The two photos below are of the same subject. The first photo was taken by an amateur photographer, making rookie mistakes. He decided to use a vertical layout to capture the pool, but this chopped off the near corners. He does not include the sky or a visible horizon, and the background is an uninteresting wall of green. The center of the photo falls in the water, with no interesting details.

Below is the same subject photographed by a professional photographer. Notice how the landscape orientation she has chosen complements the vertical layout of the pool. By moving to the other end of the pool she includes sky and an implied horizon. Notice also how she has placed the vanishing point at the splash of color inside the pool shed to act as a focus point. Simply by changing the focus point, orientation, and camera location the subject is made to sparkle!

I was sitting next to my wife who was goggling for images of haircuts. (I have to admit,   I’ve never performed this type of search before tonight….)   She showed me a few of her search results, and I noticed that she had some super cool search filtering options across the top of her Google image search results that I had never seen before. (I had thought I knew all the tricks of how to use Google image search…..I was wrong.)

As it turns out, I just hadn’t been using the right search terms, like “for women”. Here is an image of what I’m talking about.

That’s right, when you search for “short wavy haircuts for women” you can filter by “over 40”, “over 50”, or face shape!   But why can’t I filter images of men by age or face shape when searching for   “short wavy haircuts for men”?

For that matter, how come I don’t see any men when searching for “short wavy haircuts”… Continue reading →

Ben complained that he “got the short end of the stick” because EVGO charged him   $10.51 for a single fast charging “session” where the electricity cost him about $2 per kWh.

But the simple fact is, if you have an EVSE at home,   95-99% of your charging is done at home. Remote L2 and DCFC sessions fall into one of two categories:

1. Opportunity charging – Just picking up some extra power because you are at a location anyways.
2. Necessity charging – You need to go somewhere that is farther than your current range will allow, either due to a small battery pack, or a low state of charge.

When you are opportunity charging, you don’t want to pay much more than you would at home. In some cases, stores offer free charging to get you in the door, or as a public service, and in other cases the costs ($1-2 an hour, or $0.20 to 0.50 a kWh depending upon your charging speed) are reasonable and/or in line with parking fees that you would already be paying.

In Ben’s case, he was definitely in the necessity charging category (making a drive to downtown Milwaukee right at the very edge of his range).   So the $10 he paid allowed him to go somewhere that he wouldn’t normally be able to get to on a single charge. This is a convenience fee, not a “fuel” fee. Also, the fact that it was a “fast charge” session should not be overlooked, as that is much more convenient than a L2 charge for necessity charging (when you are not planning on spending time at a location for reasons other than charging).

I recently spent $3 to charge for an hour and 20 minutes outside of a Walgreens at a L2 charger (in 85+ degree heat), getting around 5 kWh   (allowing me to get home without seriously depleting my pack). In addition to the $3 I paid for the charging, I spent $5 in the Walgreens for two sodas and a candybar, (making use of their restroom at the beginning and end, partially due to the two aforementioned sodas). I had planned ahead and brought a magazine with me, but if I hadn’t I would have also spent another 4-5$ on some reading material.

If I could have spent $10 and been charged up in 10 minutes I would have gladly done so, and the time savings (and lowered sugar consumption) would have made it well worth the fee. But, I don’t have a DCFC port on my S-10 truck conversion.

So for a one time necessity charging session, $10 seems very reasonable.   It is comparable to spending $6 for a service station sandwich that you could have made yourself for $1 at home.

If you are going to be making long trips where you need DC fast charging frequently, you sign up for the monthly plan, which greatly reduces the price per session. You can think of this as a toll road type system, where you know you need to charge up every day on your daily commute, so you just budget the extra costs as part of your transportation overhead. (Although in that situation, an ICE vehicle may make more economic sense.)

If you are removing a stripped out screw, and have to apply pliers to the head to get it to turn, but after backing it out a few turns the head shears off, you can always use a rotary cutting tool to make an old school regular screwdriver notch in it.

I used to own two FOSCAM cameras, which used to (mostly) work with Linux. They would ask you to install a proprietary plugin (that doesn’t work in Linux) to view their camera feed, but if you selected the MJPEG feed everything would still work with Linux or other OS’s without installing the plugin.   (And you could manage them via the web interface with no problems.)

HOWEVER, after their latest firmware upgrade, their web management interface will NOT allow you to log in unless their proprietary plugins are detected. This means that you can not manage them from Linux. I asked them for a way to downgrade the firmware and they refused.

These cameras are now useless for use with Linux, and they are also useless unless you are willing to install foscam’s proprietary software on our (windows/mac) system.   And if you trust FOSCAM to put code on your computer, you should read this: Bug Exposes IP Cameras, Baby Monitors or look here: Foscam : Security Vulnerabilities and reconsider letting them install software on your computers.

And then there are things like this:This is Why People Fear the “˜Internet of Things’