Category: Uncategorized

Thermal Home Analysis

February 11th, 2025
A FLIR is a thermal (infrared) camera. There are models that plug into your phone. I specifically bought this one.

Its main uses are to identify:
- HVAC leaks
- Insulation leaks
- Drafts around doors and windows
- Electrical issues in your walls
I first borrowed a FLIR several years ago from a friend, when we bought our home, to determine which windows were in most need of replacing, where caulk was missing, etc. Our home was built in 1942 – so it has a lot of.. ahem.. “character” when it comes to efficiency.

The FLIR was immensely helpful, but they are around $350-400, which is right on the questionable threshold of “an excellent tool but one that I will use only occasionally” for me. For that reason, for years I resisted purchasing one. But every so often I’d really need one, and after borrowing and renting them several times, I finally decided to purchase one. It has paid for more than itself, in heating and cooling savings.

This is just a fun post to show you what it can do.

Home Analysis

The temperatures shown here are relative; if you took these measurements on a day that is 20 degrees colder/warmer outside, the absolutes may change, but the spread is really what is important (aka the “leaks”). Most of these were taken when it was about ~50F outside.

This first photo is inside my kitchen looking out through my deck door. You can see there is a spread of about 12 degrees F – which isn’t bad. However, the top and sides of the door seem much better insulated than the bottom of the door:

This next photo is of the same kitchen, stepped back a bit. Still only about an 11 degree spread, but there are clearly some spots that have a leak or are missing insulation; for example, there are four recessed light fixtures shown, but for some reason there are a few distinct cold spots on the ceiling.

You can also see that my deck door, which is brand new (ish), leaks much less through the panes compared to the old window on the right. Look at the large panes of glass on the deck door and notice how there are no distinct “cold leaks” compared to the windows on the right which are old, and, quite terrible apparently.

This is the last photo of my kitchen, which is interesting because it shows the heating duct that runs along the basement ceiling and underneath the kitchen (the bright horizontal strip).

There is another odd leak too – that purple spot right just northwest of the target – which is cold air from the crawlspace underneath leaking into the kitchen.

This next photo is taken in my living room, looking out our bay windows, which are also new. You can see the panes are doing a great job, however they are clearly leaking around the bottom:

Compare that to this original 1942 window (lead paint and all!), which is much worse and in need of replacing:

To see them side by side:

This next photo is taken in the dining room, and shows another heating duct in the wall. You can see the duct travels under the floor (from the furnace in the basement) and up behind the wall. Please ignore the oddly placed monitor stand on the floor.

This is a different view of 1) that same duct; the one on the right is the same one shown in the last photo, and 2) A different duct that comes right off the furnace.

Look at the temperature spread! We have 120 degree forced hot air coming out of that vent. If you want to know whether your heating (or cooling) is working, you can measure the air relative to the ambient air in the room – ie the forced hot air heat is ~55 degrees warmer.

Same photo but with dog included, getting his face blasted with 120 degree air. Dog is happy. And we have another vertical vent off to the left:

This next one is one of my favorites and is taken in a finished basement. Look closely at the back wall. The faint vertical streaks are the studs (behind the drywall)! Studs are are typically spaced 16″ apart. You could use this to tell whether you have irregular/”against code” studs – a better picture is shown below.

But you can also clearly see the insulation between them, and fortunately that insulation only has a few irregularities. The “coldest” gap near the bottom left is an outlet.

It also appears that my basement window is garbage – look how bad that pane of glass (upper left) is leaking.

This next photo is just to the left of that, showing a basement door that leads outside.. leaking terribly and in need of reparations.

To give a better idea of the studs, this is taken in an upstairs bedroom.

Remember, the temperature is relative. The “coldest” here is 70 degrees – the scale is different than prior photos. This room has new windows and has a heating vent so there is very little leakage.

Also, this shows about a 30 degree dropoff in the forced air temperature from the floor below. On the floor right above the furnace, the air was 120. On the top floor (at the longest run of the vent) it has dropped to around 90. I suppose some heat is “lost” in the walls in transit.

Have you ever stepped into a bathroom, and the room feels ok, but the floor is freezing? Behold – a horribly leaky downstairs bathroom. Here we have a 22 degrees spread; really bad, you can see a ton of cold air is entering, which is coming in from the garage (on the other side of this wall). There is also air leaking from behind the mirror, which is in need of some insulation.

Here is our front door with a bottom leak, but otherwise not bad:

And an old fireplace that is clearly drafty:

Finally, heres a few shots of the wood stove. It captures around 300F on the outside:

I think the limit of this camera model is around 300F, because the inside shows the same (I clicked “DC” mode which shows normal lighting). However I have another thermal sensor that doesn’t take photos, its a laser that you just point at a surface and it shows you the surface temp; that sensor shows the inside of the wood stove (the actual fire) at over 700.

If you’re purchasing a home, I can’t recommend this tool enough.
So, I bought a big ****ing Sword

April 14th, 2023

I’ll get to the sword, I promise, but first I want to talk about my wood.

