Category Archives: Consumer issues

Any hints on transitioning to an induction range?

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Hey, anyone out there with hints about transitioning from a standard glass-top range to an induction range with convection oven? We just backed into this move (story to follow) and are hoping to learn from the experiences of others. So please share if you’ve been through this. What should we expect? What should we avoid? What can we do to lessen the shock of the transition in cooking performance?

Okay. Enough of advice seeking.

There are two parts to the backstory. Here’s the relatively short part. When we started shopping for a new range, we decided to move to an induction range. Our former standard range was purchased at Sears. That’s no longer an option. So I checked the other usual places, Lowes, Home Depot, Best Buy. Most had delivery time of 4-8 weeks. Then I checked Costco. They had a reasonable item in stock. Well, “in stock” meant in a warehouse on the mainland. But five days later, it was on a ship to Honolulu, and arrived in Honolulu on January 16, ready to be scheduled for delivery and installation. That seems to me an amazing bit of logistics by Costco compared to their big box competitors.

Now, back to the beginning of the story.

It took nearly 10 years, but our electric glass-top range, purchased when we moved to my parents’ former home in Kahala in 2015, met a sudden end soon after the first of the year.

We had a friend visiting from the mainland after a very long absence, and managed to arrange to get together during his all-too-brief visit. We enjoyed an evening on our back deck with dinner and drinks, he with a bottle of sparkling water while we enjoyed a bottle of wine. He had to fly out the next day, so it was not a late evening. Before he left, we ferried our dishes back inside, staging them on the kitchen counter where we then intended to move them to the dishwasher. But, during our goodbyes, one of the cats rubbed against the bottle of water, now mostly empty, and it turned into a lethal weapon as it toppled over, hitting the corner of the stovetop at just the right angle to put a crack in the back corner of the glass top. OUCH!

End of story.

And thanks in advance for any advice you can share.

On the trail of a “ghost” message

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It started with a phone message received a week or so ago. It was from a friend, Matt, asking for a call back.

I called him, and we chatted. Not long afterwards, the phone rang, and Matt again left a very similar message. I didn’t realize at the time that it was the exact same message. This time I didn’t get back to him. But when we saw him one night for dinner, Meda apologized for our failure to respond. He later said he had been puzzled. He says he didn’t call us or leave a message.

Fast forward. There have been several more of these messsages. Always the same. I’ve learned that first there is a call that rings twice and then is dropped before going to voicemail. This is followed, maybe 5-10 minutes later, by the call that ends in the same message being left.

The calls are coming to our Hawaiian Tel landline, not my cell, which Matt would normally call.

The answering machine says they are from a number starting with 808-427-xxxx. It is not Matt’s phone number.

We’ve now talked about it at length. Matt is not calling and leaving messages. I think the message sounds like him, but he disagrees.

He’s reminded of those scam calls where a call is received from a family member who says he/she has been arrested, or been in an accident, or for some other reason needs assistance in the form of money. But the message doesn’t include a call-back number, so if it’s meant to be that kind of scam, it’s by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Now we’re waiting and hoping for another call. After the two-ring hang-up, I intend to answer before it gets sent to voicemail and see who or what is waiting on the other end.

We’ve now received the same message about five times over the past week or two.

[It seems there’s a problem trying to play an .mp4a audio file via WordPress, which I use for this blog. So far, nothing I’ve tried appears to have worked. Hopefully I’ll figure out a way so that you can hear the simple, repeated message.]

Get that cat a drink!

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There’s a new generation of cat water fountains, and it’s good news for cats and their people.

Many cats don’t drink enough water, and fountains have long been recommended as a good way to encourage water intake.

A few years ago, we bought an inexpensive fountain at Petco, brought it home, and were initially very happy.

But it quickly became a real pain to clean and maintain. It didn’t take too long for it to be relegated to a closet where it still waits “just in case” it might ever be needed again.

The problems? Well, it needed to be plugged in so that the pump would work. That was fine, for a short while. But it limited where it could be placed. The cord was always an awkward appendage. Then it required a good cleaning every week or so, which meant disassembling the fountain, but also taking out the pump, which was immersed in the water, and taking apart its various tiny parts in order to reach and remove the seaweed-like stuff that spontaneously grew everywhere. And when not properly cleaned, the pump struggled and could be heard down the hall from our bedroom. Although the cats generally liked it, this thing was too much for the humans in the house. Into the closet it went.

Then I started seeing ads for a new generation of water fountains, particularly one called the Elfin Fountain. It offered two things. A choice of battery operation, so that it could be placed anywhere after charging and operate wirelessly if desired. And the Elfin Foundatin doesn’t have a traditional electric pump. Instead, it uses a magnetic technology that is hidden in the base. A small magnetized wheel sits in an indentation in the base, and a simple tube connects up through the water pan on top and creates a bubbly fountain either when a cat approaches, or on a timer system every 15 minutes or so. It has a filter which needs to be changed every month or so, and the fountain itself needs to be rinsed out about once a week, although there’s no pump to disassemble, which makes it so much easier! The only other trick is to keep the water level above a minimum level, and charge the battery. Ours has been running for two weeks on the initial charge.

Our fountain arrived about 10 days ago. The first charge took several hours. Then I filled it with water, assembled the few pieces, pressed the “on” button, and it was ready. I didn’t know whether the cats would be scared or attracted.

The answer to that appears below! Just click to watch the video.

The Elfin turns out to be absolutely silent. It makes no noise at all. The cats notice the water moving when they approach, and that seems to attract them, perhaps at first to play, but quickly to drink. Kiko “got it” right away, as you see in the short video, with Kinikini and Kali not far behind. I’m not sure yet whether Bessie is using it yet, so we have a traditional water dish available to her.

This beast isn’t inexpensive. But it’s exciting to watch the cats having fun.

I should say that the Elfin Fountain is delivered from Hong Kong. After our initial experience, I’ve ordered a second so that we can have fresh water available to the cats on each end of the house.

A mind-blowing demonstration of AI for reporters

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I’ve been reading about the advances in generative AI and large language models, and started looking for recommendations for systems that would benefit an investigative reporter like myself. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much in the way of discussion or recommendations suited to individual reporters.

So I asked a friend who has been involved in reporting on the tech world for several decades for his recommendations. His first suggestion was to check out Google’s NotebookLM.

Knowing nothing about it at all, I went to my Google account and there was an invite to try it out. So I did.

The quick results were amazing, to me at least.

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