Utah's hot, dry summers are not kind to flies, mosquitoes, and other annoying insects. The combination of heat, low humidity, and ultraviolet light (the average July UV index in Salt Lake City is 10; in New York it's 6) is as lethal as DDT.

And at 4700 feet in elevation, summer mornings can be quite cool, even when the temperature reaches 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the late afternoon. I can open the door and windows and let the warm air out and the cool air in without ushering in a bunch of uninvited guests.

Conditions get wet and cool enough in the spring and fall to bring out the bugs in annoying numbers. Even during the summer, a couple will find their way in and spend the day banging off the glass and buzzing me, no matter how wide open the windows (wasps seem particularly stupid in this regard).

We're talking bugs with a serious death wish. They're like, "C'mon, Darwin, give me some of that natural selection!"

Splat. Wish granted.

I tried traditional fly paper and caught one fly in an entire month. Maybe they've evolved an aversion to the stuff. But as I said, not really worth spending a lot of time and money on. Still, a couple of flies droning around the room are like little kids running up and down the aisle during a cross-country flight.

I'm pretty sure fly paper--well, duct tape--would work on them. As it turns out, fly paper, like duct tape, is the right idea. It only needs a little tweak.

A $6 pack of Catchmaster "Bug & Fly Clear Window Traps" did the trick. You place a plastic sheet of the stuff it in a corner of a sun-facing window (or any window where you observe bugs congregating). Stick it to the window and peel off the protective backing, exposing a film of transparent goo.

I was amazed at how quickly it worked. An hour later, flying annoyances gone. Or rather, permanently stuck. That's how long it took them to randomly wander into an insect version of the La Brea Tar Pits. I resisted tenting my fingers like Mr. Burns and cackling as the parasites went to meet their maker.

But I've got no sympathy for flies. Spiders, on the other hand, I respect. They're cold-blooded (literally) predators, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend (as long as they don't crawl on me).

It got me thinking that what we have here is the making of a cool science project. Leave a strip up for the whole summer and you'll end up with a veritable insect abattoir, including the teeny-tiny no-see-'ums you never guessed were there. You could stick traps all over the place and see what you collect where and how many over a span of time.

The downside is grossing out the teacher. But in truth, it's not any more disgusting than butterfly collecting. It's just that the little critters look so disgusting.

Okay, make that a big upside for the average kid.

Labels: appliances, science, technology, utah, weather

One nice thing about living in the high desert is that while summer daytime temperatures can climb to 100 degrees (Fahrenheit), they often sink to a comfortable 65-70 degrees at night. Except then the problem is getting the hot air out and the cool air in.

Building codes in the U.S. stipulate wall and ceiling insulation ratings but rarely Whole House Mechanical Ventilation. And in an apartment (especially a forty-year-old one)? Fuhgeddaboudit. Unfortunately, because ventilating an apartment would be easy.

(The air conditioner and refrigerator in mine are as old as the apartment; the hermetically sealed compressor pioneered by General Electric is an amazingly rugged piece of machinery. But they are power hogs.)

When I was a kid back in the prehistoric times, my dad installed a WHMV system in our big baby boomer house. That plus tons of insulation in the attic made a huge difference, and was orders of magnitude cheaper than central air conditioning.

My solution has always been to buy a box fan and attach screws to mount it in the window. The first one was the best, with metal blades that were quiet and didn't turn too fast. They've been plastic ever since and noisier. But the last two really disappointed.

My previous Aerospeed fan wasn't unbearably loud but became steadily unbalanced (like a wobbly wheel). I started hearing what I thought was outside helicopter traffic (not that unusual where I live). It was the fan putting on a convincing ventriloquism act.

Its replacement, an inexpensive Lasko B20301, was well-rated on Walmart. That thing is a screamer, a turboprop ready to take off. I'm sure it'd be fine in a barn or a 2000 square foot house. It was too loud even from the bedroom.

So it was time to get a purpose-built window fan. The top-selling twin fan on Amazon is the Holmes HAWF2021. But the bad reviews (always read those) consistently mentioned the noise, and that made me nervous. I didn't feel like rolling the dice again.

In the reviews, somebody recommended the HDX FW23-A1 as the superior choice. HDX is Home Depot's store brand. Having decided I couldn't live with the Lasko, I took a closer look at the Home Depot listing.


Several reviews mentioned how quiet it was. That sold me. I trundled down to the local Home Depot and picked one up. It truly is the quietest fan I've had so far, and just ten bucks more than the Holmes. Plus, the airflow can be reversed with the flick of a switch.

Granted, it won't blow a gale through your living room; more like a gentle breeze. And in reverse, it's better than the air conditioner.

The accordion expander needs work. You have to play tug-of-war to get it out as far as in the picture. I wish they'd enclosed more than one of the Lego-like expansion "feet" instead. But the gap was easily filled by a piece of foam board.