Wood

For the last five years, I’ve been primarily heating our house with wood. We have natural gas (forced hot air), but I love heating with wood for several reasons:

1 “It’s the job that keeps you warm twice”. Splitting and stacking wood is an AMAZING workout. I’m at the best physical shape of my life, despite some creaking and cracking from aging.

2 It’s free. The vast majority of tree removal companies here in NJ are small operations. They don’t have the land (storage) or tooling/operations to run a firewood business. Only the (few) massive companies do this. I learned that the small tree removal companies actually have to pay the dump to leave the trees there, then the towns typically mulch them for playgrounds and such. Thus, they are quite happy for me to call up and say, “dump it right on my lawn for free” – and they do:

3 Wood is “carbon neutral”. Burning (poorly [1]) can produce pollutants, but when burned efficiently, trees are considered carbon neutral because they only release the carbon that they captured throughout their life. I suppose if you never burned them, they would be “carbon negative”, though.

4 It’s extremely effective. At 20 below 0, the house is a toasty 75 everywhere. I burn for days or weeks at a time because our stove is like a battery. We have a soapstone stove (Hearthstone), which is basically a giant rock that heats up and stays hot for many hours even after the fire dies. Cast iron doesn’t do that – it gets hot fast, and cools fast. I burn overnight without any worries at all.

5 Finally, it… just feels good. No, Great. My favorite afternoons are those with an axe in my hand:

This is just a fraction, maybe 1/3 of what I use on a cold year:

Axes

I have four axes, three of them are “splitters” and one is a hatchet/chopper (leftmost).

A common misconception is that [all] axes should be sharp. That is only partially true. Choppers or more properly “felling axes”, the kind you use when you want to cut down a tree, should be sharp. Splitting axes are not – they have wide heads so that they do not get stuck in the wood. Splitting mauls have very wide angles. If you split with a sharp axe, you will spend far more time trying to unstick your axe than turning large logs into small ones.

Fiskars is my favorite brand of splitter. The black one pictured on the right is what I do 80% of my work with. It’s just an amazing fiberglass splitter, probably one of the best tool investments I’ve ever made. A few thousand dollars in saved heating bills, and tens of thousands of calories burned.

For sentimental reasons, that Husqvarna is my favorite.

Oh, and sometimes, for huge chonkers, you will need wedges:

Sword

Now, we finally can talk about swords.

It started when I saw this video. Geez. After seeing that, I had to have one. So, off to the Viking Wood Splitter website I went.

I chose a custom engraving – CARPENTER on one side, and THE UNFORGIVEN on the other.

My order was backordered by about four months. I finally received it two days ago.

It’s gorgeous. Very well made, feels awesome in the hand, and it bleeds quality engineering. I feel like Braveheart in my yard. It’s a solid through tang, and I have little doubt it will stand the test of time.

In fact, I think it would make an awesome gravestone for my ashes. Kind of an Excalibur type of vibe.

But does it work?

All that praise aside – is it a novelty, or is it a tool?

A mix of both. It works. You can blow apart logs with it, just like an axe; that video above is not fake. I have split several large rounds so far with no issue. And the entire time I felt like a bad@ss. I’m not sure about a Viking.. as I feel a Viking would use an axe, but a warrior nonetheless.

But – it is heavy. This is not something I can spend a whole afternoon using (at least yet?). I can split for hours using that black Fiskars – but I won’t be able to get out of bed in the morning if I use this for more than an hour.

In summary – you can use it for awhile, then stare at how cool it is while resting, and then you finish the job with an axe.

Happy splitting, y’all.

Footnotes:

[1] There are many components to this. An efficient stove, dry wood, the right kind of wood, the correct burning temperature, etc.
GPTerminator and Plumbing School

April 9th, 2023
As of recent, ChatGPT and other powerful AI models have obviously been talked about.. everywhere. Having not used it myself, I could not distinguish reality from hype. So, I spent some time with it – enough to form Opinions! I’ve broken them into a few thoughts, and then some more serious topics on AI in general.

Pros And Cons of GPT itself

Here is my original impression after a few hours of talking to my robotic pal.

Pros
1. If you give it a well defined problem, it can (sometimes) generate an almost perfect answer faster than I could myself. I have great hope this will reduce some of the nonsense LeEtCoDe – if there is one application this will surely excel at, it is complex algorithms for well defined problems. If the average programmer now has these tools at their disposal, there is no need to implement quicksort yourself (not that there was before, .sort()) but you get the idea.
2. Soon, or maybe even now, it should be the goto before Google (which inevitably lands you on stack overflow) for most programming/debugging questions. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of hunting on SO – you start with a search result, turns out it’s not really asking the same thing, but oh someone marked it as a duplicate of this other thing, you follow that link, and so on – eventually you end up where you need to be, or you will be the poor chap that has to ask a new question. But so far, GPT “understands” what you’re asking pretty darn well – and if it can’t get you the answer, it can get you on the right path faster.
Areas of Improvement
1. It must learn to ask clarifying questions (without you asking it to ask you questions..)! Sometimes, it is VERY confident in it’s wrong answer, probably because it always tries to “guess” what you mean and give the best answer it can for it, rather than “making sure” it understands what you want. It would require less iterations if it probed a bit before giving an answer.
2. The disclaimer on their page says, “it may be out of date for events after 2021”. Does that mean new software libraries/versions/packages since then too? Software, at least some of it, moves fast, so there needs to be a constant “additive training” process, and a method to identify those sources of new data to train it with. There is a bit of work ahead.
Will I be Unemployed?

