Michael Graves

Sunday Afternoon at The Micro Center

Last weekend I ventured out to our local Micro Center. I hadn’t been there for several years. It was an interesting and enjoyable experience, even if I didn’t buy anything on this occasion. In some fashion, it was a grounding experience.

I have a long relationship with The Micro Center. When I first moved here from Toronto in 1998 it was an eye-opening place. That was before Amazon.com, when computer stores were still a thing, and software was bought on floppy disk or CD-ROM. The Micro Center was a place I could go and lay hands on things before making a purchase. As a lark, one day I was there with Stella and I hugged a fancy new computer. Thereafter, she started to call it “The Michael Center.”

On Sunday, August 10th, 2025 The Micro Center in Houston was busy! It had not occurred to me that this was the last weekend before kids started back to school. It was also a tax-free weekend for back to school supplies. The place was fully of families getting things their kids would need for school.

The Lenovo Twins

I was there just to look around the place, but I really wanted to lay hands on a Lenovo T14 laptop. It’s one model in the running to replace my 2019 X1 Carbon and my aged desktop. I found a T14 there on display along side a T16. This was enough to convince me that 16” is just too big a laptop for my tastes. I wish I’d brought my X1 Carbon with me. The T14 is markedly heavier, but had a built-in Ethernet port and is vastly more upgradable over time.

I came away from the Lenovo display wanting to get hands on their P14 model, which is a mobile workstation. Sadly, such was not available at The Micro Center.

It’s really difficult to move away from the X1 Carbon. It’s basically ideal for mobile applications. However, soldered in memory means that the only upgrade opportunity is the NVMe drive.

Revisiting the Alto Professional Presenter

August 15, 2025
Michael Graves
Audio

Late last year I detailed my quest to find a small public address system for use by our local civic association. I settled upon the Alto Professional Presenter, which is a portable, battery operated PA in the form of a podium. What follows are some notes about how I’ve used it over the past nine months, and some recent tweaks to the setup that have made me irrationally happy.

While I was initially quite enthusiastic about the product, that proved to be substantially unwarranted. Out-of-the-box it’s actually quite terrible. It’s a nice idea, poorly executed.

The major problem is the included gooseneck microphone. You can’t turn the device up loud enough to be useful without generating feedback. As a practical matter, the position of the microphone is fixed relative to the front-facing speakers. Also, I suspect the microphone suffered from being physically connected to the podium. The physical connection increases the likelihood of feedback, as vibration was passed directly to the gooseneck.

On “Solar Generators”

Hi. My name is Michael and I am a pedant. I don’t mean to be, but it really can’t be helped.

I come to this admission when faced with an online discussion of “Solar Generators.” I believe this term arises from really poor use of language.

There really is no such thing as a “solar generator.” Except perhaps the sort of installation found in Nevada’s Ivanpah Dry Lake.

Let me break this down a bit:

Generators

Burn some fuel to create motion, which in turn creates electrical energy.

Batteries

Open Live Writer: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

July 31, 2025
Michael Graves
Computing

This blog has been in existence for some 19 years. For most of that time the various posts have been written in Open Live Writer. OLW is the open source successor to Windows Live Writer, which was a free Microsoft app. Last time I wrote about it was ten years ago when the Dot Net Foundation assumed the project and cast it into open source. As in many things, I am anomalous. I still use it routinely.

I was reminded of how anomalous I am when I recently had a problem posting to my site. This has happened periodically. Lightningbase, my long-time host, has various protections in place to keep people from doing nefarious things with the XML-RPC process that OLW relies upon to access WordPress. Occasionally, I have to ask them to tweak the host protections to allow me continued access from OLW.

Instrumentation Options for a Portable Generator

In various online forums, people are routinely asking for help when faced with a generator that’s being overloaded. This may be in the context of a food truck, mobile pet salon or delivering whole house backup power.

It’s believed that management guru Peter Drucker once said, “You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” I have been making a lot of use of that quote when offering answers to such questions. If you are placing a significant load on the generator, you need to monitor the load to know when you are nearing overload. Allowing it to overload is disruptive, time consuming and potentially dangerous. Without hard data to inform your decisions, you’re only guessing about how to address the problem.

Option #1: Built-in Load Monitoring

If you don’t yet have a generator, you might well consider instrumentation in making that choice. For example, my Harbor Freight Predator 9500 was one of the first of a new crop of high-power inverter models that became available in 2021. It does not have any built-in instrumentation. So, it was incumbent upon me to provide such capability externally.

In contrast, a bit over a year or two later a neighbor bought a Pulsar PGD95BISCO from Home Depot. This Pulsar if effectively a cousin to my Predator. They’re both made in China by Chongqing DK power machinery Co.,LTD. The Pulsar model was introduced later in February of 2023. To be competitive it has a few more features that the Predator. One of the nicer features is a built-in load meter.

The built-in LCD shows the output voltage, frequency and aggregate load on the generator in real-time. This is very handy. I wish my Predator had this feature.

Oh, bother. Where art thou? Base Power

I first wrote about Base Power back in May 2024. Inspired by Doug Lewin’s Energy Capital podcast, I signed up for the companies mailing list, in the hope of learning when they Austin-based company would be offering service in Houston. In fact, I’ve signed up twice!

We’ve received literally nothing from the company. Putting our address into a page on their web site they report “Great news! Base is coming to Houston soon! We’ll be installing in your area later this year.”