The one disadvantage is that, unlike my old box fan kludges, when the HDX FW23-A1 isn't on it doesn't let much air through, which minimizes passive airflow. But that also means you don't have to hastily remove it with every change of the weather.

Labels: appliances, economics, utah, weather

Legacy publishers and paperback publishers have good reason to be afraid, very afraid. I have finally seen an E-ink screen with my own two eyes.

I have three Kindle emulators/readers and two ePub readers on my computer. I've been coding and publishing ebooks for going on three years. In any case, I'm not talking about reading ebooks. I'm talking about the ebook reader screen.

This isn't some neato-keen gizmo, old technology in new bottles. It really is a paradigm shift.

Mention a grayscale display and I even I can't help thinking of my old Toshiba T1200 laptop with a 640×200 monochrome LCD screen. I'm not alone with this, hence the standard: "Who wants to read a book off a screen?" reaction.

E-ink really is much more like ink than any conventional LCD. To start with, the pixels are white and black--reinforcing the appearance of real paper--not black and "transparent."

My first reaction upon seeing a real Kindle at Walmart was that it was a dummy model plastered with a fake screen decal. I looked closer. I picked it up. It weighed less than a paperback. No, that was the real screen. And it was on.

E-ink is a "passive" technology. If you don't do anything, it doesn't do anything. It doesn't flicker, it doesn't refresh. It just sits there--like print. And uses precious little power doing so.

Press a button, and all those E-ink pixels haul their little butts out of one digital Barcalounger and plop themselves back down in another, which takes much longer than their LCD cousins. Don't expect E-ink video anytime soon.

That and the 16 level grayscale are the current technological limiting factors. Not color. Leave color to tablets for now. The immediate goals of ebook readers should be portability, format universality, and 256 level grayscale.

Plus an intuitive interface (the Kindle interface is a tad overcomplicated) and a price point that turns the product into an appliance and makes it disposable.

Once the book-buying public replaces their outdated assumptions about the capabilities of digital screens with the reality of E-ink, the paperback in particular will go the way of the LP. (And, yes, the LP is still around.)

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Labels: appliances, ebooks, kindle, publishing, technology

I mentioned previously that the television picture tube was the last true vacuum tube made for consumer electronics. At the same time, the household appliance department has seen huge growth in a specialized type of gas-filled vacuum tube: the CFL.

They've gotten to the good enough and cheap enough stage that I use quite a few. I just picked up some 100 watt-equivalents for a buck a piece at Home Depot.

Make cars more efficient and we drive them more. Make light cheap and we'll produce more light (that sounds very New Age). My kitchen nook doesn't have windows, so rather than turning the light off, turning it back on, turning it off--oh, screw it, leave it on. They're CFLs!

Except that CFLs don't like the heat generated in enclosed fixtures, which is what my kitchen has. Before long the CFL starts having an existential crisis: Am I on? Am I off? Should I come on right away or take a while? I'm alive! No, I'm dead. I'm alive! Argh, I'm dyyiinngg.

I end up replacing them with incandescents, but those nickles and dimes start to add up. Because I'm lazy and like gadgets, I bought myself some economizing behavior in a box: a Heath Zenith SL-6105 motion sensor, $13 online at Walmart (that was the price a week ago).

Installation is the same as a standard wall switch, using wire nuts. Considering the price, I'll trust the electronics but not so much the mechanical parts. The timer screw, for example, has to be adjusted very gingerly to avoid the always-on or 5 second test mode setting.

Most of the complaints on Amazon about the SL-6105 is that it doesn't work with CFLs. That's because its solid-state relay trickles a high-impedance current that conventional bulbs ground, but is just enough to charge an electronic ballast, causing the CFL to strobe.

A electromechanical relay would fix this, but the paradox of integrated electronics is that old-fashioned mechanical devices like relays are bulky and expensive. The easier solution is to pair an incandescent with a CFL. Or just screw in a cheap incandescent.

Hey, who cares about conservation? I've got a motion sensor!

Labels: appliances, environmentalism, science, technology

On October 1, 2008, Japanese manufacturing giant Matsushita Electric officially retired both its corporate name and the National brand and brought all of its product lines under the Panasonic label. The Matsushita and National brands had previously been used--mostly in Japan--for industrial parts and equipment in the former case and kitchen appliances in the latter (called shiromono in Japanese, or "white goods").

The National/Panasonic distinction remains pretty fixed in my mind. My little National rice cooker (white enamel finish, natch) is a quarter century old and still works fine. I have a Panasonic VCR and DVD player. At least for the time being, it's weird to see "Panasonic" on a toaster or refrigerator. I expect there to be a radio in it or something. Then again, computerized toilets are big in Japan, so maybe it's not that big a reach.

Labels: appliances, business, japan