Pivot

16:26 Tuesday, 30 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 88.54°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 60% Wind: 8.48mph
Words: 266

Had a very productive Zoom meeting with Jeffrey Sauls at Energy Vanguard. To cut to the chase, I've abandoned radiant heating and cooling with the exception of heating the basement slab.

So we will still use an air-to-water heat pump (so we can heat the slab), but heating and cooling the main floor above the basement will be by forced air. This is an economic decision, so I'm not buying two methods of moving (or removing) heat on the main floor. (Radiant for heating, air handler and ducting for cooling.)

Our Florida experience included a loud air handler (you had to turn up the volume on the TV whenever the AC came on) with overhead registers that blew cold air down on you. Here, the air handler will be in the basement (no basements in Florida), so sound should not be a problem. The registers will be in the floor, because we're going to keep the ducting out of the attic. We'll be judicious in out choice of locations.

They need some details about the floor trusses, but they'll work up a design for us, including the ductwork, and we'll review that at another Zoom meeting.

The benefit is that I should have a properly sized, well-designed HVAC/IAQ (indoor air quality) solution that I can present to any plumbing and heating contractor to implement.

A bit of mixed emotions, as I'm still excited by hydronic heating and cooling. But I need less uncertainty in this build, and some practical, affordable, reliable solutions to move forward.

"Better is the enemy of good enough."

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We Have Footers

09:53 Tuesday, 30 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 78.24°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 8.68mph
Words: 536

Had a bit of excitement in what should have been a routine day.

Brad the Builder had ordered two cement trucks with conveyors. The cement company sent one truck with a conveyor, and they started pouring the footers. A little later the second truck arrived without a conveyor. The thought apparently being that the second truck could position its chute over the first truck's conveyor.

Sure. In an ideal world.

We're building on a hillside. Although there's a construction driveway, it's not necessarily perfectly level. The second truck parked next to the first truck and to absolutely no one's surprise, concrete wouldn't run uphill into the chute. Hilarity ensued.

By "hilarity," I mean the kind of side-splitting slapstick farce that made The Wages of Fear such a classic cinematic comedy. At one point they had the second truck's front chained to a skid-steer so it could pull the front end of the truck away from the slope that leads down into our back patio.

My brother was visiting and we watched as the second truck tried to maneuver away from the slope, which resulted in it only pushing shale and moving closer to the slope. I suggested that we repair to the house so that we couldn't be called as witnesses in the event of an ensuing catastrophe. "Not my circus, not my monkeys," came to mind.

They eventually figured out how to re-arrange the trucks so they could get the concrete from the second truck into the chute of the first. I have no idea how they did this. I asked how we would preclude a similar circumstance going forward. I'm assured we're going to be using a pumper with a boom, and the trucks can line up like ducks in row.

All's well that ends well, but sheesh.

We're entering a hot spell after what has been a mostly lovely June. I have a meeting this afternoon with Energy Vanguard to discuss the results of our Manual J calculations. It should be interesting. I'm convinced we can decouple the latent heat load from the sensible heat load by using a whole-home dehumidifier. They want to use a fan-coil unit to handle both sensible and latent loads and duct cold air, which is not what I want for a number of reasons.

We have a limited "cooling" season here. I'm confident that the house is tight enough and well-insulated enough that our cooling loads will be modest, even at the design temps, such that we will be able to keep the temperature of the floor above the dew point.

I'm also looking at using a product that goes above the sub-flooring. It is a high-density EPS (styrofoam) that has embedded aluminum channels and fins to emit or collect heat. My concern is its thickness and how that might affect the doors. It's $7 a square foot, so it's not cheap. But if I can reuse the radiant floor for heating and cooling, and avoid buying a separate piece of equipment and ducting, I think it'll be worth it. I suspect it may also help reduce the sound of foot traffic in the basement.

The beat goes on...

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Wild

10:00 Monday, 29 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 75.58°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 1.57mph
Words: 66

I did not check On This Day in the marmot before writing the preceding post, but back in 2017, I wrote something similar.

It's a theme, I guess.

On This Day is ephemeral. If you're coming to this post anytime after the 29th of June, it'll be different than it is today. But here's the link to that post in 2017. Beware, it's over 2K words.

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I Have Things to Do

09:09 Monday, 29 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 72.97°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 1.74mph
Words: 1079

And stuff on my mind.

So here I am.

This kind of post was perhaps the greater proportion of the posts in Groundhog Day, where I was often trying to "figure stuff out." Urgent questions about why my life was not working out the way I thought it would.

"Thought," past tense of "to think." There's a lot of noise out there about artificial intelligence, and what it's going to do to our ability "to think." I'm not particularly worried about it, because we've already devalued the skill of thinking to the point where few of us actually know how to do it.

Now, there's a lot of "cognitive activity" going on between all of our ears. Most of it is not "thinking" in the sense that I use the word. By "thinking," I'm referring to using reason and logic, and interrogating a question.

It's a skill, and it can be learned. It can even be self-taught, if you're literate and motivated. But unless you're motivated, unless there's some reason to possess the skill, few people ever learn it.

People in professions, engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and academics learn the skill, because it's essential to their role, their career. Programmers learn a subset of thinking, mostly in the realm of logic and systems. They're in a job, I won't call it a "profession" because there is no accountability, that demands rigorous thought and they're often very successful at it.

This then makes many of them believe they're experts at all forms of thought, and that all forms of thought can be reduced to rules of logic.

This often makes them insufferable.

But for the vast majority of society, "thinking" is mostly using rudimentary heuristics to reason backward from a feeling. Rationalization. And when you're wedded to the feeling, you can perform Olympic feats of rationalization.

We are embodied beings, and our emotions govern much of what we choose to "think" about. We are never taught the value of interrogating our feelings. One of the best things I learned in therapy was a little process that programmers ought to appreciate or value.

The first step is to interrogate the interior state, "What am I feeling?" Because thoughts almost always originate in feelings.

The next step is to interrogate the source of that feeling, "What am I believing?" There is something in our subjective experience that is stimulating that feeling, and it is connected to a belief about the world, self and others.

The next step is to interrogate the truth value of that belief, "Is this true?" This is where the value begins. Sometimes it's an easy question to answer, sometimes it can be difficult and demands further inquiry, especially when it comes to relationships and the things we believe about other people.

Then comes the "if/then" branch. If, upon reflection, the belief that underlies the feeling is not true, then there is no basis for the feeling in "reality."

Let it go.

If the belief is true, then you must ask "What can I do about it?" This is where feeling and thought turn into action. This is what gives one agency, makes one responsible for one's life.

But we don't teach any of that stuff. We don't value it. We don't value personal autonomy.

Now, I've omitted all kinds of skills that go into investigating the truth of an issue. Because this is a blog post and not a book. And I have another point I want to make.

Nobody gets to choose their parents. We didn't get to choose the culture we were born into. And nearly all of our subjective experience has been shaped by that culture. There are layers upon layers of unexamined, implicit beliefs about "the world," that have been indoctrinated into us, which would probably require the work of a lifetime to unwind, if it's even possible at all.

To some extent, it is. But that takes time and attention, and where does our time and attention go these days?

My point is that we have been born into a civilization that is unsustainable for a host of reasons. And the origins of that flaw go back centuries and are virtually embedded into our culture. "Western culture," you see so many people claiming they are defending.

We are not going to fix that.

What we are observing today, and have been observing for most of our history, is an effort to keep the system going, often with baling wire and duct tape. And that works for a while. But since the foundation is rotten, the problems eventually overtake our ability to apply patches, work-arounds, or to just accept the gradual decline of performance as part of the cost of doing business.

Part of our success as a civilization, perhaps the greatest part in material terms, is our facility with technology. Our infernal cleverness. Because we're so good at manipulating material world, we have ignored the immaterial world. The beliefs that undergird our culture and civilization. We believe every problem has a technological solution. We don't even see the immaterial defects. The fallacies and misapprehensions. Indeed, they are regarded not as bugs, but features.

Like I just couldn't see the Pex pipes that had to go into the bathroom vanity. It just never enters our consciousness.

And even if it did, it's too late to do anything about it now. The system has been designed to protect itself from attacking those beliefs. People try. Western culture and its facility with technology has infected almost every other culture on the planet. Perhaps not all of them, but the vast majority.

