Custom Aquariums Majestic Stand

Ever since I was young, I have loved keeping a fish aquarium. Of course, it took many years before I really understood much of the science behind it and had my own budget to build, stock, and maintain it the way that I wanted. For the past 6 years I have had a 14 Gallon BioCube. It has just sat on my office desk looking somewhat boring and taking up much needed desk space. We finally decided to finish my office and have built-in cabinets and a desk installed. I knew the tank would not look nice just being moved onto the new desk and it would take up too much space. So, I decided I needed to get a furniture piece I could put the tank on to make it fit with my new office design and, of course, organize and hide all of the pump, light, fan, heater, and temperature probe wiring, and air line. I looked around at some of the options in the store but everything looked fairly cheap like college furniture and there were very limited options that work with my office space and fit in design-wise. Enter Custom Aquariums…

Breville ESP8XL Cafe Roma Stainless Espresso Maker

If you’ve seen my previous article on coffee, you’ll know I’m a bit of a newbie when it comes to coffee. It took me years to be able to appreciate it. I happened to go to a coffee shop a number of months ago here in Dallas and had quite possibly the best cup of coffee that I have ever tasted. What I realized was that they were

This is my third post on this topic. My previous posts have been viewed over 146,000 times. So, I guess a few people have found my analysis useful and worthwhile. Please refer to these previous posts for further explanation and detail on the specific settings beyond what I’ve included here.

• https://rolande.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/performance-tuning-the-network-stack-on-mac-osx-10-6/
• https://rolande.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/performance-tuning-the-network-stack-on-mac-os-x-part-2/

It seems that Apple keeps changing old default settings, removing options, and adding new parameters with each new OS release. So, I may be a little slow but I eventually get around to upgrading and sifting through the changes. The information in this article is targeted to the average home MacBook user and does not really address much of the high end power user needs like 10Gig networking. So, without further ado, here is what I have discovered so far

Electro-Breeze air filter

A number of years ago, when I lived in Ohio, I had some work done on my HVAC system by a Heating & Cooling contractor. They had made a strong recommendation to replace my standard paper filter I was purchasing at the hardware store with this filter called a MicroPowerGuard. They gave me the whole product pitch and I remained a bit skeptical. After doing a bit of my own research on it, I decided to take them up on the offer.

The day they installed the filter, I had been particularly bothered by something in the air and my allergies had kicked in. I remember at the end of the day realizing that my allergies had calmed down within an hour or two after the filter had been installed. I kind of shrugged it off as a coincidence, at that time.

Flash forward to 2017 and

So, I have to say that I showed up quite a bit late to the coffee party. I’ve always loved the smell of coffee but I guess I just never tried some that got me hooked and made me want more. Well, practically overnight, I turned into a fairly big coffee nut. Now I’m constantly looking for info and ideas about creating that next best cup of coffee. I thought I’d share some of the info I have found and collected for anyone else who might be interested in making the best coffee and save them the work of all the reading I did.

Coffee is sort of like seafood. The fresher it is, the better it is. Until you’ve had either of them super fresh, you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ve had the freshest seafood practically served right off the boat from the South China Sea, when my parents lived in Hong Kong. I had no idea how incredible it could taste. It was fantastic! The same goes for coffee, except that coffee freshness is a little more complicated. You want to find freshly roasted beans that have been roasted about

I’ve had a freshwater fish aquarium since I was probably 8 years old. Obviously, my parents helped out with that financially back then, but there was only so much they were willing to invest in it for me. I always wanted to plant my tank but I knew that opened up a whole new set of costs to maintain with lighting, minerals, fertilizers, improved biological filtration etc. I learned over time that proper care and maintenance of a planted tank using the typical Fish Store purchased tools and equipment can be a little bit more costly than it really has to be. Most recently I had a Marineland Eclipse 6 tank that required these specially designed filter cartridges that cost around $3-4 a week to replace. Most of these filter systems have custom filter media cartridges that “require” you to continuously purchase replacements. They typically use a cheap floss pad material and include activated carbon inside. You can actually achieve much better filtration at a fraction of the ongoing cost of those solutions. I thought I would collect a bunch of the tips and tricks here in this post that I’ve learned over time to save money and improve the health of your aquarium.

