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Monday, 25 January 2016

11:30 – We ended up bagging Orange is the New Black. I don’t have any interest in a series set in a women’s prison, let alone one with with a whining, entitled bitch as the protagonist. We finished series one of Last Tango in Halifax last night, and started on series two. It’s a decent series, as is everything we’ve ever watched that stars Derek Jacobi (AKA Clavdivs and Cadfael). The entire cast is excellent, but Nicola Walker as Gillian stands out even among that group.

I finished Volume 4 of Bobby Andrews’ Prepper’s Crucible series. That didn’t take long. With only six normal-length chapters, this volume barely makes it into novella territory as far as I’m concerned. It’s listed as 115 pages on the Kindle, and totals less than 31,000 words. Still, it was something new to read. But it does highlight a disturbing trend, particularly in PA writing, of writing a third or a quarter of a novel and selling it at the price of a full novel.

I wish I had the time to follow OFD’s and Jen’s lead, and start work on a PA novel series myself. I’m pretty sure I could do a decent job on it, particularly given the generally weak competition. Just for relaxation, I may rough out an outline and a couple chapters to see how it goes. And, yes, I’m still working on the non-fiction prepping book, although the move and the science kit business don’t leave me much time to work on it recently.

13:25 – I just did something I haven’t done for probably 15 years or more: ordered a desktop computer. Our computing environment here is too fragile, and I just don’t have time to build a desktop.

So I ordered a Lenovo H50 desktop mini-tower with an Intel Core i7-4790, which is 25% to 50% faster than the Core i7-980X processor in my old, dead main desktop system. That’ll replace my current main system, so to speak, which is a low-end Dell Inspiron notebook that has only a Core i3 processor and 4 GB of memory. That notebook is simply not enough to handle the way I work, which is with a lot of windows open.

When I built i7-980X desktop several years ago, it was about $2,500 worth of system. The new desktop was $750, on sale for $650. Even with shipping and sales tax, it totaled only $727. I’ll leave it running Windows 10, because I need Windows to run the stamps.com software. I’ll disconnect the notebook, which is running Linux Mint, from the display, keyboard, and mouse, and start using it upstairs as my secondary system. At least I can get some work done on it, which I can’t on my Kindle Fire.

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Thursday, 1 October 2015

09:01 – Yesterday was Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of today, she’s working for our own company. Now that she has control of her own time, she’s heading over to the gym this morning. This afternoon she’ll be doing science kit stuff, starting with filling a bunch of chemical bottles.

I called Amazon yesterday about the problems I was having with my Fire HD7. They’re sending out a replacement, which should arrive tomorrow, along with a return label for the old one.

Science kit sales are down. Not a single order so far this month.

I started work yesterday on the heirloom seed vault we’ll offer in the book. So far, we have maybe 2/3 of the final lineup, including high-nutrition and/or flavorful vegetables like beans, beets, carrots, corn, onions, peas, sweet pepper, tomatoes, and turnips. For herbs, we have basil, oregano, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. We’ll be adding several herbs, including perhaps stevia (a no-calorie sweetener, although it’s hard to grow outside the far south), St. John’s wort (a natural anti-depressant), tobacco, and so on. We’ll also be adding peanuts and sunflowers as sources of oil, and perhaps poppy.

There’s a lot of work to be done. Obtaining suitable seeds is the least of it. We need to dry the seeds to 7% to 8% moisture before packaging them, and I need to write detailed instructions for planting, harvesting, preserving, and seed-saving.

The varieties included will be suitable to grow in temperate climates, including all of the continental US. Hawaii and particularly Alaska have issues all their own, but most or all of the varieties should do acceptably well in those two states as well. We’re also focusing on reliable varieties with reasonable disease resistance, which is to say ones that are easier for inexperienced gardeners to succeed with. The quantities included–at least 100 seeds of each variety, and often several thousand–are intended to be sufficient for a family of four to six people, with allowances made for newbie mistakes, crop failures, reduced germination rates after long storage, and so on.

One of the annoying things about a lot of similar products is that the packaging could almost intentionally be designed to encourage people to put them on the shelf and forget about them rather than actually plant some of the seeds to check viability. You open a #10 can and find a bunch of paper envelopes inside. There goes your seal.

We’ll use a foil-laminate Mylar bag as an outer container, which can be resealed with a hot clothes iron. We’ll use various sizes of plastic vials, tubes, and bottles to contain the individual seeds. We’ll encourage people to open the bag when they receive it and plant at least a few of each type of seed so that they can get some experience growing them. The package can then be resealed with a clothes iron and stuck in the freezer, where it’ll remain useful for many years to come. This is what we ourselves will be depending on if we’re reduced to growing our own food, so you can be sure we’ll be making this kit as reliable a source of food as we possibly can.

