Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

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jennypenny
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by jennypenny »

Pedal2Petal wrote:
jennypenny wrote:I think dehydrated bananas are really tasty if you put a dollop of honey on each slice before dehydrating.
Good idea! Though they are plenty sweet already with all those condensed natural sugars. I want to try a lemon juice bath next time though, it should prevent them going as brown.
If you dip them in a honey bath, you don't need to treat them with something else to keep them from browning. Definitely adds calories, but delicious. I use water, cinnamon and honey, but I have a friend who starts by dissolving sugar in hot water and then adding honey to that. Those come out really sweet.

Pedal2Petal
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

jennypenny wrote: If you dip them in a honey bath, you don't need to treat them with something else to keep them from browning.
Whoa, really? I did not know this. I'll try it then! Would it work on pineapple too? Or do I not need to treat pineapple as it is quite citrus already?

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jennypenny
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by jennypenny »

I haven't tried any citrus so I don't know. I've done strawberries (great), blueberries (good for cooking with but not really eating dried), and raspberries (yuck). We're going to try apple rings, so I'll post how those turn out. I'm also drying diced onions and a soup mix (onions, carrots, peas, herbs) to keep in jars in my spice cabinet. When potatoes go on sale for Thanksgiving, I'm going to try dehydrating potatoes to make my own potato flakes.

George the original one
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by George the original one »

What sort of good:bad cell ratio are finding with your battery salvage?

Pedal2Petal
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

jennypenny wrote:We're going to try apple rings, so I'll post how those turn out. I'm also drying diced onions and a soup mix (onions, carrots, peas, herbs) to keep in jars in my spice cabinet. When potatoes go on sale for Thanksgiving, I'm going to try dehydrating potatoes to make my own potato flakes.
Some great ideas here which I plan to steal! What do you use those potato flakes for? Quick story - My grandpa once dehydrated enough food for 6 guys on an 8-day canoe trip... and the only thing I remember going moldy was the potatoes. So make sure they're truly dried!
George the original one wrote:What sort of good:bad cell ratio are finding with your battery salvage?
n/a right now because I just decided to start this yesterday and haven't sourced any laptop batteries yet. My working plan right now is to start volunteering at the local "tech thrift store" and see if I can take home their unusable or bad batteries.

But I might be able to partially answer your question anyway. A lot of it depends on the brand of the cell itself. No-name chinese cells are more likely to "short circuit" inside the cell, while name brand cells like Panasonic or Sanyo (which cost twice as much) are likely to hold their charge far longer, and are less likely to go bad. Which of the 2 options a laptop manufacturer chooses to use is up to them. Here's a video where a guy pulls apart I think 90 laptop batteries and sorts them according to how good they are. I think a majority of them were still functional (no shorts), although he's not done the mAh test yet only the voltage test.

EMJ
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by EMJ »

How I dehydrated apple rings - first a quick dip in diluted lemon juice, then a dredge in cinnamon/sugar. Only every 10th apple ring or so needs the cinnamon/sugar, rest just get lemon water. All the apple rings taste like cinnamon, not too sweet.

JL13
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by JL13 »

@Pedal2petal

Can you provide some insight to your lifestyle budget? Specifically related to housing and food in Vancouver. The city seemed very pricey when I was there but you seen to have solved it. I'd love some new ideas.

Pedal2Petal
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

J_L13 wrote:@Pedal2petal

Can you provide some insight to your lifestyle budget? Specifically related to housing and food in Vancouver. The city seemed very pricey when I was there but you seen to have solved it. I'd love some new ideas.
Sure I can do my best for you. I'll start off with a chart and graph I just made for the purpose of this thread. It's my expenses for the full month of September. It's probably fairly representative, even though some costs are maybe slightly higher than normal (buying an expensive bike lock and going on a big costco trip.)

For joint purchases like groceries and rent, only my 1/2 is represented here.

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I just realised I have two alcohol categories. Well one of them was a gift alcohol for my uncle's birthday so just relabel one of them to "gift" in your mind.

Housing is the toughest in this city. As I stated earlier, my share of rent is $450/mo. Getting rent this low is not too hard if you are willing to make a compromise or two. The cheapest I ever paid in Vancouver was splitting a room in a 3-BR apartment with my brother for 250$/mo. That was in this section of Burnaby. The rest of the apartment was shared with two other roommates. We also paid 250$/mo per person when my wife and I lived in the RV I posted in this thread.

Food is the second biggest category to cut down on, but probably easier than housing.

If you can eliminate the following expensive habit in this order, you can eat quite cheaply.

