The reason they are called the Leonids is that the main orbital path the meteroids are on before they strike the earth is such that it points back in the general direction of the constellation Leo at the point where the earth crosses the comet's orbit each year (meteor showers come from debris broken off a comet).
If you make a black-on-white copy of a starchart, and draw a line on it for each meteor you see when it happens, with an arrowhead in the direction of travel, at the end of the night you will see the most of the paths generally radiating away from Leo, like spokes radiating from the hub of a bicycle wheel. This is like what you'd see if you stood in the middle of a multilane highway as cars sped past you, facing where they come from - you'd see the cars angling to the right and left, but "radiating" from one spot in the distance.
If a meteor's path is very short, it is headed in your general direction. If it just a bright spot, then it is headed straight for you, so you know when to duck. If it is very long, it is headed away from you.
I don't know if it is still practiced, but there used to be organized efforts among amateur astronomers to map meteor paths during showers so their orbits could be calculated. Now I guess it would be more practical and accurate to do it with radar. To do make such a calculation, the observers also need to write down the time they saw each meteor.
Even so, the meteors won't all be radiating from a single point. There will be a lot of randomness. Part of this will be because the meteoroids are spread out in space, to either side of the comets orbit, each on its own slightly different orbit.
Also, as it approaches the earth, the earth's gravity will disturb the orbit of the meteoroid. If the meteoroid is heading straight to the center of the earth just before it hits, then it will just go faster. If it's heading a ways to one side of the earth, then its path will be deflected in towards the earth, and when it hits it will be at a highly deflected path. If it's even farther to the side, it won't hit the earth but it's orbit will be disturbed, and many orbits of a planet through a comet's path will introduce a lot of scatter in future showers.
Kitchen stoves and speaker wires
on
Listening to Leonids
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I didn't hear the Leonids, but I have had some experience with unusual radio receivers.
The kitchen stove in the house I lived in in Moscow, Idaho when I was 12 would pick up a local radio station. It sounded very quiet, but if the room was still you could make out the words in the announcer's voice.
Curiously, it only started doing that the last couple months we lived there, and it was only that one station that was received, although there were several in the area.
Later on, I lived around the corner from a CB fanatic that had a quite illegal overpowered station in his home. He had a fifty foot antenna set up in his backyard. If he broadcast while we were listening to the stereo, it would blast the room with his racket.
I found that I could receive him clearly on a cheap 2 inch audio speaker that had one foot of wire soldered to each terminal and stretched out in opposite directions. That's it.
A neighbor took up a petition to ask the FCC to bust him but they never would.
I mentioned both of these phenomena to an electrical engineer once and he thought it shouldn't happen because there was nothing to rectify the signal. I'm not so sure how it could work, maybe impurities or oxidation in the metal forming a natural diode, or nonlinear effects from all the power, or something I don't know.
Someone previously asked if you could receive radio on dental braces. Yes you can, I've never heard it happen but I've heard of it happening to other people.
I don't know, but a friend who studied the Gamelan (loosely speaking, a Javanese gong orchestra) told me that there are Gamelan gongs that play a very low frequency that can tear your heart from its supporting tissue.
I can't say one way or another whether this is true.
The way that Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab, got his start is that he designed some impressively loud speakers while an undergrad at CalTech, and then blasted Ride of the Valkyrie over Pasadena's neighboring very upscale town of San Marino at 7 a.m. one morning during finals week (playing The Ride during finals is a tradition there). He went on to start a stereo store that sold high-quality speakers of his own manufacture that had the name Gross National Products. He got into the computer biz by making some manner of those little cards that plugged into the SparcSystem 1.
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying maybe you should look into how GNP speakers were made.
I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.
Try ZooLib - C++, multithreaded, MIT License
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2
Try ZooLib. It is written in C++, it's multithreaded, and it is released under the MIT License (same license as XFree86).
Owl's Head, Maine has occasional clear times. It was beautifully clear much earlier in the night, long before the shower. Then it was thickly clouded. I went out just now (3:30 am local time, I think that's 8:30 GMT) and it was mostly clear, but clouded up in the 15 minutes I watched. During that time I saw a number of moderately bright meteors, many that left trails, but no bolides.
