Category: Life

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Books Read: 2019

As I did last year, below is a listing of all the books I read in the previous year, and my thoughts on them. For the first time, all of the books I read last year were in digital form.

I began the year finishing Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. I read this as part of a collection of his Christmas stories.

In keeping with my love of murder mysteries, I read Introducing Agatha Raisin: The Quiche of Death/The Vicious Vet, the first of the Agatha Raisin books by M. C. Beaton. We’ve watched the TV series and they seemed like some light reading after the holidays.… Click here to read more!

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Books Read: 2018

Using my (now aged) Kindle, I do a fair bit of reading. For some reason, whenever I finish a book I put it into a folder on my Kindle named for the current year. These folders exist only on the Kindle itself, so I thought I might start to keep track of them here on the blog.

At the end of 2017 I was reading a lot of memoirs of people who moved into the wilderness, both in recent years and in centuries past. That continued into 2018 and the first book I read was:

Winds of Skilak, by Bonnie Ward
This was an excellent book, written by Bonnie, about her and her husband’s journey leaving Ohio and moving to an isolated island on Skilak Lake in Alaska.… Click here to read more!

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One Guy’s Approach to Being More Healthy

I’m not a doctor. I’m not an expert. I know only what I’ve been doing and how it’s been going for me. I’m not telling anyone what to do or making a recommendation. This is what I’ve been doing for the past year and it’s been working well for me so I thought I’d document the process a bit.

All that being said, let me explain a bit of background. I’m a pretty average American guy with more then a few extra pounds hanging around that I would like to get rid of. Generally speaking, I’ve never been one to eat a lot of fast food but I do have a sweet tooth.… Click here to read more!

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Back Burner Blogging…

I know it seems like the blog here is dead. It appears Twitter has taken over and I’ve given up writing longer form articles. It’s as though my world has moved from 1400 words, to 140 characters. When you get right down to it though, I’ve just not had the time or motivation to get things posted here. I don’t have anything to say at the moment…

I’m in the process of buying a house, my first house. In keeping with my current life goals of growing an increasing amount of my food, I’m trying to find a livable place with a good bit of land for short money.… Click here to read more!

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Getting Better Fuel Efficiency

These days everyone and their mom is posting on the internet about getting better gas mileage. I’ve read a lot of articles that talk about the topic and they all seem to have a few things in common. The first is that a few items are unrealistic and the second being that the rest is basically common sense. I’m not going to bother doing a lot of linking for this article, you can google for the same 80 million pages just the same as I can but I thought I would point out this one article from MotherJones.com about hypermiling.… Click here to read more!

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Traffic Lights – Time Wasters for All!

I few months ago my route to work changed and now includes about a dozen traffic lights. I used to have to commute 90+ minutes down toward Boston in traffic but since my office has moved I now have the option of taking a more rural route. I’m not complaining.. it’s a huge improvement over the traffic and truth be told I could still cover most of my current commute on highways if I wanted to. It’s not that I’m unhappy with the lights, it’s just that I think they could be programmed to work more efficiently. Let me also preface this by mentioning that all of these observations are likely null and void in a more urban area where traffic is ubiquitous.… Click here to read more!

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Progress Check In

I’ve been as busy as ever these past few weeks but I have been slowly making progress on all my little projects. Yesterday Apple posted a few 160GB iPod Classics to the refurb site so I scooped one up. Should be here next week. When I bought I considered also getting an apple dock but at $50 it doesn’t seem worth it for my needs. I did pickup one of the JBL On Stage II speakers. It’s kinda pricy at $129 but it gets great reviews and sounds much bigger then it is. I’ll review it when I’ve gotten a chance to test it out.… Click here to read more!

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One Laptop Per Child

The One Laptop Per Child project is nothing new in the world of us geeks. What is new is that they will soon be available for purchase in North America during a narrow window in November.

If you are not familiar with the project then by all means check it out, it’s pretty amazing. Basically, a group of people got together and decided to put together a super durable machine for children in 3rd world nations. This thing has battery life from 6 hours to 24 depending on use. It had no internal moving parts to break like fans and hard drives.… Click here to read more!

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iPod Touch, I yearn for you!

Ok, in case you live under a rock take a look at the new stuff out friends at Apple have released. Apple has released a device that I have hoped for since they announced the iPhone itself back in January. They are calling it the iPod Touch, picture and iPhone sans the phone. It’s all the goodness without any of the superfluous AT&T crap. This I will own, for two reasons.

Reason one: It’s awesome looking and I have to have it. Like a raccoon I am drawn to the shiny device and must have it in my grubby hands.… Click here to read more!

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The Wheels of Progress

Well, It’s been a while hasn’t it? Let me wipe the cob webs of the site (and the servers, but thats another post) and mention a couple of things I have in the works. First off, my Thecus N5200 has been having some trouble lately and I think it’s something that needs to be posted about. As it turns out the web interface for the product is severely lacking and does not in any way provide adequate data about the array’s health. Look for a scathing post about that coming up…

In other (better) news Apple has released some new software (iLife 08,iWork 08) and updated both the Mac Mini and the iMac.… Click here to read more!