1. Eating out
2. Shopping at traditional grocery stores such as Safeway (best places to buy food in Vancouver are Costco, Sunrise Market, Persia Foods, maybe Kin's Farm Market)
3. Alcohol (you can make your own though for cheap, or support a local U-brew for still much cheaper than liquor stores.)
4. Eating meat
5. Eating dairy

I guess I've gotten a little lazy because I still do all five of these things in varying degrees. Steph and Cel (@Zikolas on these forums) also live in Vancouver, and I think they've eliminated all 5 of those expensive habits. They have a blog called IncomingAssets. Here's their July 2015 spending. Note that their chart covers the 2 of them while my chart only covers myself. You'll notice they are more efficient than I am with their living expenses, spending $775* to my $1095*. So I guess I should buy their book and learn some of their tricks ;)

I'm also developing the skills to forage wild foods as part of this strategy. Started with plants, moved onto mushrooms, and hopefully down the line I will be fishing.

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*all of the numbers I'm stating are actually Canadian Dollars, which have been at par in the past, but are now worth significantly less than the USD you are used to thinking in terms of. My $1100 budget is really $850 - around $27/day. My spending has stayed exactly the same in terms of USD over the past 2 years since they were par. Good thing I actually earn my money in USD, eh?

Pedal2Petal
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

After days of anxious waiting, my box of 20 used laptop batteries arrived.

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Unfortunately my cheapo multimeter has NOT yet arrived; items from China have a tendency to take their sweet time. Or depending on your historical context, items from China blitz at a heroic speed across the pacific on floating cities powered by magical fire.

So instead I built a simple voltmeter using my brother's Arduino. It's just 2 resistors and 4 wires, could hardly be any simpler. HOWEVER! IT takes a lot more circuitry to actually make a digital display to go along with the voltmeter.

I actually have a bit of animosity toward these microchips, like Arduino and it's less useful but more trendy cousin, Raspberry Pi. Look up tutorials online about stuff to do with these chips, and the project ideas are absolutely pointless. A whole lot of flashing LEDs, and automation of stuff that really doesn't benefit from automation. Or shit like a nightlight. You don't need a 30$ computer chip to power a fucking nightlight, people.

I think I know what's happening here though. Most useful applications for a computer chip already exist as products, generally cheaper and better programmed than what you can do yourself with a Pi or Arduino. So aside from niche applications for farmers with an engineering degree, they're a trendy LED blinking toy for adults.

A voltmeter is really useful. Everyone who uses batteries should have one. But I only made one with Arduino myself because my 6$ multimeter is still sitting in some port in Shenzhen.

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Anyway, I used my voltmeter (with enough processing power to outcompute the entire 1950's) to test the voltage on each of my 120 cells. A higher voltage on arrival is a clue that the battery still has its youthful spirit. It's not leaking charge and it's probably been used fairly recently. Lower voltages mean the battery is sick, and any lithium battery starts to accumulate damage once it sits below 3.0 volts for too long. Below 1.0 volt and it's generally on death's doorstep, but even these undead cells can still be carefully revived and serve some role in small projects like lighting and cell phone backup battery applications.

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My results were pretty good, although I've yet to perform any milliamp tests to find the capacity of each cell. Each and every cell will have to be charged fully, then using a specialized program, discharged fully and measured for total discharge milliamps. A fresh battery will probably be rated at 2400 milliamps right out of the factory. I think I'll be lucky to get an average of half that - but we'll see.

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Assuming half of my good-ish cells and all my outstanding cells can be used in my ebike battery, I'll have juuuust about enough to replace the cells in both of them. That's 1000$ in battery costs deferred, for 60$ plus shipping and tax.

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Just so you know, all pictures in this post are stills taken from my DIY multimeter with Arduino video.

aspiringpelican
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by aspiringpelican »

Pedal2Petal wrote:Thanks to everyone who commented so far, your feedback is what keeps me motivated to keep putting these out - I mean it!

Another role I played today that wasn't nearly as satisfying, was as an "experience" consumer. Drove 15 miles each way, had to pay for parking (paid for 2 hours but only stayed for 1) then paid for admittance into a tropical conservatory. It was a fine experience but spending almost 30$ total on the outing still isn't sitting right with me.
Were there butterflies? I have some family up in Victoria :) It *is* pretty neat to be able to get close to such huge moths...

And nice shaggy parasols! We haven't had decent rain for what seems like years, but I'm still waiting with my fingers crossed...

Have you familiarized yourself with Li-Po fire safety? Those things are *extremely* dangerous if they burn in an enclosed area, and they can't really be extinguished. It's a great deal on batteries, but I'd be hesitant about doing that kind of QA indoors in my home. If you're moving them around the house, etc, simple drops can be more risky than you would imagine.