AI isn't a threat to anything. It's just a system output. Its existence is the consequence of this culture, so how can it be a threat to it?

It doesn't threaten thought for the vast majority of humanity, because the vast majority of humanity doesn't think.

It consumes.

Which also isn't a bug.

So don't "worry" about AI. There's nothing to worry about. Instead, ask yourself questions. What is the experience of your life? How would you like it to be different?

Then make a plan.

Almost nobody will even ask the first question in the sense of the process outline above. What are you believing? Is that true? What can you do about it?

These are the urgent questions that matter.

Not questions about AI.

We only have moments to live, and none of us is getting out of here alive.

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Days of Future Passed

19:53 Sunday, 28 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.8°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 0.49mph
Words: 249

There are a couple of posts in today's On This Day in the marmot that I liked. (Those are links to the original posts in the archives, because On This Day changes every day. The latter (later?) one puzzles me because I refer to a link that doesn't appear in the post. Weird.

Also weird is that the Aperture 3.5 post is in today's On This Day, when the June 2014 html exported archive on the server has it posted on the 27th. Part of the temporal rift that ravaged the marmot some years back and continues to cause chaos in the timeline. Something I must have missed when I made an attempt to restore order.

The post about choices makes me think. Today Apple is much more than a widget company. And Apple's use of Private Cloud Compute also suggests that Apple is presenting to you their version of "the world." Is it a distinction without a difference? I don't know.

Those posts were written twelve years ago. Twelve years from now I'll be 81. Twelve years ago tomorrow, Dad passed away at 87. I follow a number of octogenarian bloggers, perhaps I'll be one someday. I rather hope so, because I want to enjoy this house that we're building. But who knows?

The point is, or may be, the pace of change is accelerating. I think Apple has grown to be more like Google and Facebook and Amazon. Can we alter this trajectory?

I rather hope so.

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Worth a Read

19:48 Sunday, 28 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.68°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 0.49mph
Words: 85

I have a folder of RSS feeds called "The Crisis." It contains feeds from Talking Points Memo, Heather Cox Richardson, Empty Wheel and Timothy Snyder.

I seldom read many of the posts in that folder. It's too depressing, and they're seldom writing about anything that is surprising or actionable.

This post from Timothy Snyder should be no exception, except I did read it. There's little that's surprising or actionable, but I thought it was interesting.

Depressing too, perhaps. But that's the nature of the present.

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Footers Formed

15:09 Saturday, 27 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 77.38°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 63% Wind: 5.66mph
Words: 4

Concrete scheduled for Monday.

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Perhaps They Read the marmot?

18:29 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.8°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 9.01mph
Words: 194

Somewhat to my amazement, the porch and deck company just fired us as clients.

By email.

I responded to two emails. In the first I pushed back that the changes were not tweaks, and I looked forward to discussing them on a call.

In the second, I said we would not do this by email and that I looked forward to a call next week.

That, apparently, suggested that, "at the end of the day, this relationship needs to work for everyone involved and it doesn’t seem to be right now."

And then they fired us. They're returning our money.

Which, well... Good.

I don't think they read the marmot, but I thought it was an odd coincidence that just before he fired us he apologized for "replying by email again."

The episode seems pretty revealing to me. Yes, relationships need to work for everyone involved. So have some respect for your customer and communicate important information in a way that is transparent and allows you to give your full attention to your client. So he's correct, this relationship would never work because I don't think they understand any of that.

Good to know.

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Further to the Foregoing

17:28 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 73.29°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 10.09mph
Words: 79

I don't subscribe to this YouTube channel, but this caught my attention today. Skipping around on the usefully named chapters, I came upon this:

You may wish to watch other parts, or the whole thing.

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Root Cause

15:21 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 76.46°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 58% Wind: 10.92mph
Words: 522

I don't follow a lot of the trends and thoughts of the larger information technology culture cum economy. (A deliberate construction that harkens back to Doc's pernicious aphorism that, "Markets are conversations." Culture being a social construct that often frames "conversations," while economies and markets are systems of transactions. We can discuss culture as an element of a "social system," but they remain fundamentally, orthogonally different.)

Having digressed, I'll spare you "the weave," and try to get back on point.

Back in the day, when I was a young and foolish, I used to think that technology was great. That changes in technology represented progress. That the future was going to be better. And I used to follow all the discussions, the debates, the competing ideas. It seemed as though there were solutions to the eventual conundrums that arose when technology empowered people to do things that were in tension with economic interests. (Napster? "Rip. Mix. Burn."?)

The whole thrust of The Cluetrain Manifesto was that technology empowered people to transcend traditional "marketing." Oh, how I long for the days of "traditional" marketing.

What we had there was the delusion, or illusion if we're being charitable, that there were technological fixes for systemic problems. Undesirable elements or consequences of the economic system we'd enmeshed ourselves within.

Of course, there were no technological solutions. At least none that the average Joe or Jill could avail themselves of. Instead, we got embedded DRM. We got ebooks that we "buy" but never "own." We never "owned" software, we just bought a "license." Today we just rent software with a "subscription."

Doc's MyTerms is yet another tilting-at-windmills, technological band-aid that tries to assert human dignity, agency and privacy in an economic system that has devalued them to less than commodity levels.

You can't fix what's wrong with this system with technology.

It's not a technological problem.

It's a philosophical one. It's a values problem.

The foundation of our society is rotten. Competition as the central organizing principle of, well, everything; and capitalism, in which "them that has, gets" and where the rich get richer and the poor grow more numerous, are the core foundational beliefs that undergird everything in this society. They are treated as religious dogma, and questioning them is akin to heresy and merits being burned at the stake.

You are not going to fix anything, until we find some other core principles to build on. Like cooperation and collaboration rather than competition. Like community rather than individualism. We are all in this together, and none of us is getting out of here alive; but some billionaires are going to get to live in a bunker on an island, or maybe on Mars, when the whole rotten edifice collapses under the weight of its falsehoods and misapprehensions.

This can't go on. The system will collapse. Perhaps in my lifetime.

I don't know what to tell people like Doc. You'd think he'd know better by now. I'm not cynical. I just know that these aren't problems you can fix. They're not bugs, they're features.

But the beat goes on.

Until it doesn't.

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Email Circles of Hell

14:50 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 76.95°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 60% Wind: 10.74mph
Words: 562

I'm old enough to remember when email seemed like the future.

Likewise with texting.

Many days find me looking forward to the apocalypse, and the disappearance of the apparatus of modernity.

I subscribe to Doc Searls' blog, though I seldom find anything to agree with in his writing or his work. His heart is in the right place, at least now, but I don't think he understands the problem. But he blogs about other things, like radio, and that's interesting to me.

This morning though, I genuinely felt for Doc and his ordeal trying to get Apple Mail to talk to Fastmail. No human should have to go through that.

My email problem today isn't strictly an email problem so much as a reading comprehension problem.

We received an email last night from the company that we've contracted to do our deck and porch on the new house. In it, the guy we've been dealing with wrote that the designer, "refined the original schematic design with a few tweaks."

Nope. He emphatically did not. He changed the original "schematic" design significantly.

Then he tells us he's on the road until next week and will be able to discuss this with us when he returns sometime mid-week.

There are several problems here, suffice to say that email makes each of them worse.

I replied that these were not "a few tweaks" and that we would have to discuss when he returned. Mitzi made me delete several paragraphs of advice on customer service.

Perhaps suspecting something was amiss, the designer then emailed me with some vaguely worded explanation, with some hand-waving that we could of course "go back" to the original design.

I replied that we were not going to do this over email, and that I looked forward to having a call next week to figure this out.

To which the designer replied with yet another email saying essentially, "I take it all back."

Now, I'm pissed about the change. I'm pissed about the way they chose to notify me of the change (email). I'm pissed that they bullshitted me about the scope of the change. I'm pissed that they offered no explanation for the change. (I am certain there is a reason why they did this.) And I'm even more pissed that they don't seem to understand what "We're not going to do this by email," means.

I should also note that we have a signed contract and that they have a significant deposit.

I use text and email to communicate because I have to. It's often convenient, but I don't enjoy it. I wish I could rely on the phone, but I have my phone basically screening all my calls, and not everyone who needs to call me is on the "whitelist." But then, the original email was sent at 9:49 PM last night, when I wouldn't have welcomed a phone call anyway. I get ceaseless calls about loans I didn't apply for, which has made my phone far less useful for receiving calls.

