I Am a Backsideist.

In the United States today, we've got two primary political parties: The Democrats, and the Republicans.  They fight like cats and dogs on TV, but deep below the surface, they've both got an awful lot in common, and act more like friends than enemies.

One of the biggest core assumptions they share is regarding growth.  They both agree that Sustained Growth is the desired state of the economy, and while they disagree on which particular levers to pull to make sure Growth Returns, and maybe some aspects of the fine detailing on the lever handles, they don't dare question the Almighty Sustained Growth core of their beliefs.

What if growth is over or nearly over?  Calling THEM dirty names only accomplishes so much (none of it useful).  It would be very useful to have a political party exploring the concept, and proposing solutions that, while perhaps not along the lines everyone would like to see, are much more useful and match what people are actually dealing with in their everyday lives.

I'm calling this political party the Backsideist Party.  Because, well, I get to name the things I come up with.

Why Backsideist?

Easy.  If I'm right, we're on the backside of the story arc of western industrial civilization.  We should do something productive about this instead of insisting at the top of our collective lungs that we're still up the upswing and prosperity will return to every household if we just {whatever your preferred political party thinks the way to stimulate growth is}.

The reality in America is that the lower class is toast, the middle class is getting gutted, actual unemployment (not the gamed numbers announced on the news occasionally to great fanfare) is quite unpleasantly high, the state of infrastructure is quite sad (when was the last bridge collapse?), and if you don't count financial games played on Wall Street, there's not a huge amount of good stuff happening with regards to the GDP.  The American Consumer is out of credit, and there's not a huge amount of actual physical wealth being produced in the country right now compared to the ongoing decay.

We may as well state the facts of our current reality out in the open and do something useful, instead of pretending it's not happening.

Interested?  Read on!  This is a high level glossing over the concepts I'd like to work with, and will absolutely be expanded in many future posts.

Nexus 5 Bad Battery Symptoms & Replacement

You've got a Nexus 5, and over the past few months, it's gotten... sort of "quick" - and not in the good UI responsiveness way, more in the "It's done running in under 6 hours" way.  It might not make it through the day.  It might randomly shut down.  It might be super fast to charge, but never have the battery life you remembered.

A particularly common problem is the phone shutting down while taking an HDR photo - it'll take the picture, then, boom, black screen.  If you're lucky, it will power back on, and if not, you might have to plug it into a charger to get it to function - but powering on, it'll have 35% battery left!

What's up with that?

Well, it's highly likely that you've got a bad battery!

Read on for more details.

Rebuilding a BionX 36v 9.6AH Battery Pack - upgraded to 13.5AH

A month or so ago, I posted a teardown of a BionX 36v 9.6AH battery pack.  Some of you may have guessed that I was going to rebuilt it!  You were right!

If you're here because you have a BionX battery pack you want rebuilt, please go here for information on my pack rebuilds.

As you may recall, the core of the BionX 36v battery pack is a 5x12 grid of batteries glued together.  Freed from the power wires, it looks an awful lot like this:

I'm going to build one just like that - but better!

And you absolutely want to read on to see the photos of the rebuild...