Category: Uncategorized

That’s the headline that greeted me when I opened the latest copy of Der Spiegel this week. And that headline was not only right, it pointed out what our future is going to be like. A future where you can’t believe anything you see, read or hear.

The article featured photos on the cover that have no basis in reality and more inside like King Charles in a very unflattering suit drinking a cocktail, Elton John as a child, and a picture of a dejected looking Trump in a prison jumpsuit cleaning toilets in a jail bathroom. Every photo was, of course, a fake created some some kind of AI software. And every photo was so realistic looking that the average person who was unaware of the existence of this software would have believed they were real.

It is so ridiculously easy these days to make fake photos, fake videos, fake sound tracks, etc. that you can’t really trust anything any longer. That bowl of fruit there on the right? That doesn’t exist. It took all of maybe a minute for an AI to create that image from my written description. Adobe even has a beta version of Photoshop that I’ve been playing with which incorporates the same technology.

The AI “revolution” as I heard someone call it should, frankly, scare the hell out of you. We already have media outlets firing their staffs and replacing their writers with AI generated content. One of the reasons the actors strike is going on right now is because the movie studios and television production companies wanted to right to scan in images of actors to be able to use their physical appearance to use those images to create new content without the consent of the actors and without compensating them for using their images.

I guess maybe I’m sounding paranoid. There are scientists and others out there who claim that AI is the best thing ever and it’s going to improve our lives.

But think about this for a moment: How are we going to survive in a world where we can’t tell lies from the truth? Where every photo, every video we’re shown has to be considered suspect? They used to say that “a photo is worth a thousand words”. That statement is no longer true. These days a photo can be worth a thousand lies.

I always assumed I wasn’t going to be able to run our central air conditioning system off the solar power system. I based that assumption on multiple reports from people on Youtube and other places that have systems similar to mine that showed their EG4 inverters going into overload and shutting down when they tried to start up their aircon systems.

I decided to try it myself. I was not optimistic. This is a big house, 2,400 sq feet, it’s about 90 degrees outside, and that’s a huge compressor sitting out there. Still, what’s the worst that could happen? (Don’t answer that.) I decided to try it.

I shut down the air conditioning system, switched the house over to the EG4 inverters. Once everything was switched over, I held my breath and switched on the air conditioning and…

It worked? Yeah, it just worked. No muss, no fuss, no alarms, nothing. The lights didn’t even flicker. The cooling fans in the EG4s didn’t even speed up.

Apparently this air conditioning system is way, way more efficient than I thought. It’s only pulling about 1.8 KW maximum after the initial startup surge. How is that even possible? This is like a 4 ton air conditioner. Those generally average about 3 KW to 4KW, and this one is using half that? Wow… I just ran some rough numbers and it seems I could run the entire house, including the air con, off just the batteries and the EG4s for about 12 hours. Wow… Yeah, I know I said wow before, but still, wow…

I’ve been thinking about the future of automobiles of late and I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense to me.

Let’s start with EVs. Don’t get me wrong. I like electric vehicles. But I’m not sure if they are going to be the ultimate solution to the problem of weaning people off of internal combustion engines. I’ve talked before about how I don’t think that we have enough electrical generating capacity or a resilient enough electrical distribution system to deal with the tens of millions of EVs some people would like to see on the road. Then add into that mix electric long haul trucks, electric tractors and electric, well, electric everything, and the situation becomes even more strained.

But that is a problem that can (or could be if we’d be willing to actually pay for it) fixed relatively easily, however. There is another problem that is not so easily fixed.

There are something like 1.4 billion motor vehicles in the world. That is not a typo. 1.4 billion. There are close to 300 million in the United States alone. And people think that we can replace every single one of those internal combustion engine powered vehicles with their electric counterpart.

Guess what? We can’t.

Building those hundreds of millions of electric vehicles requires raw materials that aren’t easy to find, are difficult to mine, difficult to refine and distribute. And even the more common resources that are needed, like copper for wiring, are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. (And that doesn’t just affect the car makers, it’s rippling out through the whole economy. Have you seen what copper wire sells for these days?) And to make things even more interesting, a lot of those resources come from places that aren’t exactly friendly towards us, like China.

What it boils down to is that we simply don’t have enough raw materials to be able to make even a significant fraction of the number of EVs it would take to replace all of the ICE powered vehicles currently in use.

Production could be expanded, true. But it can take years, decades even, to find mineral deposits, obtain financing, build infrastructure necessary to develop a mine, build the infrastructure to do the processing, etc. Even worse, some of these materials are so scarce that there’s a very good chance that even if we went all out with trying to exploit our natural resources, we wouldn’t have enough.

