Author: Robert
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Extended Range Electric Vehicles (EREV)
EREVs are vehicles that have a gas generator as a source of power for an electric drive train. That is, the wheels are driven by an electric motor, which gets its energy from a generator (there’s usually a battery involved). Hybrid EREV BEV Drive train Gas Engine &Electric Motor Electric Motor Electric Motor Battery Small(25-100…
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What Alameda can learn from Côte Fleurie in Normandy, France
Our family from Alameda got to spend about a week with my aunt in Blonville-sur-Mer, one of more than a dozen small coastal towns of Côte Fleurie, the Flowery Coast in the North of France (France → Normandy → Côte Fleurie → Blonville-sur-Mer). We immediately felt familiarity with Alameda: moody cool temperate weather, great ocean…
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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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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…