Comments by "JohnDoe" (@JohnDoe-my5ip) on "Technology Connections" channel.

  1. Man… how do people screw up French press setups so badly? It’s $100 to do it properly. Much cheaper than a coffee machine, better results, and lasts forever. An adjustable hand grinder, a kettle with temperature control settings, and a carafe. That’s it. Boiling water burns the hell out of the coffee. It should be about 200F. The cheapest kettles have no temperature setting. And god help you if you’re using pre-ground coffee. It’s too fine to be filtered properly by a French press. So gross.
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  2. Get your wife the slightly nicer $35 Walmart kettle with the French press setting… smh
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  3. I’ve noticed that as machines age, using the more expensive detergent actually does make a difference.
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  4. Just 15 mins in, there’s a lot of misconceptions here already. You really should’ve met with some hvac folks and not assumed the worst about them all... First of all: your gas furnace being oversized is a good thing actually. Things that run constantly don’t last as long. Replacing furnaces is expensive. Oversizing them is not. Dude you live in new construction. They put the cheapest builder grade furnace in there that they could possibly find. I assure you. They put a correctly sized AC in there, because unlike furnaces, it saves them money to correctly size those. Theres a persistent hatred of all things heat pumps in northern hvac companies. I don’t actually think it’s about ripping the customer off. I think it’s more ideological than that. Heat pumps are part of the culture war now, like gas stoves. It’s a very conservative industry, both politically, and in terms of adopting new things. They generally don’t like new things. It doesn’t help that the heat pump offerings in the USA are antiquated garbage, mandated to use 30 year old refrigerants. It would be so nice if we could import those systems they use in Norway, instead of this Texas made junk.
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  5. Oh god. It gets so much worse. The dunning Kruger effect is so strong here. Dude, do you always get the same mpg or range advertised for your car? Don’t you know to treat manufacturer specs with some skepticism, and add a healthy safety factor to a system? Especially with heat pumps. You’re not gonna get the advertised BTUs on the coldest days, when it’s almost time to change your filter, when you haven’t cleaned the condenser since last spring, etc.
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  6. LEDs tend to die very frequently if you have a fixture that’s 30+ years old, crappy wiring, and/or a rarer lightbulb size. The bulb size issue is the one that’s bitten me the most. Bulbs of types A, BR, and PAR are pretty bulletproof even in old houses IME. It’s the B and G that are cursed. The exact size you had in incandescent might not even exist in LED. Some of these bulbs were made by one company, that you bought for 30 years. So you jerry rig something that works, for a time, but it’s on borrowed time. Long term, you need to bite the bullet and get rid of that ancient POS fixture. Incandescents are more resilient to “dirty” electricity due to shoddy wiring, for a lack of a better word. A brief power surge will fry a driver, but an incandescent wouldn’t suffer any damage before a fuse would blow.
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  7. Man, I’m sure eliminating that 5% margin of error by just reading your gas meter and applying the furnace’s rated efficiency was worth the risk of burning your attached neighbors’ homes down.
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  8. I used to have a Chevy Volt. In the absence of standards, it’s a lose lose proposition for automakers. I was equally annoyed when I found out that the Volt’s L mode (one pedal driving, sorta) was putting the brakes on for very little deceleration. I probably inadvertently brake checked dozens of people! Who tf expects the brake lights to come on when you don’t press the brake?! The volt also had a button on the back of the steering wheel to engage more aggressive regen braking, which I would expect to turn the brake lights on. This is the sort of thing that really makes you realize what madness the push for fewer regulations really is. We live in a society and some things just need to work the same across products!
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  9. Hyundai was likely responding to (valid) criticisms like mine, which produced new problems. The correct behavior of brake systems is not something automakers should get to define.
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  10. I think the reason public CCS charging is such a disaster is because it’s unworkable by design. All they’re doing is plopping down the minimum viable product that’ll qualify for government tax credits, and then it’ll sit there and rot for the next 20 years. The apps won’t work at all before long. None of it is actually meant to work. The whole system is ridiculous and stupid to begin with, just put the L3 chargers in truck stops and interstate rest stops, it’s not rocket science. The business model doesn’t even pass the sniff test for the most part.
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