I love Standard Ebooks!

I watch a few of their RSS feeds and download a few books a month to my eBoox app.

It never ceases to amaze me how interesting and relevant many of these older stories are to modern times.

Especially nice that Amazon is not involved in this process in any way!

#Books #Reading #LeavingAmazon

before it turned out to be performance art marketing, I supported Horse_Ebooks!

Won't get fooled again, man...

Following them now.

Have used Project Gutenberg and Calibre previously, to download onto my ancient Kindle. Always good to have another source.

@standardebooks

Last night I charged our spare power banks, and our phones & laptops will be plugged in whenever they can be today.

2/n

#icyOttawa

I also have just charged a little emergency radio that also works as a flashlight. Cute little gizmo only about $20 five years ago.

3/n

#icyOttawa

Turned the thermostat up a notch, and we'll dress lightly today indoors.

The idea is to load up all of our house's thermal mass so if/when power goes off, it takes a bit longer for the house to cool off. We'll bundle up and pull out the blankets after the event.

4/n

#icyOttawa

I filled up the car's gas tank. Don't anticipate going anywhere, but one never knows.

Also I found a tiny fuel-efficient car worked well as a power source for our 1500W inverter we bought in the 2004(?) power outage.

The car sips fuel idling, barely showing a depletion, and kept our fridge and freezer working.

This time it's winter, so cooling food is not such a risk.

5/n

#icyOttawa

I'm filling a big thermos jug and insulated travel mugs with hot water/tea when the rain starts.

I can boil water later with a camping stove on the back deck if I need to, but a thermos supply will keep us going through a short outage.

6/n

I'm making soup. Was planning to start a turkey soup with xmas-turkey parts today anyway, but that'll be an easy meal if power is out tomorrow.

7/n

#icyOttawa

I fetched some logs, cleaned out the fireplace, and pre-built a fire ready to go. If we wake up to a cold house, that'll be handy. An option we didn't have in our old house, so a valued resource (although environmentally nasty one, used rarely).

8/n

#icyOttawa

I've done the strange thing of adding some snow to a strip along our walkway.

If you've lived with an ice storm before you've found that walking on crusty icy snow is easier than a glassy hard surface.

9/n

#icyOttawa

Storm chips.

As our brethren in #Halifax have taught us, having chips on hand is an important thing when you're couch-bound under a blanket. We're prepared.

10/n

#icyOttawa #stormChips

Oh, salt and sand. Almost forgot that I haven't brought that out of the garage for the winter yet. I'd better move that near our front door for use tomorrow.

11/n

#IcyOttawa

Dishwasher!

As @human3500 mentions, running your dishwasher now makes good sense, so you're not both without power and without clean dishes and having to heat water to wash them by hand.

12/n

#IcyOttawa

Use the Great Free Freezer!

I've put a few large containers 3/4 full of water outside. At -8°C they should freeze up solid, and if power goes off I can use the ice blocks to keep the fridge cold.

Ultimately I'd move perishable contents outside to stay cold, but initially ice blocks should do the trick for a day or so.

13/n

#icyOttawa

Food leftovers storage? Do it now.

If, like me, you have leftover Christmas food you've been grazing on for three days, now is a good time to get the remainders into the freezer.

If that was the plan anyway, get it done now. If there's a power outage, it'll be difficult, and you won't have to face eating yet more of the same, in the dark, to avoid its spoilage.

14/n

#icyOttawa

I this is amusing but midsleading. A perfectly functional system can have much technical debt. A house with hole in the roof is not perfectly functional.

Technical debt is about underlying complexity, brittleness, and (usually) inadequate documentation. It makes change hard and dangerous, rather than a system not actually working.

@njr I will absolutely agree providing you're defining 'system' as everything that provides a service to the end user - including both software and support.

If someone lives in a house with a hole in the roof, but every time it rains a roofer climbs up and keeps a tarpaulin nailed down the infrastructure is still broken, but the system as a whole continues to deliver the desired result.

It is, as you say, hard and dangerous as it's very easy to come close to breaking the system.