I'm going to wake my wife up at 4:15 or so for the peak, and hope it clears again!
Telescope mirrors can be made by hand with suprisingly simple equipment. An eight-inch diameter telescope will run you about $250, maybe less if you're creative, for the mirror kit, eyepiece, aluminizing, and mounting.
There may be a telescope making or astronomy club in your area. A good way to find out is to subscribe to the ATM mailing list. Another way is to follow some of these links:
Stellafane - Springfield Vermont, where the hobby was started in the USA
Although it's helpful, you don't need to work with a club to make a telescope. I didn't for my first two. What you will need is some books, which you can buy from Willman Bell or Newport Glass. You will also need a kit that contains your mirror blank, abrasive, polishing pitch, and polishing abrasive. You can get those from Newport Glass or from Dan Cassaro. There are other suppliers of kits as well, or if you join a club you could buy the materials from another member.
If you don't want to build a telescope, you can buy one. The telescopes made by Meade and Celestron are well known. You can find ads for dealers in the pages of Sky and Telescope Magazine, which you'll find in many bookstores.
A large number of astronomy products may be found through the Astronomy Mall.
Although the price differential for small telescopes like 6 or 8 inches is not that great between making it oneself and purchasing, the cost of purchasing really large instruments is really prohibitive, while large ones are actually affordable to make, comparable to purchasing a computer. If you start off making an 8 inch mirror, your next mirror can be much larger, say 16 inches, and amateurs commonly make mirrors from 20 to 30 inches, and I think there is a 72 inch mirror nearly complete made by some amateurs. My goal is to have a 40 inch observatory in my backyard.
Although I've listed U.S. organizations and companies, telescope making is practiced world-wide. A while back someone from Iraq subscribed to the ATM list and asked for help obtaining a kit. There are lots of subscribers from Europe and a number from Asia and Africa. Follow the links, and maybe you'll find a club in your home town, or at least within a reasonable distance!
I cannot describe the awe that comes from beholding the wonders of the heavens through a telescope made with one's own hands.
I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.
"
While I was product development manager at Working Software, we usually had one tech support staff, however the phones were often overloaded or the techie couldn't answer the question, so I handled it.
The customers were pretty tickled when I had them open the "About" box so they could see the name of the guy they were talking to.
I didn't write most of WSI's products, but I wrote some of them from scratch, and upgraded all of them
When I was a system software engineer at Apple, I missed my experience with tech support, and advocated that each system software engineer spend a week a year on the tech support hotline. This wasn't too enthusiastically received.
Re:Gotta love Cable Modems and bzip2!
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Sometimes it helps to talk about it with someone you can trust.
Re:Gotta love Cable Modems and bzip2!
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 2
Tourette's syndrome gives the sufferrer the uncontrollable urge to curse. The illness is not a joke, it's a serious neurological illness, and can have lasting unfortunate consequences on the sufferrer's ability to be accepted by others.
I've read a few of your responses and I must say you've got a pretty negative attitude. Is that really the impression you mean to give us?
Tips for Testing and Those New to Kernels
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you are new to installing your own kernel, or you want to get started on kernel programming, see http://www.kernelnewbies.org/ and join them on IRC in #kernelnewbies on the Open Projects Network.
If you'd like to program or debug the kernel, I recommend a couple of books:
Kernel Projects for Linux by Gary Nutt, ISBN 0-201-61243-7 - this is a lab manual with hands-on kernel programming projects that address a variety of kernel components
Understanding the Linux Kernel by Bovet, Cassetti, and Oram, ISBN 0596000022 - I bought a number of kernel programming books, and this seemed to be the best written of the books that covered recent kernels. It's mainly 2.2, with short addenda in each chapter for the changes that were expected at the time of writing for 2.4
But pertinent to tonights topic is a thread called "The Bloatware debate" that ran for some issues on Risks:
A 100-company survey by Standish Group International found that 45% of a
software application's features are never used, 19% rarely used, 16 %
sometime used, 13% often used, and 7% always used; yet, in spite of the fact
that most of an application is seldom used, software gets bigger all the
time. For example, Windows went from 3M lines of code (Windows 3.1) to 14M
lines (Windows 95) to 18M (Windows 98).
