John's Random Thoughts and Discussions
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A friend recently sent me an article entitled Couple has ‘range anxiety’ as electric vehicle requires 12 charging stops. I’ve written a number of blog posts now on how electric cars fail to really provide the green result that vendors claim, but I hadn’t thought about other aspects of actually driving an electric car until … Continue reading “Electric Car Range Anxiety”
It seems like I receive yet another brochure about the huge advances various government entities, enterprises, vendors, or energy companies making in protecting the planet every month. Everyone seems to think that their technology is going to be the next green thing, when the facts simply don’t bear them out. The previous post I wrote … Continue reading “Is Your Car Green, Really?”
This is an update of a post that originally appeared on January 20, 2016. I wrote a little over seven years ago that I had read an article in ComputerWorld, Children mine cobalt used in smartphones, other electronics, that had me thinking yet again about how people in rich countries tend to ignore the needs … Continue reading “Technology and Child Safety”
A lot of people have sent me e-mail about my negative viewpoints on a lot of the supposedly green technology that we use today. The fact is that many of these green technologies simply move pollution to someone else’s backyard and may actually increase the amount of pollution created, rather than reducing it. My latest … Continue reading “More People Noticing that Green Technology Really Isn’t”
It’s winter in Wisconsin and the chicken coop isn’t heated. In fact, the chicken coop lacks an electrical connection as well, so except for taking pots of heated water in on the coldest days, trying to heat the coop must come from other sources. The slant of the roof and placement of the window ensure … Continue reading “Adding Vinegar to the Chicken Water”
It’s only September and yet the thermometer has dipped into the 30’s. Since we live in a big old farmhouse with lots of character, we have consciously changed it as little as possible. We only make changes if we absolutely need to. For example, a few years ago our roof was leaking in multiple places … Continue reading “Baby, It’s Gonna Get Cold!”
Most people know that this has been one of the colder winters in recent memory. In fact, I’ve been taking enough heat about my views on global warming that I wrote a post entitled, Where is the Global Warming?. The effects of the cold have been serious enough to drastically raise the price of propane … Continue reading “Keeping Warm in the Cold Winter Months”
A considerable amount of my time in fulfilling the self-sufficiency dreams Rebecca and I have is spent building new items and repairing existing items. Existing equipment of all types requires constant maintenance as well. If you leave a cage exposed to the elements long enough, it’ll simply rot away. Everything has a tendency to fail … Continue reading “It’s All in the Engineering”
Rebecca dehydrates several kinds of chips for us to eat during the winter months. I talked about the technique used to create zucchini chips in the Making Use of Those Oversized Zucchinis post. The techniques in that post also work well for vegetables such as eggplant, which has a slight peppery taste when dehydrated. We … Continue reading “Making Dehydrated Chips”
So far, our winter in this part of Wisconsin has been absurdly mild. In fact, we don’t have any snow on the ground. The temperatures have been up to 20 degrees above normal for most of the winter as well. All of these conditions might sound perfect to some people, but they had me worried. … Continue reading “Preparing for the Storm”