Category General stuff
Me and my wife recently bought a new apartment. To get the style we want rather than what a designer recommends, and also to save some money, we have been doing a lot of DIY for the interior decoration. I think it turned out really well, especially for two inexperienced people, and I just want to show off a bit.
Above is what the apartment looked like when we got the keys. The boxes are for the kitchen appliances that the construction company would install later. My brother inlaw was kind enough the install the floor tiles in the kitchen … Read the rest
Back in May I wrote this article about building a passive AC. That time I attached it to the front of our living room fan and I found that while the principle worked the air flow was too low to give effective cooling. I also mentioned that I would like to try to fit one in a window to cool down the incoming air. Now, I’ve finally had a chance to test this concept.
The working principle is the same, as the air passes through the funnel it gets compressed which lowers the temperature. Last time I used standard 500 … Read the rest
We all have prejudices and we all tend to use stereotypes when we think about “other people”, at least to some degree. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but I do think it’s good to be mindful, both of the prejudices you have about others, and the prejudices others might have about you. With that in mind I am writing this post to inform my readers how Taiwanese people tend to view “foreigners”. First a quick disclaimer, I cannot claim to be presenting scientific facts here, this is merely based on my own experience of living here … Read the rest
A couple of weeks ago I was in a camping gear store looking for something when a man came up to me and asked something. I couldn’t really give him a proper answer but we started chatting and soon enough he had invited me to go river tracing. I’ve been interested in going for a while, but I’ve just never taken the time to arrange a tour, so when the opportunity came up like that, I happily agreed to join.
At first my wife was planning to join as well but she had some work to do so in the … Read the rest
Over the last few months I have written a couple of advice posts for living in Taiwan that you can find them here, here and here. Apparently, three posts was not enough to cover all the subjects I wanted write about, so here comes post number four which I believe will be the last one.
The Importance of Food
Food is undeniably an important part of any culture. Not only is food a cultural expression – the ingredients and flavors say something about the history and way of life of the people that cooked it – but the … Read the rest
For the last few months the city government have been redecorating (is that the correct word here?) one of the parks near my house. The have added some fancy looking street lights, made new walkways and put up new fences around the canal, all in all making it a nicer place to be. As part of this redecoration they have also put up little groups of tables and chairs where people can sit and chat. For some reason, I suspect it is a case of prioritizing design over function, their choice of chairs fell on dinky little backless stools – … Read the rest
A while ago I stumbled upon a video showing some people in Bangladesh who had invented a kind of passive air cooler made from scrap bottles that could help poor people keep cool in the summer, you can read more about it here. I think it’s a neat idea so I figured I would try to build one of my own. The version shown in the video fits in a window but I figured i could fasten it on the front of a fan for increased effect. This post is a build log detailing the process.
Materials:
As can be … Read the rest
About two months ago I made a post listing some useful knowledge for living in Taiwan, which you can find here. After thinking about the topic for a while, I came up with a few other things that might be useful to know so I decided to make a second post. After finishing this I have written a couple other posts on the subject that you can find here and here.
1.: The Cold
Taiwan lies in between the subtropical and the tropical climate zones with the Tropic of Cancer cutting straight across the island roughly ⅔ of the … Read the rest
A Boy Named Sue Montoya
A thought struck me the other day and I felt like it’s interesting enough, or perhaps funny enough, to be worth writing down. It is entirely possible that someone else has already thought of this but I’ve never heard of it, so here we go:
The characters of Sue from the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, and Inigo Montoya from the film The Princess Bride are incredibly similar. First, they have both been wronged in some way and in both cases the wrongdoing is strongly linked to their respective fathers. The boy named Sue gets teased for … Read the rest