And I have another question. Who suddenly decided that the best, the only solution to our transportation problems, was the electric vehicle? What happened to all of the other alternatives that were being experimented with like the various hydrogen powered alternatives for example? We’ve been experimenting with hydrogen powered cars for decades. They work pretty well, the only emission that comes out of them is water vapor. There are about 50,000 of them on the road and they’ve proven to be a viable alternative to gasoline powered vehicles.

What about other alternative types of transportation that would eliminate the need for a lot of driving in the first place like light rail or even bus service? You’d think that if the government wanted to wean people off ICE powered vehicles the first thing it would try to do would be to make it easier for people to not drive in the first place. Instead the state legislature here in Wisconsin is trying desperately to shut down every expansion of rail or bus service it can, and even eliminate existing facilities by starving them of funding of any sort.

But let’s forget about EVs for a moment and look at the trends in car manufacturing in general. I have questions about that as well.

Car Makers Making Cars Worse

Yeah, they are. From stupid noise generators that try to make EVs sound like overpowered gas or diesel engined monsters, to fake gear shift levers, to “info -tainment” systems that distract driver’s attention by making it impossible to even adjust the temperature of the heater without taking your eyes off the road, car makers seem determined to make cars worse.

The fake engine and exhaust noises and the fake gear shifters are, at least, not dangerous. But some of the other things they’re doing are, like what’s going on with a vehicle’s control systems, are dangerous.

Why do they have to make cars so damned complicated? Let’s look at my Buick Envision. This thing is supposedly a “luxury” car, with the top of the line trim level with all of the goodies you can get. And some of them are admittedly pretty neat and even improve the safety of the car. But some of the things they do…

Like where the hell is the headlight switch? Seriously. I couldn’t find the switch to manually turn the headlights on and off when I got the car. It was set in auto mode when I got it, so the headlights turned themselves on and off as necessary depending on light levels and weather conditions, but I still wanted to be able to turn the damned things on manually if I needed to. I finally found it. It turned out to be a tiny dial located way down out of my light of sight on the dash near my left knee. Oh, and it wasn’t labeled as a headlight control. All it said was “on off auto”. On off auto what, though? No idea until I actually played with it.

Same with the auto dimming headlights. That’s a nice feature. It automatically dims the headlights a night when there is an oncoming car. But it also dims the lights when it comes upon a lighted billboard, a reflective road sign, and it does it even in town, the lights constantly going from bright to dim when I go past a street light. I finally found that. It’s a little button labeled “Auto” embedded in the turn signal stalk.

Now I could have found that out by reading the owner’s manual, but who actually ever reads that thing? And in any case, systems as essential to operate as the headlights should be so clearly labeled that anyone can find and operate them properly.

One day I went out to the garage and I noticed that all of the windows in the car were down. All of them. Uh? I had to go back in the house to get the key fob so i could get in the car and start it, roll all the windows back up again, and didn’t think anything else much about it. Until the next day I went out there and all of the windows were down again. That happened maybe another three times. So I complained to the dealer about it.

The dealer didn’t know what the hell was going on either so the service manager started to do some research while the car was in for an oil change. Turns out this is a “feature”. Apparently under the right conditions, if you hit the right combination of buttons on the key fob, all of the windows in the car open up to cool off the interior of the car before the air conditioning starts up to put less strain on the aircon system. Why was my car doing it? I didn’t remember hitting random buttons on the key fob or anything like that. But we unanimously agreed that a car that rolls down all of its windows while no one is even near the car is not a good idea and they figured out how to disable that, thankfully, and it hasn’t happened since.

Then there is the massage system built into the seat. Yeah, it has one. And it is utterly horrible in every single way. It is distracting, irritating and even painful if you already have a bad back the way I do. And if you fumble around down on the left side of the seat to try to adjust the seating position, you absolutely will hit the damned massage button and then you can’t turn the effing thing off again without stopping, getting out of the car so you can see the controls down there and figure out which one does what so you can shut the thing off.

What I really want is something like, well, this…

That is an old Honda Z600 from the early 1970s and I used to have one of these little beasties back in the day. It’s what is known as a kei car, and they are the most popular vehicle in Japan and have been for some time. I had it back in the mid 1970s. It had a 2 cylinder air cooled, 600CC engine, a 4 speed transmission, front wheel drive, these cute little 10 inch tires and it was utterly nasty in every way. Even so the thing was an absolute hoot to drive. Despite the tiny engine it could cruize at 65 mph all day long, it got about 50 MPG, and you could fix it with a screwdriver and a few bits of tin foil. Thanks to its light weight and front wheel drive it even worked good in the snow.

