & Videos Backup Strategy
Background I keep the “primary” copy of my photos (and other files) on my own hard drives at home. I use a Cloud Backup service in order to make it nearly impossible to lose my photos/video, documents, etc. It’s less than $10/mo to backup an unlimited amount of data. I don’t pay for much Cloud…
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Drawbacks of Electrification
Electric cars, stoves, water heaters, and HVAC systems are mostly superior than than the fossil-fuel versions. However, there are some drawbacks, and I think it’s important we are open and clear about them. Of course, I believe that the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks for most people most of the time. Possible Drawbacks for all…
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My Initial, Brief Thoughts on Snapchat’s Valdi
1. It’s already dated It uses iOS’ and Android’s old UI frameworks, UIKit and Android Views, respectively, which are all but deprecated. Sure, they’re still widely used, but if you’re in a position to introduce a new framework, it shouldn’t be based on technologies that are on their way out. And sure, Valdi can switch…
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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…