Our target price for this kit is $150, shipping included, although it may end up higher than that. We intend to begin shipping the first batch of these kits next month. If any of you regular readers/commenters want to order one or more of these kits, you can do so for $100 per kit if you place your order in the next few days. To do so, go to paypal.com, choose the option to send money, and transfer $100 for each kit you want to orders (at) thehomescientist (dot) com. Make sure to include your mailing address, either street address or PO box.

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Wednesday, 30 September 2015

08:04 – Today is Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of tomorrow, she’s working for our own company.

Instead of rooting my Fire HD7 and installing Android, I decided to contact Amazon about a warranty replacement. Even after wiping it to defaults and using nothing but the standard configuration to check web pages and email, it locks up several times an evening to the point where it requires a hard reboot. The usual symptom is that the screen either goes completely black or the left 2/3 remains lit up although unresponsive and the right 1/3 is black. I’ve had it for only five months, so it should still be under warranty. I’ll contact Amazon today.

Science kit sales are fine. For 8/15, we did only 74% the revenue of 8/14, but for 9/15 we’ve done 153% the revenue of 9/14. Total revenue for 8+9/15 is at 99.8% of total revenue for 8+9/14. One more order today would take us over 100%.

We are getting low stock on biology and forensic kits, so I’ll spend some time today making up chemical solutions and filling bottles.

Email from Jen. She and her husband decided to order that Renogy 400W solar starter kit, a decent inverter, and some heavy cabling for a battery bank. They picked up several golf cart batteries locally. They’re going to charge up the battery bank with an AC charger, connect the inverter, and then run a known load to see what kind of life they get from a full charge. They’ll then connect up the four 100W panels and see what kind of charging performance they get from them. After that, they’ll stick the fully charged batteries on the shelf in the garage and store the panels and associated gear in a Faraday cage they’ll build from copper screening.

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Tuesday, 29 September 2015

07:54 – It’s Barbara’s next to last day of working for someone other than ourselves.

I’m seriously thinking about blowing away the Amazon-hacked OS on my Fire HD7 and replacing it with vanilla Android. I’m getting tired of the crashes and forced reboots with Fire OS, and the other night for the first time the splash ad screen was a video with loud audio. That’s simply obnoxious. I’m not sure how to go about installing Android, but I’m sure there are instructions all over the Internet. If I brick it, I brick it. No great loss at this point.

I’ve harshly criticized those ridiculous X-person/Y-year emergency food kits in the book, but yesterday I followed a link to the most ridiculous one yet: the Augason Farms Mega 40-Person 1-Year Food Storage Set for only $29,999.09. Wow, enough food to feed 40 people for one year, at “only” $750 per person-year. The catch is that this kit provides only “Approximately 1,297 calories/day/person”, which is roughly what the Nazis fed inmates in their concentration camps. So this kit is fine, if you want your 40 people at the end of one year to look like those stick figures in the newsreels shot when the Allies liberated the concentration camps at the end of WWII. Jesus wept.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Augason Farms products, and recommend them. We have a bunch of AF #10 cans in our long-term storage, but only stuff like powdered eggs, butter, and cheese, TVP in beef and chicken, and similar supplemental items to give some flavor to the bulk rice, flour, pasta, and similar items we keep in quantity. But their so-called 40-person/1-year kit is actually more like a 20-person/1-year kit or even a 15-person/1-year kit. Calling it good for 40 people is simply a lie.

Which got me thinking that I really needed to add a section to the book about Basal Metabolic Rate. I just used the Mifflin St Jeor equation to calculate my own BMR, which is 1,750 calories/day. Understand that BMR is the amount of energy required just for autonomic functions like respiration, circulating blood, digesting food, making new cells, and so on. It assumes you’re lying flat on your back and engaging in zero physical activity. BMR typically accounts for 60% to 75% of total energy needs, assuming only very light physical activity. For my 1,750 cal/day BMR, that means I actually need 2,333 cal/day to 2,917 cal/day. If I’m engaging in heavier physical activity, I’ll need more, perhaps 3,500 cal/day or more.

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Saturday, 5 September 2015

08:34 – Before I bought Barbara her Kindle Fire HDX, I did some reading. The consensus seemed to be that tablets, including the Fire, were well-suited for content consumers but sucked for content producers. After months of using Barbara’s HDX and my own Fire HD, I conclude that Kindle Fires suck, period. Short battery life, unreliable WiFi connections, and my HD locks up frequently and requires a power reset. Barbara is also frustrated with her HDX, whose WiFi connection is even less reliable than my HD’s.