The only problem I had was that it often wasn’t where I left it when I came out of work or school because people thought it was great fun to pick it up and run off with it. Four guys could pick the thing up and carry it off.

It had a AM radio, a heater that didn’t work, and, well, nothing else. No power anything. No frills, no luxury nonsense. It was basically a box with a small, zipping little engine, four wheels, and that was it.

And, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the US government, they banned their import shortly after I got mine for “reasons”.

When I got the 600 it was about a year old and had only about 10,000 miles on it. I paid about $500 for it and it was the best $500 I’d ever spent. And if I could get another one I’d buy it in a heartbeat because ultimately that’s all I want or need, a basic, simple, cheap, reliable car.

So the question that everyone has is now that the system is installed and up and running, is it really doing any good? The answer to that seems to be yes. It’s early days yet but what we’re seeing is encouraging, even a bit surprising.

MrsGF is the one who keeps track of these things and according to the data she’s been accumulating one year ago, June, 2022, we used 1,600 kWh of electricity according to the utility company. This year, in June, 2023, we used 1,100 kWh, 500 kWh less than last year.

Wow…

That’s smoke, not haze or fog. We’ve been under air quality warnings for weeks now, on almost a daily basis, because of the forest fires in Canada. I think this is the worst it’s been, though. As soon as I walk outside I can smell it. They’re warning people with asthma, breathing issues, heart problems, and the elderly to stay indoors and limit physical activity. I was outside for about an hour mowing the lawn and my eyes were watering and I could feel it in the back of my throat. We have all the windows closed, the HEPA filters running on full blast and the HVAC system fans running to pull air through those filters so hopefully that’s keeping it from getting into the house.

This morning at 8 AM I flipped off the mains in the breaker panel, shutting the house completely off of grid power and switched to running completely from the EG4 6500EX inverters, batteries and solar panels. We’ve been running the entire house completely off the grid for the last few hours and so far the system has had no problems at all.

We got virtually no solar power at all for the first two hours because the panels were in shade until 10AM so that gave me a chance to see how long the batteries would carry the house by themselves. We were living normally, not doing anything to conserve power. We used the convection oven, lights, coffee maker, etc. as we normally would. There were no extraordinary loads on the system, the sump pumps were running, furnace wasn’t on because it’s warm out. Under those conditions we use about 10% of our battery capacity per hour, which is actually a lot better than I thought it would be.

Once the sun was in position to fully hit the solar panels we were making enough solar power to run the house entirely off the panels, and even occasionally enough left over to put some power back into the batteries.

So far so good. Keep your fingers crossed.

Only issue is that we’ve run into the dreaded light flicker problem, but only with the bathroom lights for some reason. This is a fairly common problem with a lot of inverters. LED lights can flicker annoyingly. It doesn’t affect everyone, and doesn’t affect every light. The only lights that flicker here are the decorative bulbs in the bathroom. All of the others, almost all LEDs of one type or another, work fine.

Let’s talk about radio for a moment. This is more of, oh, an editorial commentary, let’s call it. Oh, all right, it’s a flat out rant, okay? So feel free to skip this one.

Of late I’ve been seeing articles popping up in the media claiming that AM broadcast radio is going to come to an end, not based on any real information but almost entirely because that Ford and several European car makers are no longer putting AM radios in some of their vehicles, especially EVs. The car makers are claiming that it’s difficult, even impossible, to put an AM radio in an EV because of electrical interference caused by the motors and electronics in the EV. And the media apparently believes that the only time people ever listen to AM radio is while they’re in their cars.

And pretty much everything in that statement is a lie.

First of all, do EVs cause so much RFI (radio frequency interference) that it is impossible for an AM radio to work? No. I’ve been in a half dozen different EVs in the last few years and none of them caused enough RFI to kill AM radio reception. Not one. Can they cause interference? Absolutely. But only if they are poorly designed and poorly shielded. In fact, it would actually be illegal for an EV to cause enough interference to be significant. FCC regulations state that consumer products cannot cause significant interference to broadcast band radio, television, and other forms of communications, and I would imagine that prohibition would include vehicles as well.

So why are car makers claiming otherwise so they can eliminate AM radio? Money, of course. Not putting AM reception capabilities in their cars saves them a couple of bucks per car. Not much. The amount per car is insignificant. But when you multiply that by the tens of millions of cars the manufacturers crank out it adds up to a significant amount of money. And if they don’t have to put AM radios into cars, it means they don’t have to be so careful about shielding and design engineering to avoid RFI and that increases their profits even more.

And as for AM radio in general, is it coming to an end? Well, maybe?

