Thursday, July 28, 2016

veggie factory

Ok, I've said this before... back when I wrote Patent Mine to be exact, but it's worth saying it again.

While I'm a fan of these 'indoor greenhouses' they almost always are used wrong.

As in the article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jboyd/2016/07/28/can-next-generation-veggie-factories-finally-grow-a-profit/2/#598e21222896
an enormous amount of energy is wasted running the air conditioning to keep these indoor greenhouses running efficiently... ie, lights make heat, even LED lights.

But heat is only a bad thing during summer (a time when you can grow plants outside making indoors redundant!!!)

Back then, I said (Worth repeating) that the ideal indoor greenhouse would run during end of fall trough the beginning of spring... as the house heating system.

See, plants are very shade tolerant, they can go without light for a few days if needed. So if they come on when you need to add heat to a house or building, then turn off an hour latter, plants think of it like clouds. No big deal.

But growing fresh vegetables during the winter is a huge bonus, and when you consider that you can grow a few thousand heads of lettuce AND heat your home/building on roughly the same amount of electricity you would have spent JUST heating your home anyway... it's really a no brainer.

Most homes have space in basements or crawl spaces if you wanted to do a 'retrofit' or, think of a 'space-heater' model that looks like a book shelf with blackout curtains so it won't keep you up at night if it has to come on.

The problem is people want to get rich selling the lettuce at 2 or 3 times what it costs to import from 3,000 miles away and that's the only economic model they can see. When instead, the 'money' is in selling winter heaters that grow food and clean the air for free.

But then, I'm just a SciFi author, no need to listen to me :)  

Sunday, July 3, 2016

freedom pop review

In keeping with the Stephen King rule ('You can only call yourself a writer if you can pay at least one bill with your royalties') I have had to adjust my budget.

Gone is my expensive $25/month cellphone plan that worked beautifully, and in is my new plan $2.49/month.

This new plan is from FreedomPop and, as the price would suggest, it has a lot of wonk and glitchy built into the plan. The voice calls are over the internet which means they can be glitchy, have gaps, have lost parts, and 'static' when they don't work (think first gen Skype on dialup), but when they do work it's as good as the old plan.

The phone itself has locked up and rebooted twice in the last few months, a little unnerving but acceptable. This is kind of typical of Android phones, so, I'm not exactly worried yet.

And, though it says it offers texting, the texting is also not real texting but Internet texting, and not really dependable. This is not a big deal as I have switched back to emails instead.

The cons:
Texting and voice exists, but are not ready for prime time. The app that lets you use them has to be 'disabled' or blocked to keep the app from burning through a month's worth of data in the first 2 weeks. This means that you can send texts and make voice calls, but not receive them in practice.

Pro:
The price is fantastic.

You get 500 megs of data per month, and if you do NOT use the phone to make phone calls or text then 500 megs a month of surfing for $2.49 is an unbelievably good deal.

The $2.49 is technically for a voice mail box that lets people leave a message so that, even though nobody can 'call me' on my phone (because I block the app), they can leave me a message and I can call them back with the phone later. You can go absolutely free if you want to.

They do offer a plan for $9/month that does 200min of voice the old fashion way, but that's $70 a year and, when you are an indie author you are in extreme save mode all the time.

For me, the 500megs of data is golden. I had been making due with 250 megs for the last 5 years, so this is a doubling for me.

freedom pop review

In keeping with the Stephen King rule ('You can only call yourself a writer if you can pay at least one bill with your royalties') I have had to adjust my budget.

Gone is my expensive $25/month cellphone plan that worked beautifully, and in is my new plan $2.49/month.

This new plan is from FreedomPop and, as the price would suggest, it has a lot of wonk and glitchy built into the plan. The voice calls are over the internet which means they can be glitchy, have gaps, have lost parts, and 'static' when they don't work (think first gen Skype on dialup), but when they do work it's as good as the old plan.

The phone itself has locked up and rebooted twice in the last few months, a little unnerving but acceptable. This is kind of typical of Android phones, so, I'm not exactly worried yet.

And, though it says it offers texting, the texting is also not real texting but Internet texting, and not really dependable. This is not a big deal as I have switched back to emails instead.

The cons:
Texting and voice exists, but are not ready for prime time. The app that lets you use them has to be 'disabled' or blocked to keep the app from burning through a month's worth of data in the first 2 weeks. This means that you can send texts and make voice calls, but not receive them in practice.