Wanderings

Anything you dream is fiction,
and anything you accomplish is science,
the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
November 26th, 2008

Ward’s Heat Exchanger

This is an interesting idea. It is designed to heat up water going to the hot water heater by extracting heat from waste water. Basically, when your dishwasher is flushing hot water down the drain, the heat exchanger is grabbing the heat and pre-heating the water going to your hot water heater. It is a simple and easy to recreate design. Ward is putting these together and selling them on the internet.

He says that he’s selling a version that he has modified to fit most waste pipes for $275 plus shipping. They go for around $500 on eBay. He says there is an amazingly good ROI. He’ll have a web page up soon.

You can contact Ward about it at

h-exch

h-e

Oh boy, I think I might get plumbing stuff for Christmas.






August 22nd, 2008

Buying Books by the Pound

Some of the 57 booksI bought 57 books on eBay – about 14 pounds. (picture is of a random sample) They arrived today. These are great books, most from the 1960s and 70s. Many are unknown or little known authors. I don’t think that I’ve read about three quarters of them. This is going to last me until around Thanksgiving.

As I finish these, I’m going to put them up for sale. I am well on the way of writing a world class storefront system in PHP (no database required). My system is unique in that it is for small stores with a small inventory that don’t want to have a complex database but still want a full featured system. I also want to to be easy enough to use that it will make selling one-of-a-kind items easy. I want to support only PayPal (and maybe Google Checkout) because I believe that accepting credit cards directly is too expensive for the average small store.

I was searching around for more books, and I found a web site that sells science fiction books by the pound (I am keeping its URL secret). An average paperback weighs about 4 ounces so that’s 4 books to the pound (including packing material.) At $2 a pound, that’s right in my price range. You can make an offer for less, so I will see it they go for $1 a pound for 50 pounds (200 books). The good news is that these are new books, and I probably have not read any of them. The bad news is that they include those ubiquitous D&D, TV show (trek, Dr. who, Buffy et al), Vampire, Zombie, and 6 part series books in the count and you don’t get to choose.

You can expect many more badly written book reviews in the next few months.