Gas Prices

I'm tempted to bury a big tank in the back yard and stock up on gasoline while it's cheap. But I suspect prices will stay well under $3/gallon throughout 2015. Too many oil-producing countries are desperate enough for cash that they have to sell at any price, rather than slow production.

I don't know what the long-term effects of this will be. It's like a free cost-of-living decrease for everyone with a car, but these low prices are probably going to retard growth of renewable energy sources, and will definitely stop investment by oil companies.

Maybe it's the perfect time to impose a high gasoline tax? People have gotten accustomed to $3+/gallon prices at this point, and lord knows our road and bridge infrastructure could use a cash infusion.


***Update, a week later***

Very Interesting Podcast On Internet Regulation

The first hour of this podcast episode was very interesting.

The host got two independent ISP operators to come on the show and argue the opposing sides of Title II regulation on Internet providers.

They both raise a lot of good points, including some I hadn't thought of (do we really want the FCC, in charge of enforcing public decency on TV, to have more regulatory authority over the internet?).

I do think the ISP operator from Laramie Wyoming is living in a dreamland if he really thinks market forces will cause corporations like Netflix to volunteer to pay him (the ISP) more money to cover his operating costs not built into his costumers' prices.

Amazon Echo

Amazon announced their "Echo" product last week. It is an odd device: a WiFi-connected microphone and speaker with a sort of AI interface similar to Apple's Siri.

My first thought was - why not just use Siri? With iOS 8, iPhones listen for the trigger phrase "Hey Siri" when plugged into power. So I tried it. I updated an old iPhone 4S to iOS 8.1, plugged it into a powered speaker dock, and started talking at it.

Now granted, the speaker dock partially blocked the iPhone's microphone, but performance was pretty dismal. I had to be within three feet and raise my voice to get consistent acknowledgement, and even then the voice recognition was not all that great.

Amazon is claiming that the Echo's array of seven microphones will allow you to talk to it from accross the room, with accurate voice recognition. There's really no way to test that until the Echo starts shipping, but it's a fairly dubious claim.

Being able to accurately tell a speaker like this to play music using only voice commands is mildly interesting. The only really interesting advertised feature is verbally adding items to a shopping list. But that's not worth two hundred dollars to me.

But what if, what if, Amazon has included Z-wave and Zigbee antennas inside this thing? If this turns out to be a reliably voice-activated smart home controller, well...

Well, I would buy at least three.

"Echo, turn off the lights and shut down the house. It's bed time."

New Cree Bulbs

Cree has started selling their third generation of consumer LED bulbs, called "4flow". I haven't seen them in person yet, but they seem like a pretty crazy departure from the old design.

Old Design:

New Design:

While the old design used a metal heatsink to keep the LED elements cool, the new design apparently relies on convection - air flows through the slots near the bottom of the bulb, over the LED elements, and out the top. 

But it seems to me that this design is only effective in a vertical configuration. And indeed, all the Cree marketing materials I've seen show the new bulbs in an up-and-down orientation. A lot of our light fixtures (the majority, now that I think about it) have the bulbs in a horizontal arrangement, or in the case of the ceiling fans, at a 45 degree angle.

But apparently the new design allowed Cree to cut the retail price by twenty percent, which is no small feat.

So, I don't know. The guys at Cree seem pretty smart, but I'm not buying any of these new ones until I hear some real-life reviews after several months of use.

The good news: Home Depot has cut the price of the old bulbs by thirty percent, presumably to clear out stock before the new bulbs arrive. So I picked up three more bulbs when I was at Home Depot today. I'm slowly clearing the old, smoke-stained, mercury-based CFLs out of my house. In fact, I think there are only nine CFLs left in the house's built-in light fixtures :-)

Hazards of Trusting Software

Brianna and I use Mint.com to track our finances – it’s a great tool for when you have more than just a single checking and savings account. One of the budgets we track using Mint is the house budget – what I draw from for paint, tools, and IKEA as-is products. This month the budget seemed particularly tight, though.

Looking through it, I found a large purchase at Home Depot (which automatically falls under the “house” budget) that I couldn't remember. It took some back-and-forth with Brianna and some close reading of some computer-generated text, but I realized the transfer from our checking account to the Home Depot Credit Card (to pay off the card) was being counted as an expense, rather than a transfer. Effectively, anything purchased on the Home Depot Credit Card was being deducted from the House spending allowance twice!

