2023-05-22 09:33 - Making
When I moved in here, the house still had the original single pane windows from the 40s installed. Not only did that merit attention, there was historically only a single air conditioner in the whole house — installed in the one window that had been replaced with a more traditional double-hung arrangement, to fit the A/C. And since it was responsible for the whole house, it is a big unit! Very early this year, we had all the windows replaced. That means they're "replacement" windows. Rather than being built into the house (i.e. "new construction" windows) they're designed to fit into the existing opening. Which means some of the structure of the window moves inward, to what used to be window opening. So, this one important window opening is now in a slightly different place, and the existing support structure won't hold up the existing A/C correctly. Given that it's such a big one, I wanted to be sure that we can hold it up well. So I came up with a design.
It starts with a 2x4 cut into a complex shape to fit around all the bumps and tabs in the window frame plus a bit at the bottom of the A/C which sticks down. Attached to that is another which sticks straight out, two to brace it, and then another which sticks down. This final one has both a triangle brace and an extra foot to reach around the brick window sill down to the main exterior wall of the house.
Here it is. It was built from reclaimed wood which used to be a bench. It's not the prettiest, but it will be underneath the air conditioner, so it doesn't need to be. It's full of extra holes, but that's OK. It's also wood from a product meant to be outside. I'm not sure what kind of wood, but it's reddish. I could believe cedar, either way it should stand up to the elements OK. Some of the building was done a bit freehand, but with the key sizes measured it came out extremely close to my original design. I can pretty well hang myself off it, so I'm sure it will hold the A/C up just fine.
2023-04-26 21:55 - Tech
A while back I set up a home server (and a remote backup server at my Mom's) with one primary goal: Proper KVM-over-IP, so that complete remote support and repair is possible. I ended up building around used SuperMicro server motherboards, which include IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) for remote management, including KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) control and remote virtual USB media (boot from an ISO image located with/controlled by the IPMI client).
I ended up with oldish boards, to make them cheap. Oldish but "enterprise grade" is plenty for my needs! There's a catch though: newish IPMIView clients and oldish servers aren't 100% compatible. Reference some good community documentation at Reddit titled Fix X9DR Supermicro IPMI Colors Broken / Glitched (Archive) which even links to the official SuperMicro support page (Archive) — both of which instruct you to download some files from the IPMI device's built in web server, and replace part of the IPMIView client.
I did that, years ago at this point I want to say. More recently, I was trying to manage these servers, remotely. No matter what I tried, I would always get an error message "Session ID is Expired" when attaching the virtual media to boot from. (And I couldn't find this message documented anywhere online!) Generally to verify that if I reboot, I'll be able to do so from rescue media. But at least once, I really needed to do so. And I couldn't!
I tried lots of things over lots of time. Eventually, I could get it working in a completely blank virtual machine, with just IPMIView installed. Most of the time I did this, I instinctively patched the client files to fix the colors: I've known to do this, and done it as a matter of course, for years. At least once I must not have and after a while I figured out that's where things were working.
It's much more important that my lightly-used rescue environment works than that it looks pretty, so I've reverted the documented patching in all of my IPMIView clients, for now. (Though of course this kind of "for now" turns permanent pretty quickly.)
2023-04-16 19:51 - Making
As I mentioned recently, I'm working on "smarting up" power control at home. Back in my co-op apartment I had a fully X10 based system, and I still have many of the parts for it. An important one is the HR12A PalmPad Remote Control. For those I've looked at, remote controls are either missing or terribly expensive for modern "smart" home systems. The link shows that a still brand new one from X10 is only $17, and it has both on and off buttons for eight devices, plus a switch to control another eight, plus a dim/bright control. The closest thing I can find (they're hard to find!) is an YoLink Remote which only controls five devices and costs $30 (and probably only works with their proprietary system).
This pairs with the CM19A USB PC Transceiver which can both receive and send RF X10 signals. I previously used this to send X10 signals, via my home server. I've reworked that now: it's only receiving. The PalmPad remote sends signals when I press buttons and the server receives them via the CM19A. It then generates network requests. So far to the fan/light control I mentioned earlier and to the last thing pictured: A Sonoff S31 "smart switch".