But you don't drop something like this on a customer in passing, as you're heading off to another state for a another project, try to pass it off as "a few tweaks," and then offer to discuss it when it's convenient for you.

The beat goes on.

I feel like the beatings should too.

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Investigation

10:08 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 69.03°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 9.84mph
Words: 142

So there's even more excitement and mystery! I was trying to edit the times in the preceding post, and MacOS data detectors kept firing on the time text, inserting that little dotted window around the, with a downward pointing triangle that invites a click.

I didn't want to do anything other than edit the time, but the Data Detector wouldn't let me insert the edit cursor. (Now, I didn't try to arrow over the text, I was using the trackpad. Having just thought of this, I just tried arrowing into the time and that does work.)

So I filed a Feedback using the Feedback Assistant. It may simply be that I don't know how data detectors are supposed to work, and that I don't know if, or how, data detectors are enabled in TextEdit.

The beat goes on... (At 10:08 AM.)

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What Time Is It?

09:29 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 68.05°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 6.46mph
Words: 144

This is a test post that may or may not be published. As currently displayed in the Displayed Attributes, $PublicationDate is 9:29 AM (correct).

The preceding post was written at 6:51 AM ($Created attribute). The $PublicationDate in the exported html file now hosted on the server shows 18:51 (6:51 PM), which is 12 hours ahead of the $Created time.

I did not observe the change. I noticed this yesterday on another post when the sort order wasn't observed and a newer post wasn't at the top of the list. That made me look at $PublicationDate, and I noted the 12-hour discrepancy. I manually edited it, and subsequent posts and exports reflected the correct date and time.

This is flakey, but now I know to look for it.

(Edit: This export overwrote the previous page with the 18:51 time.)

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Visualizer Works

06:51 Friday, 26 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 59.86°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 5.93mph
Words: 35

I'm pleased to report that beta 2 of MacOS 27 has restored Visualizer to the Music app, even in Stage Manager.

I wonder if the Music app in TVOS has the Visualizer?

I must investigate.

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Wherein I Opine On MacOS 27

17:30 Thursday, 25 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 60.6°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 4.16mph
Words: 566

And iOS 27 too.

I'm running on beta 2 now. No major problems to report. Haven't encountered any incompatibilities, but then I don't use a lot of different apps all the time.

I will say that MacOS 27 is perceptibly faster. Everything feels snappier.

One weird thing is that Notes launches itself for reasons only it knows.

All the time.

I've turned off Reduce Transparency in Accessibility, and I'm running on Liquid Glass. I've moved the transparency slider all the way to the right, and it's tolerable. App icons are noticeably sharper.

I still think Liquid Glass is dumb. I would prefer Aqua and it's "lickable" buttons to this semi-translucent bullshit they've got going on.

But folks need to justify their paychecks, I guess.

I listened to the Accidental Tech Podcast on my way up to Clifton Park to pick up Caitie. Listening to John Siracusa on ATP always makes me happy. Pretty sure he's right about damn near everything.

Does anyone like the MacOS Calendar app? I know there are third party alternatives, but I don't use the calendar a lot, so I don't feel like spending money on one. If there was one thing Apple could change to make me hate Calendar less, it's the month view.

I really don't like month view.

I mean, what is the reason for smashing them all together in one long scrolling mess? I just want to arrow or tab through a view of a single month at a time, and all I want to see is one month. If you use a light touch, you can kind of slip from one month to the next, but the days of the preceding month and the next month are still there. The names of the preceding or next month also appear, only to fade away. Why? I find the whole performance confusing. Just display one month at a time, don't scroll the name, don't make it fade away, don't have any other days of any other month. If they're doing it because the screen is large enough to do so, just make the space for each of the days of one month a little bigger.

Frankly, I'd be even happier if months scrolled horizontally.

Happily, in iOS 27, month view is much better. It's not perfect, you can still scroll to a point where the screen has parts of two months visible, but if you just lightly push up or down, it'll usually stop at the boundary between two months.

And it only displays the days of that month! Amazing!

Guess I'll fill out a feedback to Apple.

I'm also off the waitlist for Siri on iOS. Haven't tried it very much yet, but the Siri app does have the same conversations I had with Siri on MacOS.

All of which has just inspired me to try to use Siri to create a Shortcut to open the Calendar app to a specific date.

It sorta-kinda works? Apparently Stage Manager interferes, because the shortcut will not bring Calendar to the front. I also asked it to open to the specified date in Day View, but it doesn't. It does open Calendar to the month, but that's all.

I'll play with it some more.

Finally, it looks like I made a smart move buying the 14" M5 MBP when I did, given all the price increases Apple announced today.

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Running on Batteries

17:00 Thursday, 25 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 60.94°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 4.16mph
Words: 346

Our electric utility is NYSEG (New York State Electric and Gas), which is owned by a Spanish company, Iberdrola (use the translate feature in your browser). It is pretty much despised in the region for its high rates and shitty service.

A week ago, during a period of strong, gusty winds, power flickered on and off most of the afternoon. Our LG induction range apparently took a hit, as our oven now no longer functions. It's out of warranty and it's going to be a $369 service call to get it fixed.

Today the power flipped on and off repeatedly. Twelve times, as reported by my Ting monitor, between 1:32PM and 1:56PM. I finally got fed up and opened all the breakers in the panel. Mitzi was out running errands, and when she got back I decided to plug the EcoFlow Delta Pro 3 into the generator connection we had installed in our mechanical room. I turned most of the breakers back on, except for the range, microwave, hot water heater, radiant heat boiler and the garage sub-panel. Basically we have everything we need in terms of lights and outlets.

Before she got back, I plugged the network equipment into a Bluetti AC70, and I'm now planning to keep it plugged in as an UPS. Likewise, I pugged my computer, Benq 27" monitor, Canon printer and Epson phot printer into an EcoFlow River 2 Pro, and I'll keep that plugged in as a UPS from now on.

I have another EcoFlow Delta 3 battery that I'll plug the TV/entertainment equipment into. I need to go out into the garage and find the plug for that one so I can plug it in and leave it connected as an UPS.

I'm going to have to look into a more consolidated, whole-home solution for the new place.

This is a horrible electric utility, and there's little we can do about it except put solar on our rooftops and use the utility as backup power.

They're projecting restoration in the next hour or so.

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Breaking Ground

06:35 Thursday, 25 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 59.65°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 4.12mph
Words: 377

We're finally underway. It seems astonishing that so much dirt came out of one hole. But it was all compacted, and now it's loose soil and stone. A lot of shale. We're planning to use some of it to create a small berm along the driveway next door for some landscaping.

Weather and inspections permitting, we hope to have the footings poured soon.

HVAC remains an outstanding question. Had another depressing conversation with an outfit called Massana Hydronic Technologies. Caitie being here has kept me from pursuing the question, but she left yesterday afternoon so I'll be digging in some more today.

If it all becomes too hard, I'll fall back to using ductless mini-splits. I'm convinced that hydronics is the most efficient way to go, but we don't have the products and experience in this country to make it a painless solution for the consumer. Contractors don't have the experience, and they're reluctant to do something they've never done before. At least, they don't seem to be beating down my door for the job.

I'm more confident about the low-voltage wiring, which is also something not a lot of people have done around here. But it's not exotic technology. The only real question I have is how much lighting and where? But I think that's easier to figure out than heat transfer.

We're also going to go with the Leviton smart panel solution. I need to sit down with our electrician and figure out the circuits and what breakers are required. The Span system seems to be the Cadillac of smart panels, but it's very expensive. The Leviton isn't cheap, but you can kind of customize it to meet your needs without gold-plating everything. Some breakers can be "dumb," in that I won't need to know how much power is flowing through them, like the outdoor outlets. Some I won't need to be remotely operable, and if I ever change my mind I can just buy that breaker and snap it in.

It's exciting and stressful and expensive, but it's underway. The shell should be complete by the end of the year, and we hope to get a certificate of occupancy by spring. The basement won't be completely finished, but it'll be usable.