Ultimately, it was a fairly easy problem to fix – much better than an actual fraudulent charge!

Why I Want to Use Blown-In Insulation in the Attic

I replied to a comment from Uncle Bill today:

I did think about buying rolled batts of insulation. Two problems made me think blown-in was a better option: 1) The entry access to our attic is small. I barely fit through it, and a lot of the rolled batts are wider than I am. 2) There are a lot of joists in the way, and maneuvering around those joists to unroll batts would dramatically increase my odds of putting my foot through the ceiling.

I also talked with my Uncle Gary, who has spent most of his career working on residential homes, about the difference between fiberglass and cellulose insulation. Our existing insulation is fiberglass and because of that, he recommends sticking with fiberglass. Apparently cellulose insulation is heavier than fiberglass and would compress the existing insulation, robbing it of a lot of its insulating value. He also agreed with the workers I talked to at Home Depot, saying that the cellulose insulation tends to settle over time.

In his own attic, Uncle Gary used fiberglass batts, and he recommended that above everything else if I had easy access to the attic. But he said with limited access to the attic, blown-in fiberglass was probably the best way to go (as long as I had a tyvek suit, face mask and safety goggles).

Reading Physical Books

I've been reading physical books recently, and I don't like it.

The books keep trying to close while I'm reading, there’s no built-in light, the ink lifts off onto my thumb and is subsequently smeared across the page (I don't dare read a paperback while working out at the gym – there would be no legible text left on the page!), the contrast on cheap paperbacks isn't much better than on a Kindle (and worse than on a smartphone or tablet), story immersion is limited to a single object (no syncing between “devices”), and I don’t carry books with me everywhere like I do my phone (well, not since I got my first smartphone, anyway).

And since the FAA lifted the ban on electronic devices during take off and landing, there really hasn't been a time when I couldn't read on an electronic device (the few times I've read in the tub, I just throw the Kindle inside a ziplock – works great).

I know  a lot of people love the experience of reading physical books. I used to be one of them. I always thought reading ebooks was more convenient, but I didn't realize I had transitioned to thinking ebooks were better until I went back to physical books.

I don't think I'll be buying many more physical books, unless maybe I want to show them off on my bookshelves. Anyway, rant over.

Google Maps Photo Views

Well this is kinda cool.

My first stab at running a website was WheretheHeckisBrian.com. That website, like this one, was a cross between private diary and a public, notated photo album. WheretheHeckisBrian.com focused a lot on public photo albums and geo-location (and the cross section of the two: geo-tagged photos). I even put together a public map of my geo-tagged photos, which you can check out here (click on the dots to view the pictures). I started the website in 2010, and kept it updated through the end of 2011, with a few posts dribbling out in 2012. Just about all the photos were taken with an iPhone 3GS, so there's nothing special about the photos other than location and the fact that I took them.

Today I got a notification that Google has rolled out a much slicker version of the photos page I had put together myself, called Google Maps Views. You can check out my pictures here.

What surprised me is that my collection of public, geo-tagged photos have racked up over 128,000 views! :-D

FCC Open Internet Comment

I submitted my comment to the FCC today (yes, I waited til the very last day).

It wasn't exactly on point with what the FCC wanted, but then the FCC wasn't very on point with what I wanted.

This feels pretty off-topic for the website, but I figure if I feel strongly enough about it send the FCC an email, I should feel strongly enough about it to leave a public record. Click on through if you are bored enough to read my thoughts on what the FCC should do about the internet.

Just One More Chapter...

I've been guilty of this before...

Ice Cream

Jeepers Creepers, you guys: DO NOT take the last drumstick in the freezer when there is a pregnant woman in the house. It doesn't even matter if the drumstick is three weeks old and there are multiple quarts of ice cream available. DO NOT eat the last drumstick!

Nest API

Well, hey, look at that: Nest just published their API. Looks like a somewhat limited early roll-out, but I already have a couple ideas of what I want to do with it.

