In light of recent events in the world, I've been slowly assembling the beginnings of a revolution at my household. A house as dedicated to solar energy as possible, and on a shoestring. As a Republican, I get strange looks when I talk about going green and even more so when I speak of frugality and re-using with conservation in mind.

Of course, the strange looks I get are even funnier to watch when I explain how many $$$ I'll save doing things this way. People pay attention when they see a way to escape with dollars in pocket while keeping warm or cool as the need changes.

Being single, the expenses of investing in these technologies is a reality. As such, my plan to go solar has evolved into the following broad initiative:

• Solar Electricity to take on bulk of home power.
• Solar Water heating to take on bulk of the water heating for 3 of 4 seasons.
• Solar outdoor lighting to remove costs of lighting paths (and perhaps holiday decorations?).
  
• Solar Home Heating using ground exchange loops.
• Solar Cooling using ground exchange loops.
• Solar Cooking using reflected heat cookers.

By attacking the most egregious items first, namely the heating and cooling of the home, one can reduce energy costs many fold with relatively little outlay. The worst expenses are investing in the digging equipment to dig the trench to form the basis of a ground loop exchange setup and the corresponding investment in piping and components to bring the system to working order. Some call this "Geothermal Exchange" and it is a means of either bring cool air in that has been cooled from having blown through underground pipes or to bring earth warmed air in during the winter when the outside temperature is often ten to twenty degrees cooler. Either way, such technological capabilities are not beyond the average home handyman. Heating water via the sun is equally easy. Materials to take advantage of sunshine that is plentiful here in our state of California are readily available and inexpensive. Using the sun to heat water with a recirculating pump and solar panel to power the pump is an ideal solution.

I have acquired a number of the components required to attack many of the items in the first list and intend to document my progress as I go. Perhaps my real-world experience will inspire others who wish to aim for energy independence.

I have already managed to install a 65 watt solar panel and charging system that lights my home at night and runs a fan. This simple setup will save over 72,000 watts of power in a year with an average 30 day month and 4 hours use in an evening. If a person can, using common sense, build one of these systems, then it is feasible to expect that similar technologies of heating and cooling the home at a much reduced cost are feasible for the masses.

I am going to create a special feature section on the site where my blogs on Republican Energy Independence are discussed. I am tempted to create a new domain to point to the site and route people to it and may do so!

In the meantime, watch for more articles on energy independence and ways to reduce the cost of living in these difficult times! I've created a new domain called "frugalconservative.com to talk about the ways conservatives can save $$$ in these difficult times!

• http://www.frugalconservative.com

I finally took the plunge and installed Hardy Heron on my Ubuntu system. Having waited the couple of weeks for any critical patches to appear, my read was that Hardy was indeed a stable release and I went for it.

A number of packages vanished in the process, including my prized xmms, so do be ready with a list of packages to install if you find them missing. I'm not quite sure where to grab a list of the installed packages, but it should be easy enough to find for future reference.

The upgrade for Hardy could not have been smoother. Ubuntu, as usual, did the quality job they always do and the process was rife only with a few surprises, easily fixed. For the perfectionists who choose to complain, you really have nothing to b****h about, but that is personality which often does not mirror reality.

For the xmms fix, visit Sartek's blog with a very nice instruction set that does the job beautifully. I was back with xmms in 5 minutes after a quick compile and install. Seamless, quick and well written. Hats off to Sartek! XMMS is a nice player that doesn't deserve to be kicked out in the cold just yet!

My Gateway laptop has always been a bit crusty when it comes to wireless support for the built in broadcom wireless card and this upgrade was no different from the rest. So, I connected up to my trusty ethernet port and searched Google for a solution. Up came the Penkin wordpress article with great information on how to easily update your broadcom driver, since the download version from the official sources does not seem to work for beans on my setup.

However, on following the instructions, things didn't quite work until I ran a few changes to the script... Read on for the fix I used. Instructions (from the Penkin article with my added notes):

1. First off you need to ensure that you have the build essentials package installed so that you can build the b43-fwcutter. (Tomcat notes: Yep - worked like a charm - I already had the latest version).

  sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Once that is installed you can download and build b43-fwcutter. (Tomcat notes: Yes - runs fine.)

  wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..

