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Energy conservation
In this time of high energy usage, the big buzz is on conservation. So much so, that CalTrans has lit up the freeway billboards with something like "Flex Your Power. Converse Energy." Hmmm...how much energy does it take to light up those signs? Brilliant. The media and energy officials are saying to keep the thermostat at 78 degrees if you can. I'm thinking, if I put the thermostat at 78 degrees, the temperate in our house would drop by 6-10 degrees! People really need to use fans and suffer to some degree. We have air conditioning, but have never turned it on. Why? Cooling our house for just my wife and me with our dog is a complete waste. Others should follow suit, in my opinion. Our electricity usage is lower, I think, in the summer than in the winter despite the heat. In the winter, we run our heat in the early morning and in the evening; it is gas forced hot air, so the fan on the furnace runs to blow the hot air around.
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Car alarms
Yesterday I was in a parking lot and heard a car alarm go off. Like any good citizen, I dashed over to the car to make sure it wasn't being stolen. Ha! Did you really believe that? Car alarms are almost completely useless. A better system for car alarms is a GPS tracking device (on the lines of LoJack, but LoJack requires you to report the car stolen which could be too late by hours especially overnight) that alerts the police when the car moves without using your coded key. That is probably the most effective way to recover a stolen car.
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Car kit issue...yuck
Following up on my earlier post, my car kit has an issue; the speaker in the Garmin sounds like crap and is too low (I think the car kit has the amplification, but the speaker is distorting the sounds). So, tomorrow it is back to Fry's to look for an external CB (marine) speaker that I can mount under my center console. I also wired the car kit using only the front left speaker, so maybe if I wire all speakers together, I can get decent amplification with a decent speaker (there is probably a flaw in this theory, something to do with impedance I'd guess).
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Printers have a lot to be desired
About 3 years ago, I bought a Canon i470D printer to print photos as it was cheap and I could get cheap ink. It did a good job over its life, but yesterday it decided (yes, I know this is the passive voice, but I didn't decide anything for it) that it wasn't going to print black despite my hour of futzing with it, cleaning the print head, changing ink, etc. I said forget it and dumped the printer in the trash (OK, I took out all the circuitry first so that I could comply with the mandatory law requiring us to recycle stuff containing mercury). I checked the Fry's ad (yes, I don't like shopping there, but they always have cheap printers). They had an Epson R320 refurbished for $40 after rebate. As I figure these printers are cheap and will break anyway, how bad could a refurbished one be? So far, knock on wood, the printer prints well and the fact that it uses 6 separate ink cartridges is good so that I don't have to replace all of them.