California (and the rest of the US) is well into a phase out of incandescent bulbs. If you’ve purchased a light bulb lately you might have noticed that 75 Watt and higher incandescent bulbs are non-existant in the stores. Granted CFL and LED technology is significantly more energy efficient, but with some significant drawbacks:

1. Cost: Compare a incandescent bulb at a price as low as $0.50/bulb to CFLs approaching $10.00/bulb and LEDs in the $40-$50/bulb range.
2. Warm-up Time: CFLs take time to start (2-3 minutes). Instant start CFLs are still slow with the fastest in the 30 second territory.
3. Limited Selection: There just aren’t that many options on the market. For example, show me a 75 Watt equivalent R30 (flood) natural light CFL in instant start. At the moment they don’t exist.

If you are venturing into these new waters here are some things that you will need to familiarize yourself with:

1. Lumen: This is the actual amount of light that the bulb emits.
2. Temperature (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin): This is the color of the light.
3. CRI: The ability for a light to produce real colors.

If you have existing bulbs that you like, figure out their ratings based on the above values. This will be invaluable for you as you try to replicate in a non-incandescent world.

My own personal evolution of the shopping list. Used when I run out of something in the kitchen.

1. Add item to a list on the refrigerator door. (Pre 2009)
2. Add item to a task list on my iPhone. (2009 – 2011)
3. Scan UPC code with Amazon App, delivered in two days with free shipping. (2012 – current)

It seems like my home Internet connection goes down daily. I’ve actually started researching how to deploy my own FTTH ISP in my neighborhood just to deal with this.

From the Wikipedia article:

Sound Transmission Class (or STC) is an integer rating of how well a building partition attenuates airborne sound.

Materials which can improve STCs in walls include mass-loaded vinyl (MLV), standard drywall, “soundproof” drywall (such as QuietRock, Supress, SoundBreak, or ComfortGuard) and damping compounds such as Green Glue.

When researching solutions to soundproof a “paper-thin” wall:

1. Blow-in insulation / cellulose. Holes are drilled every 6-12 inches in-between each stud on the wall. A hose is inserted into the wall and the material is pumped in. This will not work if there is any existing insulating material in the wall – even if it’s 20+ year old broken down fiberglass.
2. Additional drywall layer. Simple, just slap up another layer of 5/8″ thick drywall. More material = more soundproofing.
3. Soundproof drywall. Use acoustically engineered drywall sheets instead of standard drywall. Even more soundproofing at roughly 3x the material cost.
4. Dampening compound. Add a dampening compound between two layers of drywall to increase the soundproofing.

Depending on who you talk to you will receive a different recommendation. We unfortunately found out about the cellulose limitations during an aborted installation. This led to an evaluation of removing the drywall to change the insulation, or figuring out a plan “C”.

So how do you figure out what to do? First figure out the STC rating that you want to achieve. In my case I’m looking for a rating of at least 50 and anything approaching 60 would be ideal. I found a Wall Assembly Performance guide on GreenGlue’s website with some fantastic comparisons of installations. Additionally on the QuietRock site they list an STC Rating of 53 on their highest performing product.

• 1 layer of drywall each side: 40
• 2 layers of drywall + 1 layer of drywall: 42 <– Adding one extra drywall layer to one of the walls
• 2 layers of drywall on both sides + 1 layer of Green Glue per side: 55 <– Can’t install since there is no access to one of the sides.
• 1 layer of QuietRock one side: 53 <– This assumes that the original drywall was removed

Unfortunately STC ratings are not additive and increase slowly with each additional layer. In our case we’ve decided to add a layer of GreenGlue and a layer of QuietRock. I’m hoping this achieves an effective rating of 55+.

TLDR;

Install a layer of QuietRock drywall with a layer of GreenGlue to the existing wall.

It never ceases to amaze me how often things in life will turn full circle. This blog is definitely one of those “things” for me. I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog for some time now and think I’ve finally figured it out…

Back to Basics

Longer form writing will be the my focus here. Short thoughts will go to my twitter, and occasional published imagery will go to flickr. There won’t be any specific theme, just the stuff that interests me.

Check out python-simple-hipchat for super simple message posting to your Hipchat rooms.

#!/usr/bin/python

hipster = hipchat.HipChat(token='xxxx')
hipster.method('rooms/message', method='POST', parameters={'room_id': yyyy, 'from': 'Hipster', 'message': data})

Awesome list of shortcuts for the Mac and iPhone:

Dan Rodneys List of Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts & Keystrokes.

Add this to your ~/.bashrc

# Quick way to rebuild the Launch Services database and get rid
# of duplicates in the Open With submenu.
alias fixopenwith=/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user


Then run:

$ fixopenwith

From your terminal.

Thanks Getting rid of Open With duplicates – All this for the tip!

I’ve been off Verizon FiOS for exactly an hour and I already miss it. I would have never guessed that I would consider a 30ms hop to the GPON as good speed, but after seeing what Time Warner Cable is doing anything would be better. I’m going to have to climb on the roof later and figure out what I have line of sight to for a P2P RF link.

Maxs-Home-iMac:~ mclark$ mtr -r www.google.com
HOST: Maxs-Home-iMac.local Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1.|-- 192.168.0.1 0.0% 10 1.3 46.9 1.2 418.6 130.9
2.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
3.|-- ge2-25.lsaicaev-cer05.soc 10.0% 10 413.4 1171. 10.2 2954. 1087.0
4.|-- te0-8-0-3.lsaicaev-ccr01. 10.0% 10 321.6 1084. 23.1 2828. 1061.8
5.|-- agg26.lsanca4-cr01.socal. 10.0% 10 229.6 994.4 11.5 2704. 1041.1
6.|-- ae-5-0.cr0.lax00.tbone.rr 10.0% 10 137.7 904.1 10.5 2580. 1021.1
7.|-- 66.109.9.24 10.0% 10 49.8 917.1 10.3 2451. 944.9
8.|-- 72.14.197.157 10.0% 10 214.7 902.6 70.8 2331. 881.3
9.|-- 216.239.46.40 14.3% 7 60.6 646.5 11.1 2199. 850.7
10.|-- 216.239.43.148 14.3% 7 11.6 594.6 11.6 2075. 806.5
11.|-- lax04s09-in-f20.1e100.net 14.3% 7 18.2 674.4 18.2 1948. 694.5

For the record I’ve like Apple’s new Maps application. So much so that I’ve stopped using my onboard navigation in my car. Granted I’ve found problems with missing data, typically this surfaces when I am looking for a destination by a common name and not a street address. The speed, GPS, turn by turn navigation, vector tiles, and offline cache have all outweighed the negatives I’ve encountered.

Tonight Google released Google Maps for iOS, and my initial impression is that it’s absolutely fantastic. Early reviews highlight the lack of a on-phone cache (this will be a problem for me when I’m using the phone while using Maps for directions) which I’ll test and find out for sure on my way to the office in the morning. The application seems to be beautifully executed: fast data loading, smooth scrolling, responsive, turn by turn directions, etc…

Like or hate Apple Maps one thing is for certain – without it Google would have never been pushed to release what we have now. A little competition can be a good thing.