Since they're cheap and I already have several: now it's easy to leave one PalmPad by the couch, one by the desktop computer, and one near my bed. If I'm planning to head to bed? I can turn the light and/or fan off in the living room, and the light on in the bedroom. Without extra trips back and forth, and without fumbling around in the dark. And I've got five more buttons to assign, without even flipping the switch! I can send the same controls from a computer/tablet/phone through the little web app running on my home server. I've barely had it a day and I already greatly appreciate being able to easily turn the ceiling fan on or off as I please, without getting up.
2023-04-01 15:51 - General
Back in my studio apartment, I had remote control of my lights and some appliances. I used X10 devices for this, a design originally from the 1970s to pass data over power wires. Slightly newer devices also could use radio signals. The great thing is that they're very cheap, being old technology. Since they want to use the power lines to transmit the data, compatibility can be limited in a whole house scenario. (The data doesn't cross the two phases, so won't reach the whole house easily. Which part of the house is which phase can often be rather arbitrary.)
So I've been looking for a newer "smart" switch type of device I could adopt. I still want it to be inexpensive, but I also want it to work ideally over WiFi. What I don't want, however, is for it to rely on some random "cloud" service. After all The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer. And that someone else will eventually stop giving you access to their computer. Examples are many: Insteon shut down their service in 2022, Nest dropped support for some of their devices in 2016, and Amazon shut down some Alexa devices in 2022. (That's just a few easy examples.) I want my devices to be network-addressable, not Internet service dependent (or even connected, to be honest).
Pictured above is a Treatlife DS03 combined light dimmer and fan control switch. It is not local only. But depending on the hardware revision, it can be converted to use either Tasmota or OpenBeken — two very similar open source "smart home thing" replacements. This very sketchy and very temporary installation is my very first test device. I have it installed and running: all the buttons do what they should do, but it's also connected to my "infra" WiFi, which is firewalled to have no Internet access. (And the regular switch on the left controls the porch light.)
Installation didn't go perfectly. Behind that switch before I changed anything was one wire running through the dimmer, for the light in the ceiling fan, and a second always-hot wire for the fan with pull-chain control. I got this device and used that second wire for remote control of the fan, and everything seemed to work great. Later I discovered that an unrelated light upstairs stopped working. I've now become confident that this light was fed from the same "always hot" line which also powers the fan. This took me some time to figure out, with a few lucky breaks along the way.
We're talking about the upstairs hallway light. It's on a three way switch: one each at the bottom and top of the stairs. One day I went upstairs, flipped the switch, and got no light. I think this was at least a week since installing the new test smart switch, and for quite some time I didn't make the connection. The first thing I did was take this diagram pictured above. After removing the fixture from the ceiling and both switches, this is what I could see behind them, and it was a big lucky break: Some original-to-the-house style cloth wrapped wires, plus some romex-style wires — some with white and some with black jackets, so I could tell them apart! The fixture had one end and the upstairs switch the other end of the only white jacket, so it was safe to assume those are connected. Then there were three other black sheaths, probably at least one connection. And some cloth, with no immediately clear pattern.
So armed with that information, I started trying to figure out how the wiring was laid out, to aid with diagnosis. The image above has one guess at top, crossed out. The second form at the bottom felt a lot better, and I'm now convinced it's accurate. At its left is the line with "cb" and "cw" (cloth wrapped white and black conductors). That, in the light fixture, goes either through a link or the lamp to the "wpb" and "wpw" (white plastic sheath, black/white conductors), which goes to the upstairs box with the switch, and so on. The pattern makes sense for a three way switch, assuming that the cloth conductors on the left are the line/supply. With nothing hooked to them anymore besides my multimeter probes, I can use the network addressable switch downstairs to watch them go from no power to full line power, as I turn the fan on and off. I also found more of the other wires, visible in the unfinished "attic" space, including where the newer romex style wire joins to the one probably original to the house (and thus, probably already there, perhaps as part of a single leg switch later upgraded to be three way) cloth wire.
So now I've got a plan for what to do! It starts with capping off the old supply line shared with the fan: I'd prefer to keep the new four-speed control of the fan with no pull chain dangling in the middle of the room. Instead I add, in the mentioned attic space (which already has a light and outlet for me to pull the supply from) a new feed. It goes into the upstairs switch box, which backs into this space. The switch loop remains mostly the same, with the supply being injected at the upstairs switch, rather than at the light fixture.