Lots of talk of this in programming circles lately. Should we start training to become plumbers and electricians?

The majority of my time as a senior engineer is not spent programming, at least not consistently. My job is:
1. turning vague wants into products or other value to the company
2. teasing out what’s really being asked from unclear reqs and vague tickets (see AOI 1 above)
3. once we have that, figuring out what the MVP looks like
4. from there, prioritizing all the features we thought of
5. planning your resources, time constraints, release cycles, when to cut versions, and so on
6. then we get to program, or at this point delegate the task off. Until the requirements change, and you repeat.
By the time you are at the last step, assuming you’ve done steps 1-5 well, you’ve already “won”. You have reduced the monstrous “software engineering” task into a “programming task”, and that point is where I think our AI friend can really help us.

I (at the current time) do not see these AI tools performing these tasks. Handshakes are what make this world go round – not code. Everything above requires people talking to (and convincing..) people. Maybe there needs to be one less junior engineer on the team to implement those tasks. Until I am convinced that these models learn to navigate their way through a sea of uncertainty, I don’t seem them as “engineers” but rather “helpers”.

Terminator-ey Stuff

You may have seen that Midjourney was yanked for deeply convincing deepfakes, and scientists have pressed the panic button on increasingly powerful AI.
I think they are right – not so much due to the reasons specified there, about the “space race” – but more to their point that society has NOT sorted out many of the potential consequences of powerful AI yet.

Here’s a few of my largest worries about powerful AI (in general – not necessarily these LLMs like ChatGPT):
- Faked court evidence. I don’t think video rendering AI is quite here yet, but imagine it’s possible to frame someone for a crime by altering video footage of a crime using samples of someone’s face in such a lifelike way that it becomes impossible to distinguish. Does the justice system have to change because of AI, e.g., requiring more evidence, if footage could no longer be trusted?
- Faked (and dangerous) audio. Imagine I have a tape recorder in my pocket and collect N clips of your voice. I take all the samples, then I pass that through an AI capable of synthesizing your voice. I could generate a threatening recording, or maybe something very embarrassing.., or perhaps generate a fake political scandal that sways your upcoming election, or… “I swear, that’s not me!”. That is scary stuff. Lives can be destroyed like this. For 200,000 years, we could trust our eyes and ears – is that period of humanity over?
- social media (or any electronic media) bots completely indistinguishable from human accounts – i.e., they can even go sign up for a google voice number to receive a 2FA on. It is already hard to fight misinformation and propaganda – bots of this capacity would certainly take it to the near impossible level
- if you really want to have nightmares tonight, consider this
It’s not that poor me will be out of a job that I’m worried about.. it’s that innocent people could be jailed or have their families torn apart, the end of democratic elections, etc.

Futuristic Applications I’d Love Before My Grave

Here are some random things I would love to see possible with AI, again not necessarily with LLMs but in general, in my lifetime:
- I would love to give an AI a complete, large, working application, with unit tests – that is a very good starting “prompt” – and tell it to convert it to another language, including isomorphic libraries and all. For example, I want to give it a complete Flask+uWSGI application and say “go write this in rust/go/elixir/etc and it should be at least as performant and at least as well tested” – and it should not implement it completely from scratch, but rather use the same packages (eg webserver) that a human expert in that area would. I think we are probably not too far away from this. You could prototype something in a language you love and have it spit out a well performing but painfully written application!
- I want to be able to feed an AI my favorite TV shows, from the past (ended or cancelled), and have it generate new episodes, ideally well written.. We are probably very far from this – not only does the writing have to work (we are probably close to that) but we are talking about lifelike video generation with body movement etc. When we are there.. celebrities and stunt doubles should worry.
- Same thing for music (however, GENERATIVE METAL is a thing and its amazing!)
- and video games – e.g., automatic DLC creation or additional levels/missions – what a boost for gaming studios this would be.
- We are going to need to add Boston Dynamics into the mix for this last one – and some of its applications are certainly NSFW. I think Westworld would be the ultimate application of AI on Earth. Whether it will ever happen, who knows. Lifelike in both consciousness and movement. There are countless applications for this – and even the “less pious” applications portrayed in that show such as war/combat or ⚠️..ahem⚠️ would reduce harm, in my opinion, to real humans.