Update:

Oh, wow! Didn't even think of these applications with the clothes dryer:

• Keep clothes fresh if your laundry cycle ends while you're away
• Save energy with longer, more efficient dryer cycles when you're away
• Auto-delay laundry cycles during energy rush hours

Presumably an internet-connected dryer could send me a push notification when it's done, as well. That would (hopefully) stop me from leaving the laundry in the dryer for two-or-three days.

Exciting times!

Nest Protect Smoke Alarms Are Available Again

Two months after Nest took the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm off the market, it is available again. The problem was the "wave-to-silence" feature - during laboratory testing they found an edge case where the wave-to-silence feature could be accidentally activated, delaying (not stopping) an alarm in the case of a real fire. Sales were halted, and an update was pushed out via the internet that disabled the wave-to-silence feature.

Since it is on my mind, I thought I would throw up a post about why I wanted (and like) the Nest Protect.

I'll start out by admitting, straight up, that it is a glossy piece of plastic with a WiFi connection that can talk to me. No bones about it, this product was target-locked on my wallet from the moment I heard about it.

For context, we have three Nest Protects in the house - one on each floor, as required by code for carbon monoxide detectors. These are supplemented by cheap smoke (not carbon monoxide) detectors in each bedroom (and one for the garage, which I still haven't gotten around to installing) - technically this isn't to code, as the cheap detectors and the Nest Protects are not networked with each other. The plan is to gradually replace the cheap stand-alone smoke detectors with networked Nest Protects as budgets allow and occupancy demands. Here's why I like the Nest Protect:

First, before we bought the house, I did a little reading about carbon monoxide. The idea of a deadly gas that can make me too stupid to realize I'm being gassed scared the heck out of me. Even if it wasn't a legal requirement to have a carbon monoxide detector on each floor of the house, I would have installed them.

Second, the most common source of carbon monoxide in homes is from burning fuel - usually the stove and the furnace. Our stove is electric, but our furnace burns natural gas and is 23 years old - at the end of its expected life cycle (my wallet is really looking forward to replacing the furnace, let me tell you). We had already purchased a Nest Thermostat at our previous apartment, and had moved it over to the house when we moved in. When a Nest Protect senses carbon monoxide, it tells the thermostat to shut off the furnace, cutting off the likely source of the carbon monoxide.

Third, all the Nest products are redundantly networked through both WiFi and a variant of the Zigbee protocol. If there is an alert on one of them, ALL of them will tell you about it.

Fourth, the Nest Protects can be named and will talk to you. If there is smoke in the basement, the Nest Protect there (which I imaginatively named "The Basement") will send out an alert, and all the Protects in the house will say (literally): "Warning. Smoke detected in "The Basement". It doesn't get much clearer than that. (If the smoke gets worse, an 85 decibel siren goes off in addition to the verbal warning).

Fifth, and this one turned out to be way more important than I ever expected, the Protects have a motion-activated night-light feature. Pretty much every review I read about the Protect slammed this feature, and I can understand why: if you are doing a product review during business hours and just flick off the light for a few minutes to test this feature, it is not going to do anything for you - the night light is way too dim and your eyes haven't adjusted yet. But I can tell you from experience - the Nest team nailed the correct light level for waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling to the bathroom. As petty a detail as this sounds, this is the primary reason I am in a hurry to add a Nest Protect in the master bedroom.

Sixth (and last in the list because this feature is not yet available), Nest is working on publishing an open API for their devices. This would allow me to tie the Protects in to the rest of the smart house network, and instantly give me motion- and presence-sensors, temperature and humidity sensors, and speakers throughout the house. The API was supposed to be published in "early 2014", but Nest was bought by Google between that announcement and now. However, Google's big I/O event is next week, and is technically in the first half of 2014. Maybe the API will be released then? *shrug* I still don't have my Z-wave network up and running properly, so it's not like I'm ready for it anyway.

So, that's my take on the Nest Protect. I am a very satisfied customer, and I am looking for space in the budget to get more.

TV Cable Boxes are Energy Hogs

LA Times: "Cable TV boxes become second biggest energy users" after air conditioners

I heard about this for the first time a couple of years ago. Cable boxes are ridiculously big, and operate at full power whether they're being used or not.