Presto! I actually lucked out quite a bit to have a neutral wire in the switch box, as the smart switch needs it. This house is from the 1940s and apparently this wasn't typical until the 80s or so. I haven't actually checked all the other switch boxes yet: see the sketchy temporary install of this one switch. I've decided I like this line of switches, but I haven't completely planned out how many I want, and of what type: they come in standard on/off switches plus three way compatible variants of that, dimmers and three way compatible dimmers, two different button designs for each kind of dimmer, and the dimmer/fan combo I've got (at least!).
2023-01-02 09:57 - Making
A while ago I made "The Bedsofa", a sort of headboard designed like the back of a sofa, for comfortable sitting up (and reading) in bed. When I made it, I was living in a loft apartment, and it was designed to work with the mattress sitting right on the floor. (The loft was around four feet high, no room to put the mattress up on a real bed, there.
The riser I've designed, plus an "exploded view" to plan how many boards will be needed to build it.
So this is the plan: a simple little frame, to raise the bedsofa the same amount that the bed frame will raise the mattress. Almost. My original design didn't work out perfectly so the cushions hang a bit lower than intended. Raising the bedsofa a little bit less than the mattress will make those sit up where they were originally intended. So this will be ten inches tall, while the bed frame is twelve.
I've still got the rest of the material I upholstered the bedsofa with, so this riser should blend right in. Now I've just got to figure out the best way to get some two-by-four boards home!
2022-12-31 21:38 - Making
I moved almost exactly a month ago. The bedroom closet has a unique closet rod situation: self made hangers, from 1x4 lumber, around the perimeter of the closet. Since the closet is shallow but wide (I guess), they were installed to allow either two front-to-back closet rods on the sides, or one across the width. But the long closet rod in there isn't long enough to reach the hangers on either side, and the width is much more than double the depth. I'd like to use the long closet rod, but I can't as-is.
There's also some pipes feeding the radiator upstairs, tucked on one side. So the solution seemed to be to build a new hanger in the right position to support the existing closet rod, plus avoid the area with the heating pipes at the same time. I started by cutting a board to length, and finding the right shape hole to match the one already in place. I cut a second board the same length, to be a backstop so the rod can't slide and fall out.
Once cut, the boards were painted white to better match what already existed in the closet. Four "toe-screwed" screws support the main board, with the cutout, from each corner. Two screws go through the face to support the backstop board from there. Once installed, you can see the preexisting hanger already along the wall, which the rod couldn't reach.
2022-11-08 12:56 - General
As mentioned, I recently got a plug-in hybrid vehicle. When new, e.g. Popular Mechanic's review tells us that the plain Hybrid has a 1.4 kWh battery while the plug-in Energi instead has a "... lithium-ion battery pack pumped up to a big 7.6 kWH ... can travel up to 21 miles ... in pure electric mode." So the plug-in portion might be as much as 6.2 kWh of capacity. Tiny by modern EV standards, but of course this car still has a gasoline engine, too.
When turning off the car, it gives a summary of the trip (i.e. since it was turned on). Online I've read about using this summary to measure your battery capacity: it gives a direct read-out of both gasoline and electricity usage. Charge up to 100% and start a single trip, then watch for the EV mode to end with the car switching to hybrid operation. I managed to do this yesterday, coasting only once the switch to hybrid happened to a place I could pull off the road and shut down.
The picture was bad because it was very sunny and I was hurrying (this summary display doesn't stay around for very long). But it tells me both that I have 5.2 kWh of usable EV capacity in my battery, and I managed to go 19.7 miles with it. That sounds like a missing kWh, but a very favorable electric-only range compared to the as-new specs of 21 miles for a roughly nine-year-old car. I don't know exactly what "3.6 regen miles" means.
I also re-charged the battery after this, and spent 7.1 kWh to do so. That makes for roughly 75% charge cycle efficiency. I've heard that 240V charging can be more efficient, and this makes me want to experiment with it, somewhere that I can measure/report on how many kWh went into the charging.
2022-10-31 14:39 - General
As mentioned previously, I moved out of New York City in July. In the time I lived there, I didn't own a car. Saving the expense of the car itself, the gas, the insurance, and so on definitely helped with the expense of living in the city. Being able to live in America with no car is one of the things I appreciated most about the city. But now I'm moving away, to normal America where life with no car ranges from difficult to impossible.
Like lots of things, I've ended up going through life changes at an inopportune moment in history. The pandemic made cars expensive, shrinking the historically huge gap between used and new cars. And there's a big federal tax credit available for the purchase of a new EV (on top of this being the last year I'm confident I'll owe that much in taxes) to further help close the gap. So I started looking heavily into EVs.
