This last week the Pope seemed to finally get it that world overpopulation is a serious problem when he said “being a good Catholic did not mean people should breed like rabbits.” For a fleeting moment I thought “Yes – the Pope finally gets it!” But then he took it back. So much for the infallibility of the Pope.

The Catholic Church, with it’s stand on breeding like rabbits is an environmental catastrophe in the making. Poverty, war, global warming are driven by too many people going after a finite amount of dwindling resources. While large families might have made sense in ancient times when the child mortality rate was 50%, in modern times with a global population of 7.2 billion, the problem of overpopulation is one of humanity’s biggest challenges. The Pope could help solve it, but he chooses to turn his back on reality. What a shame.

In addition to my SolarCity collectors I built an additional collector / yard art / garden shade. I saw something similar online and I thought “I need to build one of those.”

Yes – this is as simple as it looks. It’s 4 240 watt panels bolted together in a diamond. They are mounted on a 2 inch pipe. The 4 panels are connected in parallel and connected to a 1KW grid tie inverter that is plugged into a wall socket on my deck. It’s very simple. The sun shines on it, it makes DC power (40 volts / 20 amps) and the inverter turns it into AC power that is fed back into the grid. If the house is using less power than the collector it runs the meter backwards.

Technically this is a 1000 watt system. But in reality at the peak of the day I get about 750 – 800 watts of real power back into the grid so I’m calling it 800 watt.

Discuss.

So far so good with my SolarCity install. Today is Jan 8th and my system has been turned on since Octover 20th,

The solar system has produced 632 KWH of electricity so far total. here’s the numbers by month.

• Oct 20-31 – 125 kwh
• Nov 1-30 – 249 kwh
• Dec 1-31 – 201 kwh
• Jan 1-7 – 57 kwh

My cost is 15 cents per kilowatt hour. (KWH) and my bill from SolarCity has been exactly 15 cents times the number of KWH. There were no additional charges, fees, or taxes. Their billing is 30 days behind and it’s charged against my checking account.

Toyota is making a big bet on hydrogen fuel cars. Like Elon Musk with Tesla Toyota is opening up its patents to its competitors to encourage hydrogen fuel technology. So – it’s a showdown between hydrogen fuel and electric cars. Which one will win?

Almost as bad as the federal deficit.

I built my first Android widget. It’s not my app. I just did the design. So if anyone wants it you’ll have to spend 2 bucks buying the app, but my template is free. The app is called “Make Your Clock Pro”. And if you don’t like any of the details you can edit it. Here’s a link to my template called “Bubbles and Clouds“. This was inspired by the original Motorola Circle Clock widget that came with my RAZR M cell phone. The 3 clouds, top, left, right are the weather for today, tomorrow, and the next day.

Enjoy.

Sorry – not compatible with IPhones as they don’t run widgets.