Let’s face it, AM radio’s audience share has been shrinking for decades already, and for good reason. It is relatively short range, it is subject to considerable interference from electrical storms, electrical equipment, badly designed solar power systems and a host of other sources. The sound quality is terrible. Etc. Etc. Etc. Almost as soon as FM radio with it’s much, much better sound quality and less problems with interference hit the market, people began abandoning AM radio in droves.

And as listenership dwindled, the quality of the programming on AM dwindled as well as station owners scrambled to try to maintain profitability. Broadcasting music is expensive because of licensing fees and other reasons. So many of them switched to all talk formats. Talk, as they say, is cheap. At least it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than music. And as the stations struggled to keep the lights on, the quality of the programming not only dwindled, so did the quality of the advertising, until a lot of AM radio stations now are the home to every scam, fake health care product and phoney investment scam imaginable.

The ever increasingly shrill and even extremist rantings of AM talk radio, together with showering the listeners with ads for vitamin scams, herbal “supplements” that will cure your nose hemorrhoids or whatever, has done more to push AM radio listeners away than removing AM radios from cars will ever push away.

Recent surveys of radio listeners indicate that less than 20% of them ever listen to AM broadcast radio any longer. The remaining audience seems to be largely made up of disgruntled, angry and very, very old white people. Not exactly a prime demographic for advertisers. Well, except for funeral homes, assisted living apartments and hemorrhoid cream, I suppose.

And, of course, the politicians are starting to get involved. In their never ending attempts to divert attention from the fact that they are doing nothing to solve our real problems like mass shootings, drug overdoses, etc. some politicians are climbing onto this bandwagon now and blustering and bloviating about how horrible it is AM radio is dying and how important it is and maybe they should do something about it. Only they won’t, of course. The average politician over in DC or in your state capital is far too busy trying to line up more bribes campaign contributions from special interest groups to have the time to actually do anything to solve the real problems out here in the real world.

Is AM radio dying? Probably. But what’s killing it off isn’t car makers. It’s dying by suicide. Instead of trying to attract new listeners it’s been desperately grasping at an ever shrinking market, a demographic that is slowly dying off from old age. Instead of developing new, relevant programming it’s been slowly being sucked down the sink hole of faked outrage and extremism and conspiracy theories being pushed by ever increasingly shrill and angry voices. It’s embraced shady advertisers and outright scammers.

AM radio sold its soul long ago and now the Devil has come calling to collect.

Well they tell me it’s spring out there. Yeah, right…

We got 8 – 10 inches of snow the other day. I just spent half an hour digging the solar panels out of the snow drift they were in. Yep. it’s spring in Wisconsin. Sigh… We’ve been very, very fortunate up here, to be honest. All of the storms raging across the country have been tracking well south of us before running up the east coast.

But it is looking like spring down in our basement. MrsGF has a small greenhouse with grow lights and a heating pad set up down there and has a lot of seedlings started already. And the stuff is growing like crazy. The way the weather is going I have no idea when we’ll be able to actually move plants outside. All we can do is wait and see what happens.

Now let’s talk about this -this thing…

This is something called a Click N Grow hydroponic growing system. Only none of those words are actually true, to be honest. What it looks like in real life is this-

I got this is a gift from someone who got it as a gift from someone else and didn’t want it so I set up and tried it. Sigh…

How it works is like this: The base is filled with water. Those little pots have a sort of wick in them that extends down into the water to draw it up into the pot. Inside pot you have put the company’s “plant pods” which, of course, they will gladly sell you for many, many $$$.

So let me tell you what you get for your $180. You get a small grow light. You get two plastic arms that hold the light in place above the tank. The tank itself is lightweight plastic with some holes in it. You put plain water in the tank. You then put small plastic cups with a wick on the bottom into the holes. The wick draws water up into the cups.

And that’s what you get for your two hundred bucks. A $30 grow light and about $5 worth of plastic. No electronics, no pumps, no heaters. Just a grow light and some plastic bits.

Into those plastic cups you put the company’s “plant pods” which, as far as I can tell, consist of a chunk of peat moss worth maybe $0.20, and a couple of seeds. The company will (start sarcasm font) generously (end sarcasm font) sell you their proprietary “plant pods” in a 9 pack for about $24.

Now it does work. Kinda. I have to admit that. I have actual tomato plants growing down in my office with actual tomatoes growing on them. Well, sort of. The plants don’t look very healthy any more and the “tomatoes”, if you can call then that, are the size of peas and they never seem to actually get ripe. I got one tiny, tiny salad out of the three lettuce pods. Well “tiny” is being generous.

