LED lights are much more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs, slightly more efficient than compact florescent (with much less mercury!), and have recently really dropped in price.

I just purchased a six pack of 11 watt LED bulbs designed to replace 65 watt flood lights for $27. When lit, together they use 66 watts. (And light up the kitchen better!)

Compared to the 390 watts used by the incandescent bulbs they replaced, this is a savings of 324 watts.     If they are lit for three hours a day the savings is substantial; 972 watt hours, or almost one kWh!   If we pretend the average cost of electricity is 0.10 a kWh (it’s actually closer to 0.117 for me) this works out to paying for the light bulbs in energy savings in less than a year (270 days!).     As long as the bulbs last for at least 810 hours, they have paid for themselves. (The rated life on the package claims 25,000 hours)

If we conservatively pretend the bulbs will only last 10,000 hours (9 years at 3 hours a day), they will continue to save   324 watts x 9190 hours after they have paid for themselves. This works out to 2,977 kWh, or $297 worth of electricity.   Not a bad return on investment for $27 of sunk costs.

In summary, it’s time to replace any incandescent bulbs you have with LED’s. (You may as well wait for the CF bulbs to burn out before you replace them.)

What MPG does a 20 foot u-haul truck get?   8.7 MPG.

My data point: Driving a 20 foot loaded U-Haul truck from Atlanta, GA to Orlando Fl (444.1 miles total, average speed around 65 MPH, using the AC) used 50.939 gallons of gas, giving 8.7 MPG.

I tested my 80% profile (limited to 25A) on a very hot 92 °F day. The chargers reached 65 °C but did not shut down due to overheating. (My 80% profile ends charging when the draw reaches 10A.)

A charger temp of 65 °C is still much hotter than I would like, so I don’t plan on charging in 90 °F heat very frequently.

The Sodexo “Unity” cafeteria at UPC in Barcelona offers a “complete menu” for 6.60 Euros that includes a starter, main, drink, bread and desert. You could typically choose between three different starters and main courses, mixing and matching.

The common vegetables were potatoes and artichokes. Ham, bacon and fish were the relatively common meats.

Below are photos of the ten meals I ate.

Grilled fish, french fries, and kale.
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I purchased a USB MIDI keyboard (the Alesis Q25) for use with my musical Tesla coil, but also wanted to use it to learn to play the keyboard/piano when traveling with my laptop.

The MIDI keyboard has no synthesizer of it’s own, so you need a computer that will take the MIDI data stream and play (synthesize) the actual sounds of a piano or other instrument so that you can “hear” what you are playing.

There are many pieces of complicated software on Linux that will allow you to compose music with a MIDI keyboard, but all I wanted was the ability to hit a key on my keyboard and have it make music.

The easiest set of software I found to do this was vmpk (virtual midi piano keyboard) combined with Qsynth (a GUI interface to fluidsynth). I started up qsynth and vmpk at the same time. Then I used the “edit->connections” menu on vmpk to set my MIDI keyboard as the incomming connection, and the “FLUID Synth (Qsynth1)” as the output connection.

To set up qsynth I hit the “setup” button and then in the MIDI tab selected the “alsa_seq” as the MIDI Driver and “qsynth” as the MIDI Client Name ID (ALSA/CoreMidi).
I also enabled the soundfront from the /user/share/sounds/sf2 folder.
I don’t know why I had to use vmpk to make this linkup between the keyboard and Qsynth, but so far I haven’t found an easy way to tell Qsynth to just listen to midi events from the keyboard directly. On the plus side, you can use the virtual keyboard that vmpk displays on the screen to play notes if you don’t actually have a physical USB MIDI keyboard.

Here are some photos of the tilting bed mechanism (and back battery bay) of my truck.

You can see that the clearance when open is relatively tight….