Posts tagged with "projects"
-
DIY Newton's Cradle
It has been a while since I wrote anything about the projects I do with my daughter. Actually we haven’t built anything in a long time. I was doing some small cardboard projects but nothing to write home about. However, recently we built a newton’s cradle just for fun and I thought it might be an interesting project to blog about. I think my daughter came across Newton’s cradle somehow in one of her videos and she was explaining to me about this toy where balls would swing like a pendulum. I immediately understood what she was trying to explain and decided to built it.
...continue reading -
Why I Don't Have New Year Goals Anymore
I am the kind of person who really enjoys setting up goals and trying to achieve them. So every year before the start of a new year, I have a couple of goals that I’d like to achieve that year. Usually one goal is about health and fitness and another goal can be anything. This has been the case since 2008. But lately, I have stopped making new year goals. Now my goals are not aligned with the years any more. I just make a goal when I feel like and have an approximate target date and try to execute as best as I can.
...continue reading -
How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save?
It has been more than 6 month since I installed my lone 320W solar panel. So I wanted to check if it was doing me any favors and how much money is it saving. Normally one should wait for a full year to make any kind of useful analysis. But I get easily excited when it comes to doing any kind of data analysis and here I am at it again. It is a very small installation and hence the savings aren’t huge, but at least I am able to verify my predicted numbers (units of electricity) against the real numbers. Did I have any savings or was this whole solar panel project a waste of my time and money. Let’s find out.
...continue reading -
Getting The Most Out Of Solar Panels
It’s been a while since I updated you on my solar panel project. I thought I should continue where I left off. So after collecting all the data from my solar panels, batteries, grid and load, I observed something interesting. While the SMU was disconnecting the grid so that the load can run on batteries and solar energy, we are not fully utilizing the solar energy. During a perfectly clear day, the solar panel is generating more power than we can use during the day. The excess energy is just getting wasted. Can we do something about it?
...continue reading -
Three Years Into Early Retirement
It is now exactly three years into early retirement! I can't believe how time flies. I can now officially say that I have lived through retired life, although three years is still a short time. These years have been quite eventful to say the least. Stock market crash, a new virus that affects the whole world, lockdown for several months, raging bull market while in pandemic. I've seen things in a few years than I have never seen my whole life :).
...continue reading -
My Daily Routine: 2021 Edition
Every weekend, I call some two to four of my friends, relatives or ex-colleagues thanks to my Friends Roster project. And invariably at least one of them ask me what I do on a daily basis after retirement. They are curious as to how I spend my day. I have posted my daily routine more than two years ago including a complete time table. But I thought may be I should do a 2021 edition in case some things have changed since then. So here goes.
...continue reading -
Friends Roster – Testing In Flutter
This is the continuation of “how I built the Friends Roster app” saga. If you missed the previous parts in this series, do check them out — part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8. So far we have seen the code that runs the app. What about testing? Normally when I work on these hobby projects I don't write any tests (gasp!). I know. I sometimes did feel the need for tests, especially if it is a large project with lots of moving parts. They help you when making changes to the code. You can be confident that your changes will not unexpectedly break something.
...continue reading -
Friends Roster – Responsive Layouts
...continue reading
This is the continuation of “how I built the Friends Roster app” saga. If you missed the previous parts in this series, do check them out — part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6 and part 7. One of the nice features of Flutter is building responsive layouts is quite simple. It is certainly easier than building responsive layouts in HMTL or Android. -
Friends Roster – More Flutter Plugins
This is the continuation of “how I built the Friends Roster app” saga. If you missed the previous parts in this series, do check them out — part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5. To recap I was using the following plugins in Flutter to reduce the amount of code I need to write.
...continue reading -
Friends Roster - Flutter Plugins
This is the continuation of "how I built the Friends Roster app" saga. If you missed the previous parts in this series, do check them out — part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. In this post I will go into a little more details on how I built the screens with the help of Flutter plugins.
...continue reading