Tax Day Sale

Once again I am giving a 10% discount to any full plans orders placed on or before our tax day of April 15th.

It is not done at the shopping cart as webmaster is overseas.  Instead you place your order, and I get back to you with the discount.

I Might Have Misled About the Illuminated Switches

It looks like I might have made a big mistake buying these switches. They don’t work, and Adafruit, the company in New York, has a policy of not allowing any calls nor emails either way on anything.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1476

A switch should be pretty simple; a hot and a ground in, and the same out. Switch shows negative on one side and plus on the other. Simple. I spent hours trying every possible combination. Nothing. The lights worked great when I put the connectors together without a switch. The switches had no instructions.

Online it says “ The body is a black plastic with the LED built inside. There are two contacts for the button and two contacts for the LED, one marked + and one -. The forward voltage of the LED is about 3V so connect a 220 to 1000 ohm resistor in series just as you would with any other LED to your 3V or higher power supply. “ I wish I could as them what that means. It takes two contacts in and two out to be a switch in the universe I know.

Also the spade terminals are non standard size and are too fragile to tolerate crimped standard female terminals.
I would have been happy to pay much more to get the working version. If there was anyone who I could tell me what to do. What am I missing?

The pisser is they are so cool, if they worked.

Kolea Is TV Star Again

Yet another TV crew was shooting on board Kolea this week. Look for us on an upcoming episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, on the Travel Chanel. They had a historian on board chatting with Andrew about Hawaiian history. It was really interesting.

36 foot KHSD charter boat in a box operating out of Kailua Kona.

Shopping Cart Still Down, Cept Paypal.

I can’t believe it. DX Cart is still unable to connect to Authorize.net. I would find another shopping cart, except webmaster is on a walkabout in India for a couple of months.  They keep saying it will work in a day or two.
I tried to put all this information on the website with the new Dreamweaver 17 or whatever the newest one is, and the new laptop.  It kept losing remote server and told me to come back later.
I’m going to try my old laptop that is 100 years old in dog years now, and to use an older, less twitchy Dreamweaver tomorrow.

Nano Wood

Nanowood for superior insulation. Supposed to be better insulation than aerogel. http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-nanowood-20180309-story.html

The same team who invented super wood.  First they do killer structure, now amazing insulation.  Coat with epoxy.  Someone will not want to hear about this…

This could be very good structural insulation for future multihulls.  Maybe even a lower cost structural core material.  Especially if it keeps the great fatigue strength of wood.

Shopping Cart Update

Shopping cart using Authorize.net is still down. It turns out that they made some changes and DXCart, the shopping cart company was unaware of it. And they, DXCart, say it will take a week for them to upgrade.
Paypal still works. And I will be looking for another company tomorrow.

On the technology plus side, I now have a phone again.  Took two hours  at Verizon.  “We have never seen anything like that,” failure.

Shopping Cart Hiccups

Over the last several days the shopping cart has tossed a few people out with an error message. But oddly, at the same time some people are able to use it.  Ok those are the Paypal users.  Looks like Paypal is it until I can sort out Authorize.net.
Webmaster checked our end and is fine. I contacted DX Cart the cart provider, and they noticed problems with Authorize.net. Said they would get back to me, last week. Not a word back. I will make more calls tomorrow.
Hit me with a call or email if it happens to you. And I do have a working cell phone now. Kind of. Many features not yet there.