It may be that not all tablets suck as badly as the Fires. I’m prepared to believe that Amazon butchered the OS in the interests of encouraging customers to buy their products. If I have time, I may replace the Amazon OS on my HD with a vanilla Android.

Or I may simply start using the Dell notebook that’s been sitting unused for months on my side table. It runs Windows 8, but even that has to be more reliable than these Kindles.

13:24 – Just back from a small Costco run. I didn’t grab much in the way of shelf-stable stuff, other than 12 gallons (45 liters) of bottled water, 22 pounds (10 kilos) of assorted pasta, six large jars of applesauce, a can of Gatorade lemon/lime drink mix, a couple large boxes of Ritz crackers (which have surprisingly long shelf life even in the original cellophane tubes), a jar of cashews, and a couple other small items.

Barbara is out doing yardwork at the moment, while I do laundry and ship kits. This weekend, we’re going to make bread the easy way.

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Thursday, 20 August 2015

07:38 – Only one more day until Barbara gets home. She called yesterday around lunchtime to remind me to fire up Thunderbird on her notebook and download and delete all the spam so she wouldn’t have a ton of it to deal with when she returns.

As I was doing that, a message popped up telling me that the system was going to reboot automatically in 14 minutes and 50 seconds and suggesting that I save any unsaved work. I canceled out of that window, finished what I was doing in Thunderbird, and clicked on the MS icon in the taskbar. Turns out it was about to upgrade Barbara’s notebook to Windows 10. I called her back and we decided to discuss it after she gets home.

She’s using a low-end Dell notebook. I bought two identical ones when I was having problems getting postage labels printed on the USPS site. I signed up with stamps.com, which has Windows and Mac clients, but no Linux clients, so I needed a Windows system. Two, actually, one for backup. But USPS has been rock solid for months now, so I finally canceled my stamps.com account and no longer need a Windows system, let alone two.

I think I’m going to suggest to Barbara that we upgrade her system to Linux Mint. I’ll pull the Windows drives from both of our notebooks and replace them with SSDs for better performance. While I’m at it, I’ll also upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB or more.

I finished watching Heartland series 7 last night. I couldn’t find the series 8 discs, so instead of burning another set I just started re-watching Jericho on Netflix streaming. It’s by far the best of the PA series I’ve seen. Yes, there are a few howlers–like the doctor telling someone who’s been exposed to fallout to take two tablespoons of iodine solution PO–but overall they get it right. And the doctor did at least tell the patient to take the iodine with some canned peaches. Those contain vitamin C, which would convert the corrosive, toxic native iodine to harmless iodide ions. The writing is tight, the acting is decent, and the scenario is plausible. Within the limitations of a TV series, they did an excellent job.

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Monday, 10 August 2015

08:03 – I bought Barbara a Kindle HDX late last year mainly as an inexpensive tablet that she could use evenings in the den for checking email and web pages. Then Amazon put their older Kindle HD on sale for $70, so I grabbed one of those for myself. After giving them a fair chance, I’ve concluded that they’re marginally useful for those, but they’re so flaky that they’re a PITA to use. They’re unstable. Frequently they have problems connecting to WiFi. The browser often crashes. Amazon’s Silk browser is crap, as is their butchered version of Android. Firefox is better, but still hinky. I’m wondering if these units can run a standard Linux like Mint.

Speaking of which, the Mantra theme I switched to a few weeks ago works fine on a regular PC, but it’s just about unusable on a tablet. I compared this site last night to Barbara’s site, which is running the original theme that I’d been using, and there was no comparison. So I’ve decided to switch back, at least for now.

More work on science kit stuff today.

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Wednesday, 22 July 2015

08:45 – The Kindle Fire proxy problem appears to be solved. There’s an add-on for Firefox for Android called uBlock, which appears to do the job and hasn’t crashed yet. It’s also a lot faster than Adblock Plus, takes far less memory and processor, and uses AdBlock Plus lists.

I finished Thomas Sherry’s Deep Winter last night. In relative terms–for PA fiction written by wannabe authors–it probably deserves three stars. In absolute terms, it rates 0 or 1 star. The guy never met an apostrophe he didn’t like. He thinks the possessive of it is it’s, the possessive of you is you’re and the plural of girl is girl’s. The dialog is stilted at best. He and his characters are fundies. He scatters bible verses and prayers throughout the text. His lead character is obnoxious and treats women not much better than muslims do. And the convenience of it all. His group just happens to live on an old farm in the midst of a normal suburban area in a major urban center. Any time he needs something, it just happens to be in one of the outbuildings or the barn. Even in the midst of a widespread catastrophe with millions dead in Washington state from an earthquake and volcanic eruption, it seems the local police and military(!) are seconds away when he needs them to deal with looters. They arrive immediately when he summons them, kill the looters for him, and thank him for being such a good citizen. Geez. This book is fantasy, and badly-written fantasy at that. I’m fortunate in that I read very fast, so I don’t waste much time reading this kind of crap all the way to the end. Reading it is like watching a train wreck in slow, very slow, motion.