One culprit that I think is mentioned in there somewhere is the use of virtual functions in C++. Even if a virtual function never gets called because of the way it is possible to run a program, it must be included to satisfy the linker. Virtual functions are necessary to enable polymorphism, though, so I don't see a way around it. However, I suspect they are overused; many C++ programmers do not know when it is appropriate to make a member function non-virtual vs. virtual.
I invited a couple friends who were old time Atari programmers to post here. I hope they do.
But in case they don't, I'll tell you what the Atari programmers had to deal with. I'm hazy about the model, but I think it was the 2600.
The unit had 128 BYTES of RAM, which included both the heap and the stack. It had a one byte framebuffer, and you effected the drawing of objects and animation by carefully timed changes of its value during the horizontal or vertical blanking intervals.
One big help is that collision detection was implemented in hardware.
You had a choice of a 2k or a 4k cartridge to store the executable code and graphics. You could do a lot more with 4k, and potentially make a game with greater appeal and thereby greater sales, but it came at the cost of the 4k cartridge yielding the programmer half the rolyalties per unit, because the ROM chips were more expensive.
Dave told me of the long hours the programmers would put in trying to get the last few bytes out of a program, to make the transition from 4k to 2k. Suppose you had a program that absolutely required 2050 bytes - wouldn't that be heartbreaking? Sometimes the programmer would think he had a way to shrink the code enough, but it had the effect of screwing up the timing on the graphics.
The royalties could be considerable on those little cartridges. I understand the 19-year-old who wrote Pac Man for Atari received $1 million in royalties.
Again I say: Kids These Days.
Re:My First Commercial Product was 8kb in RAM
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 2
I've had several novelists tell me their books were saved by it.
One of the editors of MacUser magazine told me that he caught his girlfriend having an online affair with it. I was mortified, but he was grateful. Can't imagine what his girlfriend thought of me.
I have to cop to the fact that it was not my idea, that kudo goes to Dave Johnson.
I'm afraid that sort of utility has gone down a path I never intended for it. Fearing that people would use it to steal passwords or other confidential material, I made it very obvious that it is running and installed.
However, I have received spam for keystroke loggers that are meant for "remote installation", that save their logs in encrypted, hard-to-find files on the disk, and that can automatically transmit the logs over the internet.
It was the Mac version that was 8k, BTW. I don't think the dos or windows versions are very big, but I don't actually know as they were written by others.
My First Commercial Product was 8kb in RAM
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 2
I'm very proud of the fact that my first shipping commercial software product,
Last Resort from Working Software, weighed in at 8 KB of RAM usage while running.
That was mostly for the code. There was a text buffer that went up to a couple hundred bytes.
And since the program normally stayed running in the background all the time, I thought users might want to have their 8k back sometimes, at the expense of not getting the program's benefit, so there is a control panel option that not only pauses the program, but removes the program code from memory (handy during development, as I could update it this way without rebooting the machine).
When LR was paused, only a little stub of a trap patch remained in memory, about a dozen bytes or so.
I moved to Maine in January. I'd never even visited before I came here shopping for a house - my wife and I picked Maine to live after our wedding in the summer of 2000 for the fairly random reason that it was close to her previous homes in Atlantic Canada (she's from Newfoundland, and was studying in Nova Scotia when I met her).
I was talking about this with my neighbor, a midcoast dialup subscriber, and he told me that the founder of Midcoast did it while he was still in high school.
(I'm looking into getting wireless finally; however there is a hill between me and the transitter so I'm not sure yet I can get the signal).
When you cross the border into Maine you will see a big blue sign that says "Welcome to Maine, the way life should be." And I think it's true.
It's very peaceful here, the people are nice, there seems to be a lot of interest in the arts and music.
I was able to buy my first house here after renting for 15 years in Santa Cruz, California. I'm paying substantially less in mortgage payments to own a 4 bedroom house with a 2 car garage on a bunch of land than I did to rent a cramped 2-bedroom half of a duplex in Santa Cruz.
Of course there is the winter to contend with. And I never imagined the summer would be as hot as it was. The climate is much more even in Santa Cruz. But I found last winter to be tolerable and incredibly beautiful.
