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Visiting the Transfer Station

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Even though I try to avoid making much trash, kids I recycle my bottles and cans like a good little boy. Plus glass and metal doesn't burn, and I don't like burning too much plastic when I'm up in the woods. I can recycle paper and carboard locally too, so I do that at the recycling dumpsters at the Elm Avenue Park and Ride.

NB88 – Spring time at the cabin

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"It's spring time at the cabin. We got hit with four nor'easters late in the winter which delayed spring by several weeks. Ice and snow are starting to melt and it's time to clean out the drainage and get some firewood cut."

Teardown of an LED plug-in night light. – YouTube

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This is probably the more wasteful LED-based night light ever invented.

It actually uses more power when the light is switch off by the photo cell rather then on. And it uses big-fat 1-watt resistors to limit the current flow to the LEDs, producing upwards of 2-watts of heat, whenever is plugged in. Capacitive droppers are bad news, but resistive droppers are even worse, especially when your using 240 volt electricity with them.

The moral of this story: don't build electronics like this unless your goal is to burn more coal. It doesn't matter if it's only taking a few watts of power, you shouldn't go out of the way to design things as energy inefficient as possible.

Snowbanks on Bush Road in Berne

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Some drifting of the snow on Bush Road in the Town of Berne over the weekend. I used to swing over this way all the time heading over to Berne, but I don't get out to the hilltowns as much as I used to.