JL13
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by JL13 »

Pedal2Petal wrote: my 6$ multimeter is still sitting in some port in Shenzhen.
Harbor Freight!

jacob
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by jacob »

Your Arduino voltmeter is just soooo wrong. I like it! :geek:

But, yes, another vote for Harbor Freight.

(Although I thought any self-respecting engineer would carry a Fluke in their back pocket. Gardeners, please ignore, you got the wrong context!)

sky
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by sky »

I used an Arduino as a thermostat to control a chest freezer and turn it into a beer fridge for kegs, using a thermistor and a solid state relay. I set it up to flash the temperature in morse code.

My Rpi is a torrent server hosting a number of linux installation images, running 24/7/365 (except for power outages) for many years. I think it may be close to 10 years old? I got it about a year after they first came out.

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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

J_L13 wrote:Harbor Freight!
Nope!
sky wrote:I used an Arduino as a thermostat to control a chest freezer and turn it into a beer fridge for kegs, using a thermistor and a solid state relay. I set it up to flash the temperature in morse code.
Brilliant! I think this is a really good use for an Arduino, I had actually wanted to use a chest freezer as a fridge once I own a place so now I know how to get it done.

Maybe the ERE wiki needs an "ERE microcontrollers" section. I know of another cool one - MPGuino
aspiringpelican wrote:Have you familiarized yourself with Li-Po fire safety?
Yeah, and Lithium cells have come a long way. The world produces a billion cell phones a year, and when was the last time one exploded due to a "simple drop?"

But I'll probably process laptop batteries outside from now on. And the answer to extinguishing them is generally to have sand or cat litter on hand...
aspiringpelican wrote:Were there butterflies?
There were, but more than anything there were loads of tropical birds. Very cool actually. I'm glad I went even though I was sour about spending 30$ - dammit that's what my soldering station cost! :/

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aspiringpelican wrote:nice shaggy parasols
They are! And they came back too, I just doubled my haul within the last few days. I ran into another mushroom hunter while picking them too, he says their season extends basically until it freezes, which it sometimes never does all winter in Vancouver. Anyone want some of my oversupply of mushrooms?

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jacob wrote:Your Arduino voltmeter is just soooo wrong. I like it!
It was wrong, literally. It was reading voltage lower by about 16%, so I recalibrated with a bunch of batteries with known voltages. Seems as if the circuit itself was giving me around 18 kΩ of resistance, so I had to bake that into my arduino sketch. It's a lot more accurate now! :) I hope...

I also wired in an LED that shines on the LCD so I can read it in the dark. Shoulda sprung for the backlit LCD I suppose. It's the mad max of voltmeters.

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Last edited by Pedal2Petal on Sat Oct 17, 2015 10:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

sky
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by sky »

Chest freezer conversion to refrigerator is much cheaper to buy and run than a normal fridge. I am now using a Johnson Controls A419.

https://youtu.be/ZSRAR0efNSI

Pedal2Petal
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

Today a bit on my online "business" and where it's going.

I've basically been taking an extended sabbatical from working on my projects, the last time I spent any real time on them was October 2014. Of course I'm still doing little things, like upgrading a server to have more resources, or approve comments, or when a website goes down I have to sing to the server to comfort it or something. Probably "working" around 2 hours a week if I had to guess.

However - Lately Adsense has been performing a lot poorer for me than it has historically. This experience seems to be shared by a lot of youtube partners with the onset of a new revenue scheme called "youtube red." I've also noticed that Google is promoting its Adsense program a lot more heavily than it used to, maybe it's a sign they are making the program more "profitable" for themselves and less so for their Adsense partners. Hard to say but I've always sought to be diverse in my online income sources so these new developments have not actually affected me much at all.

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Above: revenue by week, over the last year. Recently they've been lower than average.

Lower revenue along with some new hobbies is prompting me to try a few new things. Also my site is #104,000 on Alexa so I'm hoping to get it to 100,000 and be in the 100k alexa club :) (ERE is 39,000 btw)

My two main online projects right now (aside from this ERE journal) are my electronics videos on one of my youtube channels, and the mushrooms vancouver blog. Well the electronics videos are not getting a lot of traction, but the Mushrooms VancouverTumblr blog, wow! A lot of reposting, following, the account is growing very quickly.

It reminds me that youtube really is not as good a traffic source as it is a revenue source.

Anyway my most popular mushroom post so far is the crown-tipped coral mushroom, which has over 100 "notes" total. (notes are a sum of all your reblogs, likes and comments) I've started embedding non-intrusive amazon affiliate links into each post so that as the posts spread around, so do my Amazon links. Surprisingly, as Adsense revenue is diminishing, Amazon payouts are increasing. Yesterday I deposited a $1300 CAD (980 US) payout of commissions for a single month, my biggest one yet. So I want to encourage that trend and grow my base of affiliate links.