I recall reading on my power bill recently that electricity rates had dropped slightly. Take that, California!
GPL'ed Clone of Windows NT in the Works
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A nice fellow wrote me tonight to tell me about
ReactOS, which aims to be a quality binary-compatible replacement for Windows NT that will runs most NT applications and drivers.
It is still in very early development, so I wouldn't suggest you go out and run it (except for purposes of testing and debugging), but if you are looking for a worthy project to contribute to, consider this one.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some relative links in the original, which in your post will appear to reside at slashdot, which will 404. The pages are:
Please read Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind.
Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.
I'll go make them absolute URL's in the original now.
Let me also mention my DeCSS mirror and my Free Dmitry! page.
The reason they are called the Leonids is that the main orbital path the meteroids are on before they strike the earth is such that it points back in the general direction of the constellation Leo at the point where the earth crosses the comet's orbit each year (meteor showers come from debris broken off a comet).
If you make a black-on-white copy of a starchart, and draw a line on it for each meteor you see when it happens, with an arrowhead in the direction of travel, at the end of the night you will see the most of the paths generally radiating away from Leo, like spokes radiating from the hub of a bicycle wheel. This is like what you'd see if you stood in the middle of a multilane highway as cars sped past you, facing where they come from - you'd see the cars angling to the right and left, but "radiating" from one spot in the distance.
If a meteor's path is very short, it is headed in your general direction. If it just a bright spot, then it is headed straight for you, so you know when to duck. If it is very long, it is headed away from you.
I don't know if it is still practiced, but there used to be organized efforts among amateur astronomers to map meteor paths during showers so their orbits could be calculated. Now I guess it would be more practical and accurate to do it with radar. To do make such a calculation, the observers also need to write down the time they saw each meteor.
Even so, the meteors won't all be radiating from a single point. There will be a lot of randomness. Part of this will be because the meteoroids are spread out in space, to either side of the comets orbit, each on its own slightly different orbit.
Also, as it approaches the earth, the earth's gravity will disturb the orbit of the meteoroid. If the meteoroid is heading straight to the center of the earth just before it hits, then it will just go faster. If it's heading a ways to one side of the earth, then its path will be deflected in towards the earth, and when it hits it will be at a highly deflected path. If it's even farther to the side, it won't hit the earth but it's orbit will be disturbed, and many orbits of a planet through a comet's path will introduce a lot of scatter in future showers.
Now let me shill for amateur astronomy. I'm grinding my own telescope mirror. You can join the Amateur Telescope Maker's mailing list and they'll tell you how - read the FAQ. Dan Cassaro can sell you a mirror grinding kit. You can get books with instructions (you need a whole book, it's pretty involved) from Willman-Bell. You can find lots of tips on the Telescope Making WebRing.
Or you can buy telescopes from Meade and Celestron or shop at the shop at the astronomy mall. Finally, there's a new ATM portal at www.telescopemaking.com.
The kitchen stove in the house I lived in in Moscow, Idaho when I was 12 would pick up a local radio station. It sounded very quiet, but if the room was still you could make out the words in the announcer's voice.
Curiously, it only started doing that the last couple months we lived there, and it was only that one station that was received, although there were several in the area.
Later on, I lived around the corner from a CB fanatic that had a quite illegal overpowered station in his home. He had a fifty foot antenna set up in his backyard. If he broadcast while we were listening to the stereo, it would blast the room with his racket.
I found that I could receive him clearly on a cheap 2 inch audio speaker that had one foot of wire soldered to each terminal and stretched out in opposite directions. That's it.
A neighbor took up a petition to ask the FCC to bust him but they never would.
I mentioned both of these phenomena to an electrical engineer once and he thought it shouldn't happen because there was nothing to rectify the signal. I'm not so sure how it could work, maybe impurities or oxidation in the metal forming a natural diode, or nonlinear effects from all the power, or something I don't know.
Someone previously asked if you could receive radio on dental braces. Yes you can, I've never heard it happen but I've heard of it happening to other people.
I can't say one way or another whether this is true.
