Recliners on the Air
Golf Cart Memories I have big plans for my EZ-GO golf cart. I’ve used it in the past when we lived in a golf cart community. We had lots of fun riding around the golf course after the golfers left at 5pm. The grandkids, grandma, and grandpa (that’s me) would sail around the paths and […]
Part 3 of 3-Part Series | Part 1 (to begin at the beginning) While working on the After-Action Report (AAR) following our July load test of the N4FTD Power Grid, I was reminded of a true story that Sue and I experienced over a decade ago. You’ll see how this fits with our backup power test shortly. […]
Part 2 of a 3-Part Series | Part 1 (if you haven’t read it yet) No matter the size of the electrical grid, the rule of survival never changes: you must balance your power sources with your loads. For traditional commercial grids, this meant burning fuel or harnessing water to physically spin a generator and […]
Last time I reported my Emergency Backup Power project as 95% complete with only the load test remaining. Gemini AI theorized that “under load”, my Ecoflow + Zoupw solar system would be able to power our home’s six critical circuits including a small window air conditioner. It should be able to do this around the […]
I enjoy listening to the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast. The hosts and guests go around the virtual table every other week sharing the projects they’re working on. I recently completed a project that gave me loads of extra space inside my air-conditioned house. With some creative rearranging, purging, and organizing, I suddenly had two bedroom […]
It started with a physical bottleneck. I had two bulky boxes taking up the exact footprint where I wanted to sit down in my shed-shack. To reclaim my favorite chair, I carted them into the main house and slid them onto the newly cleared floor space of our bedroom closet. Sitting back down at the […]
I woke up at 5:00 AM thinking about this post. I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when I should just get up and turn on the computer instead of lying in bed, thinking. This was one of those times. I’ve been known as a “thinker” since the day I was born. My parents and relatives […]
It started with a completely mundane digital bottleneck. Recently, while sitting at the desk on my new M5 MacBook Air, I tried to install the latest Apple iOS updates on my iPhone 15. The phone squawked about a total lack of storage. To make room, I had to execute a massive digital triage: purging 53 […]
It started under perfectly blue skies. This morning, exactly two minutes before “net time,” the grid in my North Fort Myers neighborhood vanished. As the Net Control Station for our local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), I didn’t have time to worry about the sudden silence of my ceiling fan. I fired up my battery-powered […]
The Evolution of the Digital Shack Assistant For fifty years, my ham radio journey has followed a familiar, linear rhythm: you run into a brick wall with a piece of hardware, you crack open a printed manual, or you jump onto Google to hunt down a forum post from some obscure reflector. But recently, while […]