Brian Christiansen briandigital

I spent a week in Washington DC, with a Tesla Model Y rental from Hertz. I wanted to share what that experience was like. For background, I had never driven any electric car before pulling out of the lot with our rental. I had my wife and 3 middle-school aged children (5-seat config) with me for a trip that was a combination of driving from our accommodations in Georgetown downtown 3 days, parking in a garage, and walking the sites, and spending two days in the Williamsburg, VA area, about 160 miles south of DC.

Why would I do this? My family is doing what we can to decarbonize, and an electric car is high on our list. I thought this would be the most difficult thing to use an electric car, so it seemed like a great test of real life usage. That said, personal use from home would be much easier, since we would have a charging point in our garage, whereas here, we could only use public charging stations.

Two last data points if you don’t know me: I consider myself a “car guy”, and I design software interfac

If your kids haven't learned to ride yet, I cannot more highly recommend using a kickbike. My kids all learned on them, and when they were handed pedal bikes, they were riding solo, without ever using training wheels, after only 15 minutes of an adult helping them understand how pedaling keeps them upright. The secret appears to be the challenge of bike riding is balance, and training wheels prevent you from learning how to balance. Strangely, my kids still pull out the kick bikes on occasion. They're still fun to glide around on.

My son, 9, has a Cannondale 20" MTB. 20" is the wheel size. You should get the largest wheel size that your kids can stand over, to give you the best chance of getting a couple years out of the bike. I wanted to get him something so we could ride real trails together, and this has been capable. I wasn't looking to get a suspension fork on it, but it was the same cost as one without. If you're not going to do off road riding, the fork doesn't get you much otherwise. Cole has 6 gears

At my company, I am the IT department in addition to my primary role as a UX designer and web PM. You guessed it, we’re small. This means I have years of experience keeping a small shop up and running, in addition to the four years I spent at Apple before this, much of that as a Mac Genius helping hundreds or thousands of people with their own personal tech disasters.

When it came time for one of our employees to spin-off into her own consulting gig, she asked for advice on getting an external drive for backups. My response unintentionally became a short course on Backup Strategy for Apple-powered Small Businesses. I realized I knew many small shops that might benefit from this, so I’m posting it to the Internet for any and all takers. (Nota bene: there are a few Amazon Affiliate links below, most aren’t. Consider that the tip jar if you benefit from something in this essay.)

Summary:

Mandatory: 1. Subscribe to an always-on cloud-based backup service for your files. 2. Maintain two external har

Top 3 daily driver weather apps:

Weather Underground

Weather Underground Downloads for multiple platforms

Free, Universal on iOS. WU subscribers have ads removed ($10/ur or connect your weather station and get it for free)

"If I had to have only one weather app", it would have to be this one. Part of that is more heavily weighted because I operate a weather station at my house that updates to WU every 3 seconds, and this app allows me to keep watch on it. But beyond that, I've found this app, while not the prettiest weather app, has the best overall utility. Excellent radar, excellent written forecasts. They've recently added nice graphs to show forecasted trends from the next few hours to ten days out. A big deal here is that they don't rely upon the National Weather Service forecasts. Those forecasts don't translate to regular people very well because they cover what can happen within a large reporting area. So "30% chance of rain" is true if it h

Strategy: Buy the nicest performing, dumbest TV you can afford at the size you think fits your room best. What follows are my recommended specs and why. Spend an extra day to get something that matches this description and you'll be very happy for years to come.

Who:

Brands: Panasonic and Samsung are the top two brands in this field right now. Vizio is an upstart that should also be considered.

What:

42-50" diagnonal size. See: http://crutchfield.com/screensize

	# How to use the Python Interactive Interpreter with a BBEdit UNIX Worksheet.
	# Thanks to @bbedit_hints for suggesting this.
	# Disclaimer: the author of this file doesn't know a damn thing about HEREDOC so proceed at your own risk.
	# Step 1: call Python, then double angle brackets, space, "HERE" to open the HEREDOC:

	python << HERE

	#Step 2: write the Python you want interpreted:

	def biggest(a,b,c): #outputs the largest