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Father's Day

19:55 Monday, 22 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 58.69°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 2.84mph
Words: 519

Had a very nice Father's Day yesterday, beginning with a wonderful brunch at the Stonecat Café. Perfect weather, three guys playing some blues, and an excellent meal.

We stopped at Overlook Coffee in Burdett on the way, so Caitie could get coffee up to her fancy LA standards. I missed the turn into the parking lot, so I parked in the back and it was a fortuitous mistake because I'd never seen the falls the shop is named for! There they were, right behind the place! Very cool.

We came home from brunch and there was a little skid-steer up behind the house in the new driveway. So Ken Carson had been by to drop that off.

We napped a bit after brunch and later in the afternoon headed down into Montour Falls, which Caitie hadn't seen yet. We visited the falls and then stopped into Jerlando's for some garlic knots. From there we went up to Havana Glen Falls, which is a county park with a waterfall and an easy hike.

It was pretty crowded since it was such a beautiful day and on a weekend, so we didn't stay very long. Mitzi read about another, lesser-known, falls nearby, Deckertown Falls, so we went looking for that.

We found them, and that's where this shot was taken. There's not a well maintained trail, and it was a bit wet, muddy and slippery. We hiked up to get a better view, but decided discretion was the better part of valor. My knees can push me up the trail, but they can be tricky coming down.

From there we headed back home and right after I parked the Mav in the new driveway, I heard a loud diesel laboring up the hill. I looked down the hill and saw a dump truck hauling an excavator and knew I had to move the Mav. Ken was bringing the other piece of equipment he needed.

Mitzi had been talking with our neighbor, Lisa, earlier in the morning and she mentioned she'd like to meet Caitie, so we went next door and said hello. Caitie told Lisa how much she loved cows and after we left, Lisa went up into the pasture and called their small herd down. Back over to Lisa's and Caitie got some closeup time with their cows. She loved it. I put a few pics up at Flickr.

When Caitie was here last year, we watched Season 1 of Only Murders in the Building because she doesn't get Hulu. So we started watching Season 2 on Saturday night, and continued last night. It felt serendipitous because I hadn't noticed how much Season 2 was focused on father and child relationships. It took getting hit over the head with Father's Day to see it!

We have two more episodes to go tonight.

Anyway, it was an excellent Father's Day. Lisa and Ray enjoyed meeting Caitie and her fascination with cows earned up some more goodwill with the neighbors. Rain all day today. Caitie wants to bake cookies and Mitzi has some ideas about museums. We'll see what unfolds.

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Hummingbird

19:05 Sunday, 21 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 56.35°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 1.88mph
Words: 440

Caitie texted me Friday night and mentioned she was coming into Albany on Saturday, not Sunday. So I left early yesterday (0550) and drove straight through to Clifton Park without stopping. I guess it makes a difference if you skip breakfast and have nothing to drink! Traffic was light so I made good time. Got to Jimmy's Egg in Clifton Park a little after 9:00 to have some breakfast before I went to Mom's.

Visited with her for a couple of hours before I went to pick up Caitie at the train station. Went back to Mom's so Caitie could visit with her, and Mark was there which was a nice surprise. We stayed for about an hour and then got back on the road. Caitie drove for over half the trip. She's probably a better driver than I am, but she doesn't drive for fuel economy like I do. I looked over and saw the speedometer was at 85mph at one point. I suggested it might ruin the weekend if she got a $500 traffic ticket. She said she thought the Subaru in front of her would get it first.

When we stopped to switch, I looked at the computed fuel economy and it was only 34mpg. Every 10% increase in speed requires a 22% increase in energy with a corresponding decrease in fuel economy. I did not mention this to her. Highway driving is where hybrids get their worst fuel economy.

I'm a little disappointed because my lifetime fuel economy in the Mav is 39mpg. I was hoping this trip would get me closer to 40mpg. The previous trip to Clifton Park came in at 41.6mpg, since over half the trip is stop-and-go where the hybrid excels. I was hoping for about the same on this one but I don't think that's in the cards.

It was a beautiful night last night, and we sat outside on the back patio and watched the hummingbirds at the feeder. A little downy woodpecker was quite upset that we were out there while it was trying to visit the bird feeder. It would perch on the shepherd's crook and Chirp-chirp-chirp at us. It chased off a hummingbird or two while we were out there too. To my surprise, they like the hummingbird feeder too.

We had a little fire in Mitzi's fire pit, and I'm coughing a lot this morning. Knowing what we think we know now about PM2.5 fine particulate pollution, we probably shouldn't indulge in sitting around a fire for fun anymore.

It's a beautiful morning, so I probably should get on with it.

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Siri Smart

12:42 Thursday, 18 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.29°F Pressure: 997hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 17.4mph
Words: 957

I spent some time this morning with the Siri app in MacOS 27, asking about low-voltage, DC LED lighting. The experience was very much on par with the discussions I've had on ChatGPT and Claude.

The conversation veered into our HVAC design as well, and it seemed as informative as Claude and ChatGPT were in that topic as well.

Like both of those other AI products, Siri tends a bit toward the verbose, but it doesn't have the gratuitous obsequiousness of the other two. It does ask questions to continue the conversation, which the others do as well.

I haven't asked it anything about things like AppleScript, or how to write a formula in Numbers, but that's another area I'll be exploring.

Had a very pleasant Zoom call with the representative from CleanLife & ATX LED about low-voltage DC lighting solutions. We'll have another meeting with Mitzi on the call to talk about design solutions before we get a quote. He's confident that we'll probably save money on our lighting install, simply from the wiring.

I'm planning to use a Zigbee system, with their Kinetic products, rather than the ATX-specific design. That means we'll be using constant voltage versus constant current, which also means that dimming will be achieved with pulse width modulation (PWM), which is supposedly the source of flicker, I mentioned the other day.

For funsies,here's part of my chat with Siri, responding to the question:

Can you tell me what the practical difference is between a "constant current" and "constant voltage" DC LED lighting system would be? Apparently the "constant current" system can dim LED bulbs more, but as a practical matter it's not significant. Is that correct?

Answer:

You are entirely correct that for most residential applications, the practical difference in dimming between the two systems is negligible. While Constant Current (CC) systems are technically superior at ultra-low dimming levels, modern Constant Voltage (CV) systems—especially at 48V DC—use high-frequency dimming that is completely imperceptible to the human eye. The real practical difference for your home build comes down to wiring flexibility and fixture types, rather than how dim the lights can get.

THE PRACTICAL DIFFERENCES

FEATURE	CONSTANT VOLTAGE (CV)	CONSTANT CURRENT (CC)
How it Works	Delivers a fixed voltage (e.g., 48V); the current varies based on how many lights are on.	Delivers a fixed current (e.g., 700mA); the voltage adjusts automatically.
Best Used For	LED tape, linear lighting, and flexible systems where you might cut strips to length.	High-power individual fixtures, like architectural downlights or exterior floodlights.
Wiring Flexibility	High. You can wire lights in parallel (like a standard home). Easy to add or remove lights later.	Low. Lights must be wired in a specific series loop. If one light fails, the whole loop can go dark.
Dimming Method	Uses PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)—turning the light on and off thousands of times per second.	Uses CCR (Constant Current Reduction)—actually lowering the electrical flow to the diode.

THE DIMMING MYTH: DOES CC REALLY DIM BETTER?

Technically, yes. A Constant Current driver can dim an LED down to 0.1% smoothly because it is physically choking the electricity flowing into the diode.

However, modern Constant Voltage systems use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). Instead of lowering the power, they flicker the light on and off so fast (thousands of times a second) that your brain perceives it as "dim." Unless you are shooting high-speed, slow-motion video in your house, you will never notice the difference. Both will dim down to 1% perfectly for your eyes.

WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU CHOOSE FOR YOUR BUILD?

For a 48V DC residential system, Constant Voltage (CV) is almost always the better choice for the following reasons:

1. The "Christmas Light" Effect: Constant Current requires wiring fixtures in a series. If one CC downlight fails, the circuit breaks, and every light on that line goes out. CV is wired in parallel, so if one light dies, the rest stay on.

2. Flexibility: With CV, if you decide later to add one more puck light over a kitchen counter, you just tap into the existing 48V line. With CC, you would have to completely recalculate the electrical load for the whole chain.

