Sean’s Mental Walkabout

The house monitoring project has made a little bit of progress, as I’ve now got data being collected into a rails app using backgroundrb, and can get that data back out into very pretty graphs with gruff.  (I also looked a little bit a sparklines, but that’s specifically for graphs without labels.)
 

We’re running above target temp as it’s the weekend, so the wood stove is on.  As is the furnace fan to spread the heat through the house.  I’m overloading the values for heat on an fan on to be either the bottom of the graph or a specific small value.  I need to sort out a better way to put that into the graph, which may require some hacking on gruff itself.

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I definitely don’t have this anywhere near I like it, but I did manage to just dump out a bunch of info from my thermostat and turn off the fan with this script:

I need some nicer symbolic constants for state setting, and pull together a rails site just to keep track of thermostat data over the course of the day.  All this code is going on my newly