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Daddy Day Care

One big new development is that my wife will probably be promoted soon to a middle management position at her radio station. She is on maternity leave right now but will go back to work early if she gets the job. So I could be primary caregiver starting as soon as December.

Since we're already on the subject, here's that baby dressed up as a pumpkin for Halloween.

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I'll be going in sort of blind here, but I have some ideas about making parenting easier. Like maybe I can find some parent friends and work out deals where "I'll watch your kid one day, you watch mine the next day, then our kids grow up to be friends" - sounds good for everyone doesn't it?

Also I got one of these bike trailers off Craigslist but haven't used it yet because it's hard to find a baby-sized helmet that isn't a TOTAL RIPOFF in price.

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Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

I've seen a similar trend with AdSense income decreasing and amazon increasing. In my case it's more due to Google algorithm changes sending more traffic to one of my sites and less to another.

You are FIRE on AdSense and amazon alone? That's awesome. Are you worried about your income slowing down? I don't trust it at all.

Aren't you worried about revealing lucrative niches and ending up with a lot of competition? Maybe I'm paranoid. :)

Did you figure blogging out yourself or do you learn from other blogs? I'm always looking for good resources.

If you feel like chatting in more detail send me a pm. It might be fun to talk shop.

Pedal2Petal
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Pedal2Petal »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:You are FIRE on AdSense and amazon alone? That's awesome.
Not exclusively those 2 sources, but combined they are well over 50% of my total income. I have a few other sources of money to have as diverse an income as someone with a low net worth can have.
Gilberto de Piento wrote:Are you worried about your income slowing down? I don't trust it at all.
In time I do expect the gravy train to slow down or even derail completely, so I use my very substantial free time to learn new marketable skills, especially ones that don't depend on the internet. Like bike mechanics, practical electrical engineering, etc. Other alternative forms of capital especially social capital make a great safety net too.

At my current earnings:savings ratio, every day I pull income I actually earn enough to live for 1-2 additional days. So the longer I hold on the safer I am. Currently if my income dries up I have minimum 2 years of savings I can burn through in finding another revenue source. I consider myself rich now, but I've been poor and it doesn't really frighten me. Read Possum Living for a really great perspective on that.
Gilberto de Piento wrote:Aren't you worried about revealing lucrative niches and ending up with a lot of competition? Maybe I'm paranoid. :)
No, not really. My website ideas aren't really worth very much, it's the actual implementation of them that takes years of work. If someone wants to spend 2 years building a better site than I have, rather than fill one of the many voids that exist out there, let them try.
Gilberto de Piento wrote:Did you figure blogging out yourself or do you learn from other blogs? I'm always looking for good resources.
I figured a lot out by trial and error so I have a lot of techniques and ideas that you won't find on "smart passive income" or whatever. A lot of my ideas came from Early Retirement Extreme, and from an SEO internship I had after college in 2010. I actually got a lot out of Ed Dale's 30 day challenge, but I don't think it exists in the form it did in 2013 at all. I might still have some of the materials I downloaded though.

Changing Gears a Bit

I don't have anything to report right now as I've been spending a lot of time lately playing a hideously complex roguelike zombie survival game, but here's an ERE story from two years ago.

When we first moved into my in-laws' basement suite, my mother in law just could not accept the fact that I was neither working a job nor looking for one. She probably thought I was mooching off her daughter (my wife) for money. She bugged me about it a lot, trying to suggest different jobs I could apply for. Like once I mentioned I used to work retail and she suggested I go apply for some retail sales jobs (ugggggggh I'd rather freeze to death in the streets actually thanx! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: .) Or she would see me working on my bike and suggest I go find a part time bike mechanic job.

So my response was simply to stop checking the mail, and make her deliver my mail to me. Since I don't have any bills, my mail is generally checks. Like 3 or 4 a month. After a couple months of delivering me a check every week, she stopped asking or bugging me about "getting a job" altogether.

This was another great idea stolen from Jacob actually, I remember a blog post where he started posting all his dividend checks to facebook and pretty quickly his family members stopped trying to offer him "resume advice" or whatever, and left him alone. It worked like a charm for me too! :)

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Thanks for your detailed response. I placed Possum Living on hold at the library.

simplex
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Re: Pedal2Petal's post-ERE life

Post by simplex »

I'm also using amazon a bit, although in the EU. My experience is not that good. They change advertised prices depending on the country of the buyer, and some get (rightfully) annoyed by this. This combined with the fragmentation of the EU market makes amazon less attractive.

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