Many of them advertise just under $40k prices, so after the tax credit it feels like $30k. But for anything I looked at (the Hyundai Ioniq 5 really caught my eye) it was hard to accept the base model at that headline price, especially hard to give up the larger battery (and thus longer range) that they all offer. The larger battery is never an option though, just one of the things in the higher level trim package. Then they all come with enticing optional features which made the next-higher trim level hard to turn down. Plus at most dealers the pandemic pricing has translated into over-sticker price bumps for new cars too. Suddenly, I was looking at around $60k rather than around $30k.
So I started looking back at the used market. I had previously heard interesting things about the Honda Element, a smallish SUV with fold-up rear seats that make the cargo area very capacious. But ...
That's a plot of the 53 closest (within 300 miles!) Honda Elements for sale right now. It was only made from 2003 to 2011 so there aren't very many and they're all pretty old now. Only eight of them are under 100,000 miles, and the cheapest of those is over $13,000 (up to over $21,000!). As I looked further: this vehicle also barely gets over 20 MPG. I'm no longer excited about this. I looked into the Honda Fit as well (I was interested in the small car size with flexible-for-cargo interior), which had similar results: Made more recently so more availability, but also the prices are not so exciting when a new (e.g.) HR-V MSRPs for $24k and an under-100k-mile Fit is at least $10k.
So as I continued looking, I decided to focus on the used plug-in hybrid market. This gives me a bit of practice experience with what it might be like to plug in an EV, gets me good mileage overall, and avoids the new car purchase price. Having done so I can say I found it tricky to find such used cars. Most plug-ins are available in a plain hybrid version, which is generally much more common. So it's hard to find the plug-in varieties. Either way, I ended up picking a favored model.
After looking around for a couple months, I picked this car. It's a 2013 Ford C-Max Energi. It's a light blue ("Ice Storm Metallic"), which I greatly prefer to a plain white or black. This model is hybrid only, "Energi" means it is the plug-in variety. This model was only made (in America) from 2013-2017 so there's not a lot of them out there. For the first few model years, Energi also meant the highest trim level. My particular one has several extra options as well: upgraded stereo/infotainment with navigation, hands-free including keyless entry and start, power lift gate (with keyless kick-to-open), rear view camera, and panoramic sunroof. And some cosmetic issues, but it's close to ten years old.
It's a rather compact car, but in a hatchback/wagon style which makes for decent cargo room. The plug-in battery pack takes up some of that cargo room, but this is a compromise I was happy to make.
Mine came from a trade in to a dealer. I picked it because of the color/price/options combination. The dealer experience wasn't so great -- I was there for about ten hours. I bought it in New York state, and ended up titling and registering it there as my license still had my New York City address on it. Some of the delay was trying to avoid this. This past weekend I came down to Maryland with all my documents in hand and transferred title and registration and license, here. (I'm moving here and insurance is half the price as compared to New York.) Now I've got to go back to New York, to surrender the unused registration (and the plates) for a refund.
2022-08-17 23:23 - General
In early 2006 I adopted my second cat, Brandy. She was described to me as about six months old, so I picked October 25, 2005 to be her birthday. She was a wonderful cat: playful and friendly, very talkative, and beautiful. Though historically quite heavy, in late 2019 she was starting to visibly thin out. She weighed 13.69 pounds in mid 2011 but by then was down to 11.0. Since then she gradually continued to lose weight (down to 5.26 pounds). Over the COVID pandemic, she lost first one and then the other of her upper canine teeth, and developed a limp in one of her front legs. She showed some other minor changes, which I attributed mostly to age: she's almost seventeen years old.
This past week however, starting Friday (as far as I know), she stopped eating. One of the things she's done for a while now is have a "bad day" every once in a while, where she'll vomit a few times and not eat for 24 hours. She'd always improve and resume eating the following day (and not considering it serious at first means I don't truly know when it started), but this time she didn't resume eating. She grew weaker, and soon she could hardly even drink for herself, so she got water put into her mouth by dropper for a while. She got to the point that she could hardly walk and hadn't eaten for almost a week with no sign of changing, so today we made the hard call that at nearly seventeen years old it was time to take her to the vet, to be put down gracefully.
Like I did for her older (separately adopted) sister, what follows is a photo album, spanning from "2004" (date attribution on my pre-smartphone photos is imperfect!) up to today. They're presented without further detail or comment. Goodbye, sweetheart.