More work on science kits today.

09:45 – Vermeer prepper.

Girl-with-a-Pearl-Earring-and-a-blaster

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Tuesday, 21 July 2015

07:53 – One of the first things I did when I was setting up my Kindle Fire HD last November was install Adblock Plus, despite the large number of one-star reviews. Many of those one-star comments said pretty much the same thing: AdBlock Plus on a desktop/notebook system was great, but on Android it was crap. They were right. After eight months of suffering frequent proxy server failures, I finally decided just to put up with the ads, so I uninstalled AdBlock Plus. It can’t be fixed, and the fault lies with Google rather than AdBlock Plus.

So now I’m seeing ads, and I’m making a point of clicking on lots of them, just to cost the advertisers money for no return. Not only will I never buy anything from one of those ads, but I’m keeping a mental list of which companies are placing those ads so I’ll remember not to buy from them under any circumstances.

More work on science kits today.

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Tuesday, 14 July 2015

08:53 – I wrote Sunday,

“As far as I can see, the only way out of this for Greece, if there is any way out, is for the EU to abolish government at all levels in Greece and appoint a receiver to oversee the bankruptcy of Greece and the auctioning off of Greek assets to pay off the creditors. Greece will have to become an EU colony for the foreseeable future, ceding all local control.”

but I didn’t actually expect them to do it. I underestimated just how much the Germans and the rest of the Northern Tier distrust Greece, because that’s essentially what they’ve gotten Tsipras to agree to. Whether or not the Greek legislators vote tomorrow to accept those humiliating terms is still very much up in the air. And, even if they do, it’s extremely unlikely that the Northern Tier will agree to fund yet another “bail out” for Greece, knowing that Greece will never repay the earlier bail outs, let alone the one under discussion. Payback, as they say, is a bitch.

My next task is to build another 60 biology kits and chemistry kits, which I’ll be working on over the next few days. With what we already have on hand, those should be enough to carry us through July and into August. Once I get those built, we’ll go back to making up solutions, labeling and filling bottles, and making up subassemblies for yet another batch of kits.

Barbara’s TV remote stopped working a week or so ago. When I popped the lid of the battery compartment, I found that the two AAA alkalines had leaked. At the time, I thought nothing about it. I just cleaned out the compartment, put a fresh pair of alkalines in, and gave it back to her. The other night, it stopped working again. When I opened it, the new cells had leaked. So this time I rinsed it out thoroughly under running tap water and put it aside to dry completely. This morning, I used a hair dryer for a couple of minutes to make sure the interior was dry, and again replaced the two AAA alkalines from a new pack of them. It works. We’ll see if it keeps working or the cells leak again.

Which has gotten me thinking about replacing all of our AA and AAA alkalines with low self-discharge (LSD) NiMH cells. We’ll use up our remaining stock of alkalines, which is around 100 of the AAA’s and maybe 40 of the AA’s, and then shift over to the rechargeables. For now, I’m going to pull the alkalines from our long-term storage stuff–flashlights, radios, etc.–and put the devices and a couple sets of alkalines with taped terminals in plastic bags.

We have a few devices that use C or D alkalines, mostly flashlights and lanterns, and those are a problem to convert to NiMH. C and D cells make up a tiny percentage of sales. AA and AAA combined are literally something like 97% of sales. So C or D NiMH cells are pretty hard to find, even on-line. When you can find them, they fall into one of three categories: ones made by name-brand alkaline companies like Duracell, Energizer and other mass-market suppliers, cheap Chinese ones that I wouldn’t trust, and the big name-brand NiMH cells like MaHa and Powerex. The Duracell/Energizer class ones are crap. They don’t want to cannibalize their alkaline sales, so their NiMH models are generally pathetic, with capacities of maybe 2,500 mAH in D (versus 10,000 to 12,000 mAH for the good brands). Their only advantage is that they’re reasonably inexpensive, roughly four or fives times the $1.25 price of an alkaline. Many of the Chinese no-name D cells have reasonable rated capacities of 8,000 to 10,000 mAH, but that’s usually grossly exaggerated and these rechargeables tend to die fairly young. Then there are the good brands, which have high capacities and are quite reliable. The problem with them is the price, typically $30 or so each. And, to top it all off, probably half of the available C and D models use early generation technology and are not low self-discharge. So I think we’ll stick with alkalines for our C and D devices.

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