3. Now we need to download the Broadcom firmware and install it. Note that the “FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” must point to the directory where your firmware directory is. The one I have used below is what it is in Ubuntu. (Tomcat notes - Here is where we ran into trouble Houston... Ignore the export instruction. Instead, remember the /lib/firmware path - you will use a "sudo" command in front of the last instruction and replace the quotes and $FIRMWARE parameter with the /lib/firmware pathname - that is it for the changes needed!).

  export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o

4. Now simply reboot the laptop and presto… the little wireless light should be blue.

For my Gateway MX6424, this worked like a champ! If you have comments or wish to add experiences, feel free! My thanks go to the Penkin site for giving out what has been the most pain free wireless fixes for Ubuntu yet seen by this intrepid Ubuntu fan ;>)

References:

• http://penkin.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/ubuntu-804-broadcom-wireless
• http://blog.sartek.net/2008/04/install-xmms-on-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron.html
• http://www.ubuntu.com

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

A man heckling First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna outside the 92nd Street Y was arrested after he punched a wheelchair-bound girl whose parents had told him to shut up, authorities said Wednesday.

German Talis, 22, was shouting obscenities at the Bushes, who were leaving the building Tuesday, when he crossed paths with Wendy and John Lovetro and their daughter Maureen, 18, who has cerebral palsy.

They had been in the audience to hear the Bushes talk about their children's book, "Read All About It."

"He began yelling about Iraq and Iran at Jenna Bush. She was waving at the crowd. I told the guy, 'What are you doing? Shut up. This is about a child and books,' " said John Lovetro. "He was unperturbed. I said, 'Get out of here! You're being a moron!' "

The next thing he knew, Talis was allegedly punching Maureen, a fan of the first lady since meeting her in 2004.

What has the world come to? - punching out a crippled girl for no good reason... Talis should be tossed in jail for twenty years to think over what he did with no chance for parole. This kind of behavior is completely disgusting and an indication of the mentality of the Democratic party these days. A party ruled by violent emotion, fanaticism and a radical anger that is disturbing beyond belief. My friends, this is a sign of the times. We Republicans must stand against these kinds of behaviors with quiet determination and an iron-clad will to do what is right.

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

[Critics quickly pointed out that Chapman may have been "cherry-picking" the data. A strong La Nina formation in the Pacific pushed down January temperatures over much of the Northern Hemisphere from where they had been a year earlier, but average global temperatures are still much higher than the 20th-century average, and the NOAA said last week that last month was the warmest March on record.]

The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures in Australia have been warmer than the 1960-90 average since the late 1970s, barring a couple of cooler years, and are now 0.3 degrees Centigrade higher than the long-term average.

A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

An alternative theory of global warming is that a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the Earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak — during low sunspot activity — the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

But scientists from the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, and that that was far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

Chapman proposes preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective.

"My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he writes.

• Click here to read Chapman's opinion piece in The Australian.

Just a quick note to let folks know if they want an account, they'll need to register via the register button up top and not with the usual registration system. I've had enough of the newly hacked Gmail accounts that have taken to submitting gangs of user accounts to try to access this site with their nefarious and criminal activity.

So... Ayeladdy is going completely manual on registrations. This will become a completely exclusive intellectual community with registration being done manually. This should solve the problem permanently.  Feel free to request an account anytime and we'll be certain to speak with you and establish a user account to interact with a cool community of thinkers...

Tomcat

I live on a ranch with about 7 acres of land. As such, I've got multiple buildings spread out over quite a distance and it becomes pretty clear that if you are going to compute in such an environment, you need a decent network to cover large areas of space.

So I started with a single Linksys WRT54GS speed booster access point and enjoyed the coverage the little wonder gave me for some time. Trouble was, it covered only about 200 feet in the house and, with a special Cantenna at my remote lab about 400 feet away, it gave barely acceptable performance.