Our internet plan came with basic cable bundled in. The cable box is still in its shrink-wrap, on a shelf in the basement.

Eating Crow

Dang. My dislike of Comcast is no longer (recently) justified.

Uncle Bill suggested that there was probably a short between my modem and Comcast's amplifier, and said to call in a service team (And Uncle Bill knows a thing or two about computer networks). I really hate calling Comcast, and thus had a strong incentive to think how I could fix it myself.

The entire house has coax outlets, and a lot of it looks like it was done by the previous owners, particularly in the basement. I disconnected all the splitters I could find in the basement, and I'm pretty sure the only coax outlet that's still currently working in the entire house is the one the modem is connected to. Between removing all the extraneous copper and rebooting a few systems, I got the following result, at 6:45 in the evening local time:

Pretty hard to complain about those numbers. I guess it wasn't actually Comcast's fault at all.

Why Am I Paying For This?

Comcast service: Pay for 50Mbps down/25Mbps up, and feel lucky when you can stream YouTube at 360p.

This is so bad I'm going to cancel service and move to....

Hmm.

Comcast has a legally sanctioned, local monopoly on cable internet? Well crap.

Do we really want this company taking over the country's ISPs?

***Update on May 12, 2014 at 7:00PM***

Dang. Looks like it wasn't Comcast's fault at all. Does this mean I have to apologize...?

Spring Has Finally Sprung

No, Brianna, we can't adopt them.

LEDs Attract Fewer Mosquitoes?

We live next to a beaver pond, and there are a LOT of bugs. I started looking into ways keep them away from our house. There were a lot of people willing to sell me solutions, but one option that cropped up was to replace outdoor lights with LED bulbs. The theory is that mosquitos mostly sense in the ultraviolet and blue light range, as well as sense heat and carbon dioxide. Incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) throw out more ultraviolet and blue light (and heat) than LEDs do.

CFL Spectral Analysis

LED Spectral Analysis

Now, this doesn't mean that LEDs repel mosquitoes. They just attract them less than other bulbs do. Some sites are claiming that LEDs don't fix mosquito problems because they lit up a single LED bulb out in the forest and bugs flew to it. But Brianna and I don't live in the middle of a forest. We live in the middle of a neighborhood, and every other house uses incandescents and fluorescents in their exterior lights, (supposedly) making them much more attractive targets for the little bloodsuckers.

We have only had one night with LEDs in the exterior lights (last night), but the initial results were very promising: normally we have a swarm of mosquitoes around the lights and last night I found TWO.

Booyah.

Territory Dispute

Brianna is attempting to annex the entire bathroom counter. I'm going to need the international community to impose sanctions and send in troops and supplies.

Cooling the House in the Summer

We are still occasionally getting snow on the ground, but on days when it doesn't snow, the house can reach 75 F without any help from the furnace. We have a great south-facing exposure, which will be handy in the winter, but makes me pretty nervous about the upcoming summer months. The house does not have a central air conditioning system installed. After three years in Texas, Venezuela and Abu Dhabi, I don't like living in warm climates with no air conditioning.

Unfortunately, air conditioning is expensive, both in up-front purchasing and installation costs and in year-after-year operating costs. I'm not a big fan of that, either.

So what are the options?

• Suffer quietly through the summer without any type of cooling (not going to happen).
• Refurbish or replace the gigantic, gross and rusty swamp cooler hanging off the house's west face.
• Get a window AC unit for the master bedroom - I kinda like this idea, and there is a cool "smart" window AC unit due out in May.
  
• Shell out $5000+ for a new central air system, and pay ~$200/month extra in electricity.
• Install a whole-house fan in the attic.

The more I think about it, the more I like the last idea. A whole house fan resides at the highest ceiling in the house, venting hot air into (and out through) the attic and drawing cool air up from the basement. The house I lived in the last two years of college had a whole-house fan, and I remember it working rather well during the muggy Michigan summers. Having someone else do the installation seems to run between $1500 and $2000 all-in, and I bet my brother-in-law and I could do it for significantly less. Add some automation to make it a little bit smart about what time of day it runs automatically, and I think this could be a winner.

(I have to admit, I still like the idea of a smart window AC unit. It has wi-fi. And a phone app. It's aimed right at my weak points!)