The way that Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab, got his start is that he designed some impressively loud speakers while an undergrad at CalTech, and then blasted Ride of the Valkyrie over Pasadena's neighboring very upscale town of San Marino at 7 a.m. one morning during finals week (playing The Ride during finals is a tradition there). He went on to start a stereo store that sold high-quality speakers of his own manufacture that had the name Gross National Products. He got into the computer biz by making some manner of those little cards that plugged into the SparcSystem 1.
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying maybe you should look into how GNP speakers were made.
I always wanted a set of his bookshelf speakers.
I'm going to wake my wife up at 4:15 or so for the peak, and hope it clears again!
I made several telescopes when I was a teenager, and have recently taken up grinding glass again after a long hiatus. I was also pleased to find the Central Maine Astronomical Society is in my area and joined last night while visiting their new observatory.
Telescope mirrors can be made by hand with suprisingly simple equipment. An eight-inch diameter telescope will run you about $250, maybe less if you're creative, for the mirror kit, eyepiece, aluminizing, and mounting.
There may be a telescope making or astronomy club in your area. A good way to find out is to subscribe to the ATM mailing list. Another way is to follow some of these links:
- Chabot Telescope Maker's Workshop (Oakland, California)
- Sidewalk Astronomers (Los Angeles and San Francisco)
- Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston
- Stellafane - Springfield Vermont, where the hobby was started in the USA
Although it's helpful, you don't need to work with a club to make a telescope. I didn't for my first two. What you will need is some books, which you can buy from Willman Bell or Newport Glass. You will also need a kit that contains your mirror blank, abrasive, polishing pitch, and polishing abrasive. You can get those from Newport Glass or from Dan Cassaro. There are other suppliers of kits as well, or if you join a club you could buy the materials from another member.If you don't want to build a telescope, you can buy one. The telescopes made by Meade and Celestron are well known. You can find ads for dealers in the pages of Sky and Telescope Magazine, which you'll find in many bookstores.
A large number of astronomy products may be found through the Astronomy Mall.
Although the price differential for small telescopes like 6 or 8 inches is not that great between making it oneself and purchasing, the cost of purchasing really large instruments is really prohibitive, while large ones are actually affordable to make, comparable to purchasing a computer. If you start off making an 8 inch mirror, your next mirror can be much larger, say 16 inches, and amateurs commonly make mirrors from 20 to 30 inches, and I think there is a 72 inch mirror nearly complete made by some amateurs. My goal is to have a 40 inch observatory in my backyard.
Although I've listed U.S. organizations and companies, telescope making is practiced world-wide. A while back someone from Iraq subscribed to the ATM list and asked for help obtaining a kit. There are lots of subscribers from Europe and a number from Asia and Africa. Follow the links, and maybe you'll find a club in your home town, or at least within a reasonable distance!
I cannot describe the awe that comes from beholding the wonders of the heavens through a telescope made with one's own hands.
Suggestions appreciated.
I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America. "
Read it here
They also have attorneys on staff, and will work with law firms in other cities if it comes to a lawsuit and you need local representation.
They take 20%, which is quite a bit, but note that they specialize in large business collections.
For what I feel is a cogent argument as to why everyone, even your mother, should use encryption, please read:
The customers were pretty tickled when I had them open the "About" box so they could see the name of the guy they were talking to.
I didn't write most of WSI's products, but I wrote some of them from scratch, and upgraded all of them
When I was a system software engineer at Apple, I missed my experience with tech support, and advocated that each system software engineer spend a week a year on the tech support hotline. This wasn't too enthusiastically received.
Have you any friends you can call on the phone?
I've been through some pretty tough times myself. Here's a website I wrote about my experiences.
Don't give up hope.
I've read a few of your responses and I must say you've got a pretty negative attitude. Is that really the impression you mean to give us?
If you are new to installing your own kernel, or you want to get started on kernel programming, see http://www.kernelnewbies.org/ and join them on IRC in #kernelnewbies on the Open Projects Network.
Also helpful to newbies, or to convince you it's worthwhile to help with testing, is my other article Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel.
And finally there is the Kernel HOWTO.