3. The 48V Advantage: Because you are already using 48V (instead of 12V or 24V), you won't suffer from "voltage drop" (where lights get dimmer at the end of a long wire), which used to be the only real downside of Constant Voltage.

Are you looking at a specific brand of 48V fixtures (like WAC, PureEdge, or a proprietary smart home brand), or are you still in the exploratory phase?

==============================

That also shows the question at the end.

My Tinderbox Export Template for the marmot doesn't handle tables. When I copied and pasted the response into Tinderbox, a very nice RTF table appeared in the text of the note that is this post.

Rather than try to figure out how to revise the template, I made a screenshot of the table and asked Siri for the html to re-create it.

Let's see how that works.

Update: That worked pretty well. It also gave me some css to make it look better (add the lines and so on), but I omitted that because I have no idea what I'm doing! I'll have to check out the RSS and see how that turned out.

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At Mom's

15:10 Tuesday, 16 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.96°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 48% Wind: 5.46mph
Words: 392

Safely at Mom's. Sucks getting old. I used to be able to just drive and drive for hours. For the last few years, I've been good for about two hours before having to stop. Now it's about an hour. Or at least it was today.

It's not a problem, because I'm seldom in a hurry to get anywhere anymore. As long as I can find a decent place to pull off.

The drive was fairly pleasant. Beautiful day, very little traffic. The only frustration was at the end when Apple Maps gave me one of those routes where the last 10 miles involves 20 turns. So very irritating.

Also, my vision isn't what it used to be either. I have an appointment for an eye exam in July and I'll be hoping a new prescription will improve things. I just changed the Display settings to "Larger text" so I can see what I'm writing on this 14" screen.

Depressing.

I listened to Mac Power Users and Accidental Tech Podcast on the way up, so I learned a lot about Apple Intelligence. ATP had a terminal command to skip the waitlist for Siri, so I've entered that. I don't know if you have to restart, because I didn't check, but I restarted after executing the terminal command and checked Siri in Settings and it shows it's up and running.

I don't know if the improved Spotlight/Siri index is complete yet, but I just used the Siri app to ask for my brother Mark's address. It took several seconds to respond, but it got it right. Low bar, I know. I'm just feeling my way through this.

I think I'll play around with editing some images in Photos. Find some power lines to erase and see how that goes. Historically it's been hit or miss. Sometimes it doesn't get all the power line, other times it leaves visible artifacts. It does occasionally work, but it's been the exception rather than the rule.

Took Mom for a walk around the parking lot. Movement is medicine, and she had issues lasts summer with ulcers on her toes. We finally learned they were due to micro-clots, and she's been getting treatment for them so they're all resolved now and she's able to be on her feet and walking a bit.

Off to play with Photos...

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On the Road Again

08:02 Tuesday, 16 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 55.09°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 5.99mph
Words: 231

I'm driving up to the Clifton Park area, near Albany, this morning to see Mom and take my brother to the doctor tomorrow. He won't be able to drive for a while after the appointment, so I'm shuttling him back and forth.

It's a three and a half hour drive, so it's not much fun. I'll have to look for some podcasts before I leave. Of course all this stuff happens as we're studying the plans, applying for the permit, the power company is coming by today to tell us how we're going to get power to the house. I need to finish the windows spreadsheet with all their U-values, and on and on. So I'm bringing the MBP with me.

At least the weather is nice. The drive is pretty for the most part, and the traffic usually isn't bad at all, but I don't enjoy driving anymore. It's something to be endured, more than experienced.

I have to do this all again in a few days when my daughter arrives by train in Albany. She's coming up from visiting a friend in NYC. We'll stop in to visit with Mom a little while, then head back here for her stay with us for a couple of days. She flies out of Elmira, so that's nice.

Enough bitching about that. Time to pack a few things and get going.

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Sorry Mike, No Can Do

12:55 Monday, 15 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 58.95°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 12.82mph
Words: 324

Mike wants better titles for blog posts.

I understand the sentiment.

Here's the thing, titles are hard. The marmot isn't a magazine, and don't get me started on how shitty all the titles are in Apple News or on YouTube.

Basically, when I'm feeling clever, I'll try to write something that relates to the content of the post, or at least the photo if it's an image post. Most of the time, I'm trying to think of something to "fill in the blank," so I can get started on the post.

And this has never been a labor of art. I get some feedback now and then, and that's welcome and wonderful; but even when I do, nobody has ever complained about the quality of the prose, let alone the titles.

I hope I'm correct when I say that I could write much better than I do here. These posts are dashed off in a hurry. I do enjoy writing them, or I wouldn't do it, but if I had to labor over sentence construction, or structure, it'd be too much like work, and that's no fun. Likewise with titles.

And given the reflexive abhorrence of AI, I'd be reluctant to outsource "meaningful" titles to an LLM.

Also let me add that I did not submit the marmot to "Bubbles." I'd never heard of Bubble before Mike mentioned it. Having then learned of it, I clicked through and found the So Far, So Good offending post and discovered that if you simply hover over the link, a little text "bubble" pops up with the first few sentences of the post. Perhaps that might suffice in lieu of "meaningful" titles?

Anyway, started this post yesterday so it wlll only appear in the RSS feed and the archived month. Not a big deal, since it seems most folks who read the marmot do so through the feed, which is fine by me. Just an editorial note.

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So Far, So Good

06:07 Monday, 15 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 51.42°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 8.66mph
Words: 698

MacOS 27 is installed and, so far, everything seems good. I posted this pic just to make sure the AppleScript still works.

I haven't tried any of the new features yet, and I'll be busy enough today that I probably won't get to do so right away.

The picture is from the other morning and is from the back corner of the lot, looking southwest. That large grassy area between the bottom of the frame and the house is where the new place is going, the driveway is a big clue.

In better news, Brad the Builder got back from his weekend getaway with his family last night, and we were able to go over the plans. It turns out that the "error" is perhaps not an error at all. At least, if we tried to change the ceiling height of the basement, that would require a change to the stairs, and then a whole series of changes cascade from that.

So while we hadn't specifically requested 9' ceilings in the basement, they were something of a necessity to accommodate a stair design that we had requested, to maintain adequate clearance going down the stairs and making the turn on the landing. Mitzi and I would have been fine, but anyone over six feet tall would have had to duck. We'll have French doors at the walkout portion of the basement, so we would never have to carry any large objects down those stairs, but it's nice not to have to worry about people bumping their heads. Plus, it's probably a code thing, I haven't checked.

Anyway, we're off to the races! We'll be filing for the permit today, and hopefully breaking ground later in the week.

I watched a YouTube video about the history of The Moody Blues the other day, and got all nostalgic for some Prog Rock. I had a few of their more well known tracks in my library, but I went ahead last night and bought several of their earlier albums. I started listening to Days of Future Passed last night with headphones on because Mitzi was watching that Jane Fonda concert/counter-programming event.

It was 1975 when I was a plebe at the Naval Academy, near the end of the era of album-rock FM. (They'd play entire albums on the air, and you could record them on cassettes!) One "safe space" I could find was the library, where I could check out headphones and sit in a study carrel and jack into the library's audio system. I think they had six or eight stations or channels you could select. An album rock station in DC was one of them, and I just recall sitting there listening to Days of Future Passed one evening, not studying anything at all. It's not a strong memory, I've not made any effort to recall those memories or strengthen them. But I recall the feeling, which was kind of melancholy, but also relieved, to be someplace quiet where I could listen to music and not worry about anyone bothering me. I was depressed much of that time.

Just had a brief conversation with ChatGPT about the foregoing. I guess I should place an AI content warning here.

Anyway, I recall those days of FM rock. As a teenager, it was kind of how you connected with the broader "cool" culture. It felt much more sophisticated than AM radio with their loud and noisy DJs, ads and three-minute songs. Of course the jazz and classical fans had their stations as well.

I can't even imagine that listening experience today.

One thing that may be broken in Apple Music in MacOS 27 is the Visualizer. Couldn't get it to work on either the 27" monitor or the built-in 14" screen on the MBP. I don't know if it has anything to do with using Stage Manager. I tried putting Music into full screen mode, but it didn't help. All I got was a black screen in both versions of Visualizer.

Hopefully that gets fixed. I'm looking forward to listening to some progressive rock and watching the visuals on the screen.

And the beat goes on...

