Bloodforge Blog

I just got this massage chair. There weren’t too many reviews online, so I thought I’d list my thoughts. I’ll keep updating this as time goes on with my impressions. Initial Imperessions: Good: Chair is of really high quality. Good: The hardware of the chair is amazing with lots of possibilities. Bad: The software isn’t very good. Although the hardware of the chair can do so much, the software is poorly designed. In the auto modes, its not possible to turn off individual features. In the manual mode, you cannot setup complex sequences that are available in the auto mode. I’ll expand on this later. Other observations: ...

Bloodforge.com is now powered by Blogifier. Blogifier is a .NET Core 2.0 project. Because my previous webhost didn’t support .NET Core, I switched over to using Digital Ocean. I wanted to move to Azure, but since I didn’t way to pay more than $5 per month, that wasn’t really an option. This is also the first time in a very long time that my website is running on Linux. So far, so good. ...

I needed to create a program which will run a web page from the local file system. Using the WebBrowser control wasn’t really an option since that uses the Trident engine which didn’t support many of the things we were trying to do in the web page. I went with the latest build of CefSharp.Wpf, but that doesn’t natively run local files, so it had to be modified. Fortunately, I found some posts on how to enable that feature (here and here) – however, the first link was for an older version of CefSharp, and the second link only works with static resource files. I ended up merging both concepts to get it to work. ...

I love .NET, but this video is really funny and well done.

Adjust the smoke in this post header Color Opacity Speed Particle Size Density ...

I created a log viewer for my Honeywell thermostat. In addition to providing a much more friendly way of viewing log files, it aggregates logs over time allowing for some pretty neat analysis. The site is located at http://energy.bloodforge.com (sorry, but this site isn’t active anymore)

I’m using this post to document how I upgraded my blog for HTTPS. The first thing I needed to do was to get a SSL certificate. I really didn’t feel like paying for one, so I went with a free certificate from StartSSL. Their free certificates expire after a year (I wish it was longer), so I’ll need to do this again next year.  But they work and… they’re free. After I got my p12 certificate above, I asked my web host (Arvixe) to set everything up. It took them about 2 days (it was the weekend though, so maybe it would have been faster if it was during the week). This was pretty much the easiest part since all I had to do was to provide them with the cert, and they got it installed and set up the correct ports for HTTPS. ...

The following numbers are all in kWh, and for my single-family house that is about 2,000 square feet, plus basement. All heating is electric. My electric bills usually come in around the 17th to 20th of the month. In the data below, an October value is actually the usage from the second half of September to the first half of October.  The data is current as of 5/24/2017. I’ll try to update this monthly. ...

This is a follow-up article to my initial article about my geothermal installation. For the past couple days, Arronco was finishing up their geothermal installation in my house. The first day was spent on removing my existing unit as well as setting up the Byrant geothermal unit (GT-PB). The second day was spent on finishing up the GT-PB install, hooking up the tubes that run outside to the unit, attaching my water heater to the geothermal unit, and finally setting up my thermostat. ...

It was time for me to replace my heat pump, and I got a few bids from local companies. I ended up setting on a geothermal system from Arronco. They came out yesterday to drill the wells where the tubes will go. The first thing to show up was the tubing, delivered by a local delivery company. After that the Arronco geothermal truck showed up. ...