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  • The Reverse Osmosis Saga Continues

    The Reverse Osmosis Saga Continues

    As I posted about a couple of weeks ago, my under-sink Reverse Osmosis (RO) filtering system went tits-up. It was a Whirlpool WHER25, that had developed stress cracks in the manifold (where the filters attach). It was an injection molded part, and while it wasn’t terribly expensive to replace, doing a little of internet searching yielded that this system pretty much sucked, failed often, and the shipping costs were more than the cost of the manifold.

    I could have just removed the existing unit, and lived with our tap water, but it is Great Oaks, it is pumped out of the ground, and it is horribly hard, and has a strange taste. Not awful, but after using RO water for years, you can tell the difference in your drinking water, your coffee, and your cooking. You don’t have to be a snob to know it. (the first place we had an RO system was when we bought our house in Tucson, AZ. The water there was awful, and it was a necessity). The reality is that living without it would be a non-starter. (more…)

  • Sucky Netflix Originals

    Sucky Netflix Originals

    I posted a while back on how I pretty much have written off Netflix Originals. While I will grant that Narcos was pretty solid, every, and I mean EVERY other one I have tried has sucked.

    I wouldn’t care so much, except that Netflix over-hypes their originals, pushing it to the top of my browsing, and often burying my “List” or “Continue Watching” down 20 or so layers, just to put their preferences on the top. (more…)

  • Product review: Whirlpool WHER25 RO system

    Product review: Whirlpool WHER25 RO system

    When we bought our house in South San José, I learned that we were on Great Oaks water. Having experienced that when I lived in my first condo, I knew the water was hard, and had a “taste”. (it is well water)

    While there was a filtration system, it was a simple cartridge system, and by how frozen the cartridges were to the manifold, it was clear that it had been installed and neglected for a long time (so long, that the cartridges went end of life and couldn’t be replaced).

    I looked for a little better system, and bought a Whirlpool Reverse Osmosis system for the under sink filtration. I will admit defeat on the installation (I hate plumbing), so we hired a handyman to get it fitted in July 2015. (more…)

  • Down with the Sickness

    Down with the Sickness

    Down with the sickness Album - DisturbedA few weeks ago, I regaled you with my quest for a replacement to the venerable Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor temperature monitor. It had become somewhat unreliable (the radio exterior sensor would lose contact many times a day with the base station), and the replacement with a La Crosse unit that so far seems vastly superior in its reliability (of course, it has been less than a month compared to the 13 or so years I had the Oregon Scientific hanging).

    At that time, I did a little digging on more robust weather monitoring systems. Something that tracked humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, temperature (and not impacted by radiative heat), wind direction and speed, in short a real weather station. (more…)

  • Back in the Saddle

    Back in the Saddle

    The downside of working full time again is the dearth of time to exercise. Little over a year ago, spending some down time between jobs, I was able to get out for lengthy exercise sessions every day. That included typically 3 bicycle rides a week, often up to 30 miles at a through. Alas, that freedom to get out and pound the pavement was severely curtailed with a regular job.

    I still did get out on the weekends to walk and hike, but the bicycles have remained (mostly) parked in the garage. Earlier this spring I did get out a few times, but ouch, the acclimatization of my derrière to the saddle was punishing, so apart from isolated rides, they remained hung up in the garage. (more…)

  • Goodbye to a Friend – Oregon Scientific Thermometer

    Goodbye to a Friend – Oregon Scientific Thermometer

    An old friend, an indoor/outdoor temperature monitoring station, made by Oregon Scientific. I am pretty sure I bought this while I lived in my first Condo in San Jose. An impulse buy on one of my trips to Fry’s Electronics, it has a head unit, and one remote sensor. The remote sensor communicates with the head unit via radio, and it worked quite well. (more…)

  • Tinkering part 2

    Tinkering part 2

    The last installment I mentioned how I branched out in my tinkering, and bought a basic FPGA board to play with. While the major makers (Alterra (now Intel) and Xilinx both have prototype boards, they are typically focused on the high end, and are quite expensive. I bought the Embedded Micro “Mojo” board, a modestly priced unit with a suitably powerful Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA.

    I did get the IDE working, it is a pretty simple Java application, however, it requires a pretty hefty development package from Xilinx, their ISE Design Suite tools. As that is supported only on Windows and Linux, it does force me to keep a functioning Windows system around. Following the instructions was pretty straightforward, and I had to apply for a webPACK license (free) to use the toolchain. Simple, but it was a monstrous download (about 7 gigabytes). (more…)

  • Tinkering – FPGA

    Tinkering – FPGA

    If you have been a long time follower, you might remember a flurry of activity in late 2015 and early 2016 when I was diving into tinkering with an Arduino board. At the time, I was building bits and pieces to make a remote weather station. (that was derailed by an unrelated life change, but I have slowly gotten back into it.)

    The Arduino is interesting as it is a pretty complete SOC, with memory, microcontroller, CPU, and a pretty robust set of digital and analog IO’s. Plenty of cool things you can do with it, and it is really simple to program. Ordinary C code, solid libraries, and third parties make a pretty complete set of sensors and widgets, with libraries to support them. (more…)

  • A decent “Free” PC

    A decent “Free” PC

    My mother inlaw has been in an assisted living community for a couple of years. As part of the move in, my brother inlaw got her this service called “Grandcare” that provides a touchscreen PC with a very customized user interface.

    The first PC that was sent to her room was a pretty large HP Envy 20 AIO touchscreen system. First manufactured in 2012, it has a HD resolution, 20″ touch screen display, and is licensed for Windows 8/8.1 (there is no sticker on it, the OEM code is in the BIOS ROM.) It has a 3.1 GHz Pentium G870 chip, which is a dual core, 4 thread processor with integrated Intel HD graphics. Just fine for this system. (more…)

  • Review: Doc Martin

    Review: Doc Martin

    Doc Martin

    Netflix had been offering me as a “recommended” show to watch a series called “Doc Martin”. I had successfully ignored it for months, when one evening, as I was scrolling (and scrolling and scrolling) looking for anything decent, I saw it roll up again.

    What the hell, I fired it up, expecting it to be like many of their recommendations. However, it quickly sucked me in with the story, and the cinematography.

    Set in the seaside village of Portwenn (actually Port Isaac) in the Cornwall region of England, it is the story of a once masterful surgeon who developed haemophobia (fear of blood), and having given up his senior posting in London, became the GP of the village. (more…)