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Reckless

14:25 Sunday, 14 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 72.93°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 11.59mph
Words: 866

Throwing caution and sense to the wind, I'm downloading the MacOS 27 beta. It's 32GB, so that's going to be a while. (Software Update says about four more hours.)

Little Snitch seems to be incompatible, but I've installed a nightly beta that's supposedly compatible.

Mitzi wanted to change the top of the bathroom vanity, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Well, the new vanity that fits the new vanity top arrived on Friday and after posting yesterday morning, we proceeded to install it. Figured it'd be a two-hour job, tops.

Took more like five.

A large part of the problem was a certain kind of blindness on my part. The cabinet was going over an existing plumbing setup that we couldn't disassemble, the drain and supply lines. The supply lines are Pex tubes with shutoff valves attached. When I looked at the problem, all I seemed to see was the drain line.

I carefully measured the diameter of the drain pipe, its distance from the back wall and so on, also the distance to the center of the cabinet. I then used a hole-saw drill attachment to cut a hole precisely large enough to pass the drain line through, and used my jigsaw to cut an opening in the side of the cabinet so we could lower it over the drain line.

When that was completed, we tried to lower the cabinet over the pipes, and it wouldn't go! I thought I must have made an error in one direction or another in cutting the opening in the side of the cabinet. Pulled it out and cut a bit more material out on either side, "just to be sure."

Tried again, still wouldn't go all the way down to the floor.

Then we saw the Pex tubes!

In all that effort, it never occurred to me that they might be a problem. There should have been enough space below the drain line for the Pex to pass under the cabinet, but there was no way to manipulate those pipes. In hindsight, perhaps I could have duct-taped them to the bottom of the drain line.

But when we realized the Pex tubes were keeping the cabin from reaching the floor, we also realized they had to come up through the bottom of the cabinet along with the drain!

Took the cabinet back out and cut an even larger opening in the side of the cabinet (none of this is visible) to accommodate the Pex pipes, and enlarged the opening in the bottom to do the same.

New problem! Pex pipes just kind of flop around. How were we going to get them to come up through the bottom of the cabinet?! I thought of using some para-cord tied off to each of the shutoff valves.

So we try again with para-cord tied to the shutoff valves and a larger, squared off opening in the back of the drain pipe opening to accommodate the tubes. Somehow we managed to get one of the supply lines in front of the drain pipe in such a way that we couldn't get the pipe to finish going up, nor the cabinet off!

Now I needed to make the hole bigger again, only now there are two soft plastic supply lines in the hole with the drain. I'm not going to be able to use the Makita multi-tool to do that! Back to the garage for a small wood chisel, and I'm down on my knees carefully carving a larger opening around this stupid Pex pipe.

Finally we get that free, get the pipe up the back side of the drain where it belongs and lower the cabinet, only to find that the cold water line continues on to be the supply line for the toilet, which was all there in plain sight the entire time! I had to cut another opening in the other side of the cabinet.

So we pull the cabinet off again, back out to the kitchen to cut another opening, and finally get the whole thing finagled in again with the para-cords and it was in!

I was sweating like a pig, tired and frustrated.

How could I not see those Pex pipes? What was going on in my head that I never took them into account when thinking about how I had to modify the cabinet to accommodate the plumbing?

It's very troubling.

I mean, I'd used graph paper to figure out how to locate the drain pipe openings. We created paper templates which we used to test whether the measurements were right? The Pex pipes were there the entire time, I kept shoving them out of the way, and it never occurred to me that they would require being taken into account.

Am I becoming cognitively impaired somehow? Is this an early sign of dementia?

Well, we got the cabinet in and the vanity top mounted, the plumbing connected up. Minor leak with the drain pipe fixed this morning with teflon tape. All's well that ends well, but wow. It's really shaken me.

Which makes me wonder if deciding to install Golden Gate is especially reckless.

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Widow's Bay

07:44 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.91°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 4.27mph
Words: 142

I'm not a horror guy, but I am a humor guy.

I love this series, mostly because of the characters. It reminds me of Deadloch in that way.

It's a genuine horror story, there is some supernatural evil going on, which shouldn't be too much of a spoiler.

But it's also a lot like Deadloch, because you have a fairly "normal," level-headed protagonist surrounded by a bunch of decidedly abnormal characters confronting something frightening and unexplained.

It's not as funny as Deadloch was, which was mostly played for laughs with some suspense on the side. Widow's Bay is mostly played for the scares, with some laughs on the side.

But I enjoyed the characters in both series, and I think that's the key.

I'm looking forward to the season finale, and I've read that it's been slated for a second season.

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Criminal Record

07:29 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 63.14°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 3.69mph
Words: 233

A quick comment on this British series on Apple TV+. We just finished watching season 2. I started season 1 last year, but didn't make it through the first episode. I think I got the impression it was going to be mostly about a black woman cop fighting white patriarchy, and that didn't exactly draw me in.

Perhaps partly out of dumping Prime and having fewer shows to watch, I gave it a second chance this year and I'm glad I did. Now, I will say that season 2 is much better than the first one. It is about a black woman cop fighting white male patriarchy, but it's about much more than that too.

I haven't read any reviews of the series. I expect that season 2 will be criticized for the very things I found compelling, though perhaps they might also be called "manipulative."

But the evolution of the strained relationship between June and Dan was fascinating to observe.

The one part of the show that never felt credible to me was June's relationship with her husband. I never felt any empathy toward him, though I could see how I was supposed to. He just didn't seem to be a very relatable character.

Anyway, good show. Worth watching. You have to watch the first season to understand the second one, but all episodes are available now, so that's not a problem.

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Catching Up

06:48 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 61.36°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 3.69mph
Words: 512

It's been busy around here, mostly in a good way.

The big news, such as it may be, is that we finally have signed plans in hand. The bad news is that this process has been bumpier than I think it should have been. Part of that is on us for not having a clear idea of how the process should have worked.

We're having a post and beam deck and porch attached to the house. The plans from the designer included notional drawings of what those features should look like. We'd known from the beginning that that portion of the build was going to be performed by a third party. What we didn't understand going in was that most third parties are going to do their own design and engineering calculations. So we didn't communicate that to our architect, and he did his own thing that we have to pay him for, which we aren't going to use.

That and some other things have caused a bit of a mess that's going to cost us a couple thousand dollars more than we'd planned; but this isn't the kind of thing any of us understood going in, so it's been an expensive lesson.

We just received the plans yesterday afternoon, they were supposed to be here earlier in the week, and we haven't taken a close look at them yet. I expect we'll find errors. The post and beam engineers are supposed to meet with the architect by Zoom on Monday to go over the details of how the features attach to the ICF walls. Hopefully that all goes smoothly.

In other news, I've made some progress in finding a low voltage DC LED lighting solution from a company called ATX-LED. I'll be requesting a quote from them on Monday. Our builder's electrician has never done anything like this, but since it doesn't involve pulling Romex through a cathedral ceiling, he might like it.

It runs on 48v DC, and instead of having dozens of little power supplies converting 110v AC to DC at the light fixture, there are two DC power supplies providing power to all the fixtures in the house. There is some redundancy or fail-over capacity if one of the power supplies should fail, so you're not without lighting throughout the house. I'll probably buy a couple of spare power supplies to have on hand should that ever happen. The LED lights should last a lot longer. When conventional ones fail, it's usually that little power supply that fails because of heat.

There are a lot of other advantages with DC lighting in that they're dimmable without using pulse width modulation, which some people can detect as flicker. It's never been a problem for me, but good to know. It's very automated, but doesn't rely on cloud services, everything is local to the home.

I'm sure I'll flinch when I see the quote, but it just makes more sense to me. More to follow on that.

If the weather cooperates, we should be breaking ground next week.

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Sunset 6-11-26

09:15 Friday, 12 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 75.6°F Pressure: 1006hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 6.11mph
Words: 6

No text, because I got distracted.

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Neighbors

08:29 Tuesday, 9 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 66.33°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 8.57mph
Words: 341

This is from Saturday morning's walk. It kind of tickles me how curious they seem to be as I walk by.

Watched much of the WWDC keynote, though I got a late start. I'm still not a fan of this sort of "live shot" presentation.