I am a bit of an aquarium geek or fish geek, whichever term fits best. I’ve had a 6 gallon Marineland Eclipse6 acrylic tank on my den desk for nearly 8 years now. I have kept a variety of freshwater fish with some driftwood planted with Java Fern and Anubias. It hasn’t been a bad aquarium and has served its purpose fairly well. The pump, filter, and bio-wheel have been okay but nothing spectacular. What can you expect for a small 6 gallon complete system? At this point, however, the acrylic has taken a beating with my kids and is really showing its age with a lot of visible scratches and marks. The acrylic has also displayed what looks like cracking in a few spots that has me concerned it will randomly spring a leak one day. So, I’ve decided I’ll be proactive and replace the tank. After all, I need to have an aquarium and so do the fish.

So, I went to several fish stores and looked around online and I discovered

Notes on Maintenance

I have always loved having an aquarium, since I was young. I had a small 10 Gallon freshwater tank one for about 10 years through college. I was never very successful at it, until I added a Whisper filter and learned about doing water changes. Up to that point, my fish never lasted more than a year. Once I learned the real fundamentals of maintaining a healthier environment, I was able to get a couple of fish I had to live 3 years. Once I graduated from school I was without a tank for a number of years.

After my oldest daughter Olivia was born, I decided to put a small freshwater tank together to entertain and teach her about it. I got a 6 Gallon Marineland Eclipse6 acrylic tank with a self-contained 3-stage filtration and lighting system. I decided to plant it with Java Fern on some Malaysian driftwood and a couple of Anubias plants to make it a little healthier environment for the fish and make it prettier to look at. I’ve had this system for about 8 years now and am on about my 3rd generation of livestock. So far, I’ve had a pair of Rasboras that lived almost 6 years and I had a school of Neon Tetras that lived over 4 years. I currently have 2 Cherry Barbs that are over 4 years old and a group of Neon Tetras with the oldest ones that are just over 2 years old now. So, since I learned all the important basic stuff to do to maintain the water, I’ve been fairly successful at keeping fish well over their expected lifespans. In addition, the tank has generally looked fairly clean and not been an algae eyesore.

Probably the most important thing, especially in a smaller tank like this with a low power filtration system that doesn’t get very much water movement, is to

If you’re like me, you are concerned with having access to water for your family for drinking and cooking and food preparation and maybe even your fish aquarium that is as pure as possible without necessarily breaking the bank. It costs quite a bit to buy filtered bottled water from the store, especially in single serve bottles. It is also not very environmentally friendly either with all the plastic bottle waste. Obviously, the bigger the containers, and the more you buy, the cheaper it is. But you can’t keep huge amounts of water just sitting around in containers. It takes up a ton of space. It is heavy to lug around. And, if you don’t consume it in a high enough volume, it is bound to sit on the shelf for longer periods of time in bottles that are possibly not the best containers for an extended amount of time.

For drinking water, we have a filter system included in our refrigerator that is actually not that bad. It is certified to the NSF 53 standard for removal of chlorine and organic and inorganic volatile compounds. This has provided us somewhat clean, healthy, cold water for some time. The problem here, though, is that we have fairly hard water that includes quite a bit of dissolved lime and calcium. These minerals combine with the chlorine used to treat the water. So, even though my fridge filter is designed to remove chlorine, it is really only removing the free chlorine and not the chlorine that has combined with the high mineral content in our water. Additionally, there are several other contaminants that are occasionally present in our water system that are minimally right at or just below the maximum EPA guidelines. This reminds me of the old joke about the FDA’s regulations on the maximum amount of

This is my second post on performance tuning the OSX network stack. My previous post on this topic has gotten over 55,000 views and generated quite a bit of feedback and questions. This updated post is intended to address performance tuning the IP stack on OSX Mavericks and, hopefully, eliminate some of the confusion around many of the caveats and options, as this is a fairly complex topic. Much of this configuration and the settings are backwards compatible to previous OSX releases. However, please refer to my original post for the gory details and caveats related to previous OSX releases. You can also find my latest updates for High Sierra and Mojave in my most recent post here.

MBUF Memory Allocation

Probably the most fundamental yet debatable system option for network tuning is memory allocation to the mbuf buffer pools. This boot-time parameter governs the scalability of network connections, in terms of the simultaneous number supported and how much data can be queued in either direction. This is the basis for determining most of the buffer and socket threshold values which can impact network throughput and connection scalability. The default value seems to be set based on the amount of physical RAM your system has installed. Based on my research, BSD, the underlying OS that OS X is built on top of, defaults to