So, I bought a second WRT54GS and ran a CAT-5 cable down to the lab. I figured it would be a cinch to hook up. Well... it was almost a cinch. It took some research to figure out how to get things to run. And to boot, I had to talk with one of my network guys at work who clued me into the simple fix. So, this article is being written to eventually find it's way to Google and to help others in the same boat. My initial research on Google into how to best hook the two together fell on the mutterings of network gurus who spoke in strange tongues and seemed determined to obfuscate the simple fix. My own network support person has the strange talent of speaking in english and being able to communicate concepts easily, so his expert support clued me in to what to do. To start, I had the configuration almost right. I tried the following

1. Main WAP.
2. CAT-5 to remote lab.
3. Plug CAT-5 into secondary WAP WAN input port.
4. Configure the secondary WAP as desired. New name, security, etc. The standard stuff.

When I ran this configuration, things went badly. I was confusing the hell out of the primary WAP and the secondary. They were fighting over DHCP rights and also the conflicts in the IP addressing were the start of a day of frustration that finally ended with me putting the project aside for quite awhile.

Well, I talked with my network guy again and he pointed out what I needed to do. So here is the recipe:

1. Main WAP. Plug Cat-5 cable into one of the LAN bridge ports as would be expected.
   
2. CAT-5 to remote lab. Run as needed to get it to the destination.
   
3. Plug the CAT-5 cable into one of the 4 secondary LAN bridge ports. Do NOT plug into the WAP WAN port!
   
4. Configure the secondary WAP with the following big differences:
   • Change the operating address of the second WAP to 192.168.2.1 or to anything other than 192.168.1.1.
   • Turn OFF the DHCP serving for this WAP. DHCP requests will go upstream to the primary for resolution. This works nicely and the primary worked right off the bat for serving up the needed addresses as clients signed in.
     

Thats it! I did the needed changes and it worked nicely. One could even see that a wireless to wireless configuration could work with a second Ethernet port on a wireless connect-only PC if you enabled internet sharing if you didn't want the expense of running a hard line, but that gets more complex. In my case, the 100 megabit line is ideal and the second WAP is serving a whole new zone and extends my reach considerably. I have opted to add a Linksys 5 port hub to expand my selection of devices at the other end for network devices that don't routinely communicate up the line and can share a single port off the secondary WAP. It really has worked out nicely and I'm excited at being able to even have the ability to fully hook up the devices in the lab with reckless abandon.

Now here is my final point. This whole solution was given in plain English by my good friend at work. Not in technical-speak and in terms designed to confuse as is seen in the forum responses out in the wild and which return as search matches in Google.

I'm a technical person myself and yet I find great power in simplicity and a few well placed writings to brighten understanding. So take it as your own mission to simplify and remove complexity when teaching others - Believe me, they will appreciate the frankness and directness without all the confusion and terminology that only serves to keep the truth from getting into the hands of real people. In fact, it was explained to me that some academics deliberately confuse simple concepts to make sure knowledge remains in the hands of a few and thus usable only by the few. Do the world a favor guys... share the knowledge and keep it simple. The world will be a better place for it. Just a thought ;>)

Feel free to comment and request any further information from me if you like!

Are we getting closer to Star trek? Well, Purdue University researchers have developed a handheld sensing system, which they liken to Star Trek’s “tricorder,” to be used to study the chemical compounds of alien worlds.

Boasting an ultraportable weight of 20 lbs, the handy miniature mass spectrometer combines mass spectrometry with DESI (desorption electrospray ionization) thereby allowing chemical composition to be resolved outside of a vacuum chamber.

Purdue Professor R. Graham Cooks said: "We like to compare it to the tricorder because it is truly a handheld instrument that yields information about the precise chemical composition of samples in a matter of minutes without harming the samples. Researchers have already employed the device to check for cocaine on a $50 bill in less than 1 second."

NASA should be keyed up since this little box could be used to analyze the atmospheric conditions of Mars. But, it has other down-to-earth applications too as it could be used to test foods for dangerous bacterial contaminants including salmonella.