I think the things that intrigued me the most were being able to use AI to "vibe code" Shortcuts workflows. I'm tempted to install the beta today just to play with that. Likewise, custom extensions for web pages in Safari looks interesting. All the parental control stuff feels vaguely defensive. Who sees a class action suit forthcoming?

The last thing I want in Messages is more intrusive "suggestions." I can barely write anything in Messages without auto-complete or auto-correct interrupting my efforts and making unwanted changes and suggestions. There's probably a setting somewhere to turn that off, but I haven't looked for it yet.

There are a lot of "natural language" calendar event creators, LaunchBar having one of them. Seems somewhat surprising to me that Apple just got around to it. But I guess they were distracted by all the chrome, er, "Liquid Glass" efforts.

I don't know how I feel about the Photos AI features. I hope the object removal feature is improved. It still struggles to remove power lines, and the generative fill content that replaces the power lines is often not very close to the original content it removed in the process of removing the power lines.

I'll be interested to see how smart Siri is with doing things like terminal scripts, or AppleScript. I'm not optimistic. I mean, why would Apple give Siri "intelligence" about its own operating system?

There's a part of me that still kind of wants to be excited about new features in MacOS. I really don't give a rat's ass about iOS or iPadOS. But the whole experience just feels, well, flat now. I'm primed to be disappointed, not "surprised and delighted."

It's a lovely morning outside. I need to get out there and enjoy it.

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Ruby Throated Hummingbird

17:12 Monday, 8 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 75.96°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 61% Wind: 3.38mph
Words: 256

Today was a pretty lazy day. Weather is just gorgeous. I didn't want to jump right on the computer this morning, so I spent some time outside. It was nice just sitting out there, listening to the birds.

Had a bit of a scare earlier. I protected one of my external SSDs with File Vault, and of course I couldn't recall the password. Eventually I figured it out from the clue, and I've added it to Keychain Access so hopefully I won't forget next time.

I watched some of the WWDC keynote this afternoon. I guess my iPhone 16 won't be up to scratch for all the new AI stuff. Some of it, yes; but I'll have to go look at the docs to see just how much. Anything to get you to buy a new phone, I guess.

Mark Bernstein has put together a way to share a read-only view of a Tinderbox document. There are still a few bugs in the system, but this should open to a post in Groundhog Day from the 4th of July, 2009, nearly 17 years ago. My how things have changed.

Sat outside this afternoon and a couple of hummingbirds visited the feeder. Went inside and grabbled the OM-1 Mk1 with the 40-150/f2.8 mounted. Sat patiently for quite some time and this one showed up. I was somewhat amazed it let me bring the camera to my eye without flying off.

All in all, a pretty nice day today.

And the beat goes on...

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Good Night

21:40 Sunday, 7 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 61.16°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 5.91mph
Words: 584

Bit of a long day today. Drove out to Minoa, 84 miles from here, and spoke to a couple of prospective plebes. Spoke extemporaneously this time. Not sure I did a great job, but everyone was polite about it.

After I got home, YouTube's algorithm offered this in my feed. Pretty inspiring, and it felt pretty serendipitous after my day trip.

Then Mitzi started watching a three part documentary on U.S. Grant on Netflix. I got sucked into it. I was modestly familiar with much of Grant's story, but the documentary covered a great deal that was new to me. It's a remarkable story about a profoundly great American leader, and if you're a Netflix subscriber, I heartily commend it to your attention.

Finally, scanning my feeds before noticing the sky and taking this photo before bed, I came across this post at The Marginalian.

That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.

And again I felt that sense of serendipity. That I was "in the groove," on the right frequency.

I spoke to the prospective midshipman about the fact that our culture is fixated on achievements and milestones. We work hard and sacrifice to earn them, and we're lauded and celebrated for them.

But we don't talk about something else, which is perhaps more important, and that is the reason why.

Why are we here?

I told them we are here to make meaning. And that one of the best ways to do that is through service to others. I told them that service is action, informed by our values. I tied that in with the Navy's core values, honor, courage and commitment. I told them that honor is a quality of one's character that accrues from keeping faith with our shared values. That honor and meaning aren't the same things, but they are adjacent. That one is earned, while the other is made.

I pointed out that there are so-called leaders all around us who are squandering the opportunity to make meaning in their lives, in service of something other than our shared values. I did not say that there was no honor in that; but I hope the inference was clear.

Perhaps not.

I asked them to be continue to strive for their achievements, to celebrate their milestones; but to be alert to the opportunities to make meaning in their lives, for there will be many. And that fifty years from now, as they look back on their lives, it will be the meaning that they treasure, not so much the achievements.

I got kind of gooey a couple of times, talking about shipmates and classmates lost in violence. Or things I learned while in service. I think I did a better job in this synopsis than I did when I was speaking. On my drive home, I kept kind of replaying it in my mind and wishing maybe I'd simply memorized the same pitch I made last year, and wondering if all that driving, and all that talking mattered at all.

And the universe delivered a few suggestions that it was perhaps all exactly the way it was supposed to be.

So goodnight.

Oh, that's Venus and Jupiter up there, getting closer together each night. This might be the closest, I"m not sure. Pretty captivating when you see them.

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The Painted Ponies Go Up and Down

06:53 Saturday, 6 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 69.12°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 71% Wind: 6.24mph
Words: 297

Montour Falls is having its annual fireman's field days this weekend. Mitzi and I went yesterday evening to check it out.

When I was a kid, we used to look forward to the fireman's field days. They're fundraisers for volunteer fire departments, and they're like small carnivals. I recall that the food was prepared by local civic organizations, and I loved the sweet Italian sausage with peppers and onions on a hard roll with a side of marinara. They did have that here yesterday, but it was a commercial outfit, the roll was soft and there was no marinara, alas.

But the energy felt the same, which was nice.

We entered a raffle for a new lawn mower because we need one!

I'm volunteering this afternoon at the Hector Swap Meet and Dumpster Day. People bring things to trade or dispose of. The Hector Sustainability Committee is one of the sponsors, and I've become a member to get more engaged in the community.

Tomorrow I'm going to Syracuse to sub for the Naval Academy Class of 1980 at their Another Link in the Chain event for prospective plebes. Apparently there aren't any 1980 alumni in the region, so there was a call for any members of '79 who might be able to fill in. There were three of us, but I didn't raise my hand immediately. I figured if nobody volunteered by Memorial Day then I would, and that's how it went.

I may go a couple of hours early and visit my brother who lives nearby, and we can FaceTime with Mom together from his place. She'll probably enjoy that.

We're hoping to get the plans by mid-week, and at least submit the permit application by the end of the week.

The beat goes on...

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Abide

06:53 Wednesday, 3 June 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 52.23°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 2.64mph
Words: 681

Not having the plans for our house in hand has kind of taken the wind out of our sails. To work that metaphor a bit more, I find myself in the doldrums. The gorgeous weather offers some relief, but I still find myself spending time online and it's depressing.

Time was once when you could "surf the web," and find new and interesting things. Kottke still manages to pull that off, but a lot of his content is also the depressing kind.

I dug into some more content about building science and the debate around ventilated versus unventilated attics. One of the more well known PhD mechanical engineers has a huge presence on YouTube, and I was watching a number of his videos yesterday when I happened on one from just a few months ago.

For the most part, building science is fairly apolitical. "For the most part," may be doing some heavy lifting there, because some people go to great lengths to make everything political, which is very tedious if somewhat true.

In any event, I was watching an interview with this guy and his interlocutor asked, perhaps rhetorically, if we had a housing problem in the United States, she being in Australia.

Well of course we do, but our building science guy had to go on to say that we also had a homeless problem, an "illegal alien" problem, and then seemed to catch himself. In other videos where he's a speaker he refers to "greenies," supposedly people who care about the environment or the climate, but who don't understand physics.

I get it that we have a science illiteracy problem in this country, but calling people names doesn't help make your case and in fact distracts from whatever point you're trying to make.

I also wonder how much this is a characteristic of an engineer's mind? Because I have a friend, a former classmate, who is also a mechanical engineer, who is also extremely opinionated and way to the right. In engineering, you're focused on achieving a result using data and equations, and where there may be uncertainty, well, you add some "margin" for safety.

But there is always an answer. And while there may be more than one way to solve a problem, once they've settled on an answer, that's the "right way." He made an engineering joke that went something to the effect, "Don't hire an engineer who's never had a bridge fall down. He over-engineers everything. Never hire an engineer who's had two bridges fall down, because he never learns anything."

