Category: Geek

How to Improve an Electric Clothes Dryer (phase 1)

Electric clothes dryers are very simple devices which have not changed much in 50 years. While electricity is very efficient at generating heat (virtually 100% conversion from electricity to heat), it is not terribly economical. While there are now (as of 2024) heat pump based dryers, they are still fairly expensive (and I started this project almost 10 years ago anyway). I have undertaken to improve the economy of the basic, very reliable, electric clothes dryer. My clothes dryer is a White Westinghouse Electric 27″ drum unit from 1988 or so, about 36 years old. I have had to repair...

What Does PK1048 Mean

Geeks love inside jokes. Most (if not all) Unix commands actually have a meaning and are not just an assortment of random letters. So why did I choose PK1048 for my domain and blog? Well, back in the earlier days of the Internet (I do not claim to have been around for the real early days of the Internet in the 1960’s and 1970’s) you needed a way to manage domain names. These are the names we use to refer to things on the Internet, like coke.com, since all the Internet knows is the numeric address of the systems. The...

Who am I

When meeting someone new, an introduction is in order, so here is my introduction. I am a “Geek” and I mean that in the sense that I seek to understand how everything works. Not just what buttons to push, but what the buttons do and why I might want to push them. I went to a major technical institute in the early 1980’s and failed out after 2.5 years as a Physics major. I then leveraged my experience at the school’s student run radio station into a string of jobs in Broadcasting on the engineering side of the house. UHF TV...