I had the opportunity recently to visit a friend at her home in a large upscale gated community. As my Mustang approached the imposing gates of her sanctuary, I couldn't help comparing the colossus before me with the gate to Folsom Prison, a mere ten miles away.  In fact I wondered if I had wandered into the prison grounds when the gate magically opened for the person who passed me by and I scooted my Mustang in behind the angry woman who must have thought I was crazy for not identifying myself on the intercom before I entered the pri... er... compound.

Moving forward, I entered the featureless plain that was the aptly named attempt at sounding California Chique. Not wishing a lawsuit, I can reveal that the community resides just outside Folsom and represents a huge blight to the land with it's *sameness" that removes all doubt that replicators have indeed landed and taken over the Earth with the soundex "ano" ending the horror that is the evil compound of Klingon/Russian black and white theater. The old commercial "Ticky-Tacky Houses, All The Same" entered my mind...

My mind rebels and Chris Issak saves the day... That dude sure can sing...

As I edged the Mustang further on, I realized I was in a land of conformists. Socialists? Perhaps these people need the management to tell them what color the house will be and where each plant is to reside. Driving down the street was a case study in spooky. Any second, the Stepford Wives would greet me and I'd run screaming to keep the pods from taking my soul.

As a gardener myself, I stopped in wonder to realize that the lawns were all the same exact grass species. There were only five types of plants allowed in the front yards and I even got the feeling that holiday decorations were not allowed. Jeez... Even Christmas much be managed in this hell hole.

I pulled up to my friend's house and she greeted me. We watched a couple of movies and did a walk through the neighborhood. I asked about the lifestyle and if one could have their backyard the way they wanted it and she said no... The commission had to approve every outdoor feature.

This is too much to even contemplate. Sure, you can have the illusion of civility for the front so that property values hold up, but a backyard is the sanctuary of individuality! And this right is even gone!

I dared to ask if they picked the china pattern and bedspread coordination and got a dirty look. Hmm... There is a line after all. The commission hasn't yet opted to control all aspects of reality. One day it'll succeed when the minds of the homeowners are fully controlled with the implants.

I began, at that very thought, to plan purchase of property in Arizona and to buy a trailer where I could raise a statue of Bob Big Boy's sister, Diane and to construct a giant TeePee for summer drum festivals. Of course, giant rabbit sculptures and as many colors of flowers and varieties as I could get my hands on will color my unique world and I'll do it far from the confines of the U.S.S.R. Commission at this abomination that tries to look chic and removes every trace of uniqueness from those who pay for the right to own a home.

Even the cars are the same... BMWs, Volvos, Subaru Forrester's for the green crowd who live in anything but green homes and the occasional Mercedes.

Not once did I see an American car. As I drove the streets, I was looked on with suspicion and avarice by the entranced locals who considered lynching me for buying American. Even more glares were noted at my obvious conservative values sticker in the window...

I was a stranger in a strange land indeed.

I try to imagine the meetings these men and women have... the ones who run the Commission.

Do they blacklist those who have a scrap of individual thought left in their hearts? Do they seek to control the countryside and install their own secret police and wildlife control personnel who execute rabbits for the mere crime of looking at their utopia? One wonders these things as they drive by the exotic looking shop of horrors that is the commission headquarters...

I left my friend's house laughing and then, as I turned the corner after escaping past the prison gates, let out a scream of horror and decided that should I return, an extra dose of medication would be needed for me to tolerate the imprisonment, however short it would be...

God... I need a drink. And to forget.... Time to get back to real homes with painted bricks, colored houses and bird fountains with coyotes and cats running through the yards, past the Geo Metros and old Ford pickups... You know... the Real America...

For those who need something to recognize the Association Hell in their corner of the world, I offer:

Little Boxes

Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990. Malvina and her husband were on their way from where they lived in Berkeley, through San Francisco and down the peninsula to La Honda where she was to sing at a meeting of the Friends’ Committee on Legislation (not the PTA, as Pete Seeger says in the documentary about Malvina, “Love It Like a Fool”). As she drove through Daly City, she said “Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Oh... the inspiration....