It's a small sample size, but I'd extend this to my experience back with "hard" science fiction fandom. I'm not into sf fandom anymore, though I may read a novel now and then. But my distinct recollection was that of a group of people who had firmly fixed opinions that they believed were "right," and had "the charts and graphs to prove it." (Science and engineering.)

I see the same phenomenon in the Micro four-thirds forum at DP Review, where I made the mistake of reading a thread. I seldom go there anymore, because it's always the same tedious debates; but I went there this morning and read stuff like this.

I read Nick Bilton's letter to Scott Pelley. I'm not a 60 Minutes viewer, but I think I'm still entitled to appreciate its value as an institution and reputation as a journalism outlet. I think Bilton's overworked block of text is an exercise in self-justification, and that the guy never should have taken the job if he didn't expect to take fire from the organization he was looking to lead.

Fuck Bilton. Fuck Weiss. Fuck CBS. Fuck the Ellisons.

And then I read stuff like this, where Trump is trying dismantle the very infrastructure we've created to try to understand what's happening with our climate and in our oceans.

I really need the distraction of studying our plans, sharing them with HVAC contractors, developing a timeline, figuring out the budget.

For now, I guess I'll just go take a walk.

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Another Year Older

08:13 Tuesday, 2 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 54.54°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 2.75mph
Words: 562

But not, "deeper in debt."

Yet.

If you're interested in AI, and not just reflexively opposed to it, there's a thread over at the Tinderbox forum I commend to your attention.

Spent some time in Siegenthaler's book yesterday. Lots more to read and think about. It's interesting that a basement slab loses most of its heat through the edges. It's because the edges are closer to the atmosphere where the temperature gradient is greater and the path is shorter. Our slab is insulated below, and at the edges, because the slab is poured after the basement walls, and the edges meet the wall at 3.25" of EPS, so they never "see" the ground. Which is all great, because we're putting radiant heating in the slab.

The concrete in the walls meet the footings, which of course are in contact with the ground; and that's a large thermal mass as well that represents a great deal of hysteresis, or inertia, in the system. Because whether it's hot or it's cold outside, it's nearly always around 50°F at the footings. So as heat escapes the house, it will "flow" (warm) the concrete walls, down to the footings, before it makes its way through the 3.25" of EPS on the exterior of the wall.

That's not to say the house never gets cold, because heat also escapes through the windows and doors and to some extent through the ERV ventilation. But they've plotted the performance of heating systems in ICF houses constructed identically to stick frame houses with identical R-ratings in insulation, and the ICF heating system lags the stick frame, and the magnitude of the changes is less, which is what you'd expect in a system with significant hysteresis, dampening the response to external temperature changes. The key component being the reduced magnitude (energy consumption) of the response.

Still waiting on the plans. Brad the Builder is in communication with the architect. We decided that all communication should go through Brad until we have the finished product. Then we'll review them closely with Brad, and if we have any feedback provide that through Brad as well. One of the things we learned with the designer is that, even with everyone present on the same Zoom call, what the designer heard wasn't necessarily what we thought we were saying, because a number of people were talking and not all necessarily saying the same things.

I think, if we were to do this again, we'd try to structure the meetings more, so that at the end we would go over a list of things that were decided. The meetings were supposed to be limited to an hour, and there was a lot to go over, and we always felt like we were bumping up against that one-hour time limit. My bad, because I know better. But this felt different than other meetings I've been a party to. More like a collaborative effort, and less like a decision-making, direction-giving process.

While we're marking time, I'm trying to wrap my brain around the HVAC piece. I still have to get smart about how to size the ERV and the dehumidifier.

Anyway, I'm optimistic that this time next year, I'll be posting from the new Dave Cave, in a windowless room in the basement. That probably doesn't sound appealing, but it is to me.

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New Month

07:26 Monday, 1 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 52.02°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 3.47mph
Words: 976

Because it's hard to think of titles for everything.

Here is a reasonable corrective to the AI hysteria that seems to be swelling. Siting data centers, and powering them, is challenge. But it's not one that's exclusive to AI.

We finished watching For All Mankind the other night. It feels like they really leaned into The Expanse. That's ok, I guess. I'm mostly watching it out of inertia these days. There isn't a single character I'm really invested in, and that feels like it's by design since each season leaps forward by about a decade. And the sets still look far too antiseptic. But whatever. I thought the season finale was pretty good. While the sets may be antiseptic, incinerating a bunch of people wasn't. Overall, I'd say this season was better than the last one.

Then I watched the premiere episode of Star City and immediately decided it wasn't for me. Too depressing in the KGB storyline. I think the sets are far less antiseptic though!

I'm going to spend time with Chapter 2 of John Siegenthaler's Modern Hydronic Heating & Cooling. It's the one that covers calculating heat loss. Maybe I'll play with one of my programmable calculators and party like it's 1984.

Housing construction is one of those things we take for granted. It's not the kind of thing that gets covered in the popular press. Although it's likely the most expensive purchase any of us make in our lives, most of what gets written about in "popular" media covers fashion trends, not the nuts and bolts of how a house functions as a shelter system.

That seems like an enormous gap in our basic knowledge, and I don't know how we might go about filling it. Maybe secondary school curricula need to include system dynamics with housing as a case study of some kind.

All that is to say that, the more I learn about it, the more convinced I am that we have gone about heating, cooling and ventilation (and domestic hot water) all wrong, because energy was "cheap." In the case of fossil fuels, natural gas for example, we're burning a fuel at over 3,000°F to raise the air temperature in a home 30 or 40 degrees!

Because fire!

And we use that energy to heat or cool air, and then blow that air around the house through large, leaky ducts that gather dust as it transports air and dust around the house. It's inefficient because air has a very low heat capacity compared to water.

But most of this is "out of sight, out of mind," until it stops working. Maybe we're aware of tax incentives for upgrading devices to be more efficient, but we just sort of take blowing air everywhere as the best way to heat and cool a house.

I associated radiators with antiquated technology. How would we ever have Bruce Willis crawling through the Nakatomi Building if they used hydronic heating and cooling?! (You still need to move air for ventilation, but the quantities and velocities are smaller and likely too small to crawl through.)

Heat pumps still get a bad rap from a lot of people, you see it in the YouTube comments. If people are experiencing poor performance from a heat pump, it's because the system wasn't designed properly. Either it's too large or too small. If you have a leaky old house, then you probably lose most of your heat just through convection, air movement from the outdoor environment to the indoor. Many of those old leaky houses have oil or natural gas boilers that heat water to send to radiators. ("Emitters is the preferred nomenclature, Dude.") Modern cold weather heat pumps can produce water at 158°F. The question then becomes are your emitters properly sized and located? Perhaps not for using a heat pump. So it may not be a simple matter of retrofitting a heat pump in lieu of a gas boiler.

And sizing is critical. Too small and you can't move enough heat fast enough to overcome the heat losses. Too large and you risk short-cycling the compressor on the heat pump and shortening its working life by years. To say nothing of paying for capacity you simply don't need.

So it's a more intellectually demanding exercise to design and install a hydronic system; but it's simply not the case that "heat pumps don't work." They do, but they're not a one-for-one swap with a boiler. Sometimes they can be, but probably not in very old homes. You may need a buffer tank, which takes up space not formerly needed, to prevent short-cycling.

Anyway, the point is that understanding how to maintain the indoor environment of a home, including its air quality, demands a far more thoughtful approach than what we have heretofore been able to get away with. It's unfamiliar to customers and it's often just as unfamiliar to the trades who do this kind of work. Not a recipe for success.

I'm grateful that we have the opportunity to kind of do this "right." We hope, anyway. In addition to the unfamiliarity with air-to-water heat pumps, the thermal performance of ICF construction adds some uncertainty to the size determination. The effect of thermal mass on heat flow is not well characterized. Our ICF R-30 walls get their R-30 rating just from the EPS foam. It will likely perform like an R-45 to R-50 wall in practice, due to the thermal mass of the concrete retarding the movement of heat from the interior to the exterior of the house.

I'll run the numbers with three R-values and see how they affect the overall heat loss, which is one of the factors to determine the size the heat pump we'll need.

Anyway, time to crunch some numbers.

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