News and Views

My mother just had surgery today for a detached retina. I was at her house on Friday last week when she mentioned to me that she couldn’t see out of one side of her eye. There seemed to be a curtain over it. That sounded like the classic symptom of a detaching retina, and I […]

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National Geographic has a project called The Genographic Project. They are collecting DNA from people all over the world to “help answer fundamental questions about where humans originated and how we came to populate the Earth.” So far over a half million people have contributed DNA. Gisele and I are also participating in this project. […]

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I got a Blu-ray player a couple of years ago for Christmas. The picture quality of Blu-ray is clearly better than DVD, especially on my big 65″ TV, but unless I think about it I don’t really notice it. But Blu-ray has one characteristic that makes it much inferior to DVD. When I insert a […]

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I flew my quadricopter up to take a quick look at the solar panels. I left this in full resolution when uploading to YouTube. Set it to highest quality when viewing to see how the original looks.

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Here’s my newest toy; a quadricopter: I got it yesterday from Brookstone It’s a remote control helicopter with 4 rotors that work together to give amazing stability and control. It can be easily controlled with either an iPad, iPhone or Android tablet or phone, indoors or out. There’s one mode where you just tilt the […]

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Verizon is still ranked number one for coverage in the US, but it’s becoming very expensive. We pay about $220 a month for 4 phones, one of which isn’t even “smart”. The rest of my family is going to stay with Verizon for now, but I’m in the process of jumping ship. I bought the […]

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Consumer Reports just published the results of their car ownership survey, and for two years in a row the Chevy Volt has the highest rate of “Yes” answers to the question “Would you buy this car again?” 92% of Volt owners said “Yes!”, just nosing out the Corvette and Porsche 911 at 91%. I’m certainly […]

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Yesterday I produced more electricity than I consumed for the first time since spring. At the end of the day I was about 1.5 kWh in the black, having produced 35.5 and consumed 34. I would have broken even several times over the past couple of weeks (as the need for air conditioning has plummeted) […]

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With a $40 price I felt it was worth it to try Windows 8. Gisele’s computer was still running XP, and was working fine, but since the rest of the computers in the family already have Windows 7, it seemed like the logical candidate. So yesterday I downloaded a copy of Windows 8 and set […]

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