Do I need to tell you to avoid this thing like the plague? It consists of a $20 grow light and a few bucks worth of plastic. And that literally is all it is. And they are selling it for $180. The plant pods are peat moss with probably some added fertilizer, and a seed or two. MrsGF has a 4 shelf mini greenhouse down in the basement that can hold 2 or 3 full sized flats on each shelf, with grow lights and heaters, and that entire setup cost about half of what this — this thing sells for.

I’ll keep it going because I’m curious to see if those so-called tomatoes will ever actually turn red. After that the plastic bits go in recycling and the grow light might be salvageable and used in MrsGF’s greenhouse.

Amazon Issues

I don’t know what’s going on with Amazon of late. Maybe it’s just a local issue? Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a monitor stand. Amazon told me it would arrive in 2 days. Fine. On the 3rd day I got a message saying delivery had been delayed and would now take another two days. Okay. I’m in no big rush. Then on the day the stand was supposed to arrive I got a message telling me it was “undeliverable” and it was being returned to the warehouse and I would be issued a credit. There was no explanation of what “undeliverable” actually meant. By that time I kinda really wanted the stand so I ran all the way up to Appleton and bought one at Office Max.

Three days later, guess what Amazon dropped off at my door? Yep, the monitor stand I’d ordered a week and a half earlier.

Earlier I’d ordered a heavy electrical cable to connect my backup generator to the transfer switch in the house. These things are expensive, around $200 for the one I needed. The cable arrived two days later. It was the wrong one. The day after that the right cable came. Amazon says they have no record of the wrong cable being sent and I should just keep it. Not sure what I’m going to do with it, but okay…

I ordered mounting brackets for my solar panels last week. They were supposed to arrive on Saturday. Sunday I got a message that they were delayed and they should come tomorrow, Tuesday. Okay…

I ordered a National Geographic science kit as a gift for a great nephew. They told me it would arrive in two days. Great. It arrived in 8 hours. Seriously. I ordered it around 10 AM and it arrived at 4 PM the same day.

Sigh…

I’m more grouchy than usual at the moment. I’m prepping for a colonoscopy tomorrow so I’ve had no solid food for 2 days and now I’m trying to gag down a half gallon of Gatorade mixed with laxatives that will keep me huddled near the bathroom for the rest of the evening. Great fun.

The B300 external expansion battery for the AC200Max just arrived an hour ago and dear sweet mother of milk of magnesia that puppy is big! Not only is it physically larger than the AC200Max it’s considerably heavier too. The specifications page pegs it at 80 pounds and after lugging that thing down the basement stairs and into my office/lab/radioshack I can assure you that it is every single ounce of that.

And to make things even more interesting the connector for the massive cable that connects it to the AC200 is, drum roll please, on the wrong side of the damned battery box! The connector on the battery box is on the right. The connector on the AC200 is on the left. And the cable is too short to reach if the two of them are stacked with the front panels towards, well, the front. The only way to connect them is to turn the battery around so the panel and switches are facing the rear.

Sigh….

Right now I’m dumping about about 800+ watts combined solar/grid power into it to fully charge the B300 and it’s sucking it down just fine. It’s already up to near full capacity. Of course I’m also drawing about 250W out of it at the same time to run my office so that’s slowing it down a bit. Yes, you can charge it from two different sources at the same time, and draw power from it at the same time as well.

So far so good. I’ll keep you posted.

Later Edit: Okay, within an hour of me posting this, guess what happened? I got a response back from Bluetti regarding the message I’d sent them last week about the RFI issue. They acknowledged that yes, there are RFI problems but they can’t do much about it at this time and are working to try to improve future models. And they gave me $2,000 Bluetti Bucks, whatever the heck those are. So I changed the headline up there from “do not buy” to Be Cautious.

From what I’ve been seeing on social media, Bluetti’s customer service is allegedly not very good. Scrounging around on places like Reddit, Youtube, and various forums, I’ve been seeing story after story from customers having trouble getting any kind of response from the company’s customer service department.

You can’t sell a very high tech, very complex and extremely expensive product like Bluetti does without a good customer service department to solve customer problems. And it seems that as of right now at least, Bluetti doesn’t have a good record when it comes to service after the sale.

The Bluetti equipment I’ve been working with here has been excellent, well made and it works. But seeing all of the stories about their customer service makes me very, very nervous.

So, does getting a response back from the company make me feel less uncomfortable? That I got a response back that actually addressed the problem, even though they couldn’t do anything about it, and that they tried to make up for it by giving me the “Bluetti Bucks” does help, I must admit. But I’m still nervous about all the issues I’ve been seeing regarding customer service.