If you'd like to program or debug the kernel, I recommend a couple of books:
But pertinent to tonights topic is a thread called "The Bloatware debate" that ran for some issues on Risks:
- The Bloatware Debate
- Response
- Response
- Response
- Response
and also:- Bloat Dissections II
- Response
- Response
- Response
- Response
- Response
One culprit that I think is mentioned in there somewhere is the use of virtual functions in C++. Even if a virtual function never gets called because of the way it is possible to run a program, it must be included to satisfy the linker. Virtual functions are necessary to enable polymorphism, though, so I don't see a way around it. However, I suspect they are overused; many C++ programmers do not know when it is appropriate to make a member function non-virtual vs. virtual.But in case they don't, I'll tell you what the Atari programmers had to deal with. I'm hazy about the model, but I think it was the 2600.
The unit had 128 BYTES of RAM, which included both the heap and the stack. It had a one byte framebuffer, and you effected the drawing of objects and animation by carefully timed changes of its value during the horizontal or vertical blanking intervals.
One big help is that collision detection was implemented in hardware.
You had a choice of a 2k or a 4k cartridge to store the executable code and graphics. You could do a lot more with 4k, and potentially make a game with greater appeal and thereby greater sales, but it came at the cost of the 4k cartridge yielding the programmer half the rolyalties per unit, because the ROM chips were more expensive.
Dave told me of the long hours the programmers would put in trying to get the last few bytes out of a program, to make the transition from 4k to 2k. Suppose you had a program that absolutely required 2050 bytes - wouldn't that be heartbreaking? Sometimes the programmer would think he had a way to shrink the code enough, but it had the effect of screwing up the timing on the graphics.
The royalties could be considerable on those little cartridges. I understand the 19-year-old who wrote Pac Man for Atari received $1 million in royalties.
Again I say: Kids These Days.
One of the editors of MacUser magazine told me that he caught his girlfriend having an online affair with it. I was mortified, but he was grateful. Can't imagine what his girlfriend thought of me.
I have to cop to the fact that it was not my idea, that kudo goes to Dave Johnson.
I'm afraid that sort of utility has gone down a path I never intended for it. Fearing that people would use it to steal passwords or other confidential material, I made it very obvious that it is running and installed.
However, I have received spam for keystroke loggers that are meant for "remote installation", that save their logs in encrypted, hard-to-find files on the disk, and that can automatically transmit the logs over the internet.
It was the Mac version that was 8k, BTW. I don't think the dos or windows versions are very big, but I don't actually know as they were written by others.
That was mostly for the code. There was a text buffer that went up to a couple hundred bytes.
And since the program normally stayed running in the background all the time, I thought users might want to have their 8k back sometimes, at the expense of not getting the program's benefit, so there is a control panel option that not only pauses the program, but removes the program code from memory (handy during development, as I could update it this way without rebooting the machine).
When LR was paused, only a little stub of a trap patch remained in memory, about a dozen bytes or so.
Kids these days...
I live in Owl's Head, Maine, which is where Midcoast Internet Solutions was founded - Midcoast was featured on Slashdot recently for its forward-thinking work on installing wireless in Midcoast Maine.
I was talking about this with my neighbor, a midcoast dialup subscriber, and he told me that the founder of Midcoast did it while he was still in high school.
(I'm looking into getting wireless finally; however there is a hill between me and the transitter so I'm not sure yet I can get the signal).
When you cross the border into Maine you will see a big blue sign that says "Welcome to Maine, the way life should be." And I think it's true.
It's very peaceful here, the people are nice, there seems to be a lot of interest in the arts and music.
I was able to buy my first house here after renting for 15 years in Santa Cruz, California. I'm paying substantially less in mortgage payments to own a 4 bedroom house with a 2 car garage on a bunch of land than I did to rent a cramped 2-bedroom half of a duplex in Santa Cruz.
Of course there is the winter to contend with. And I never imagined the summer would be as hot as it was. The climate is much more even in Santa Cruz. But I found last winter to be tolerable and incredibly beautiful.
I recall reading on my power bill recently that electricity rates had dropped slightly. Take that, California!
It is still in very early development, so I wouldn't suggest you go out and run it (except for purposes of testing and debugging), but if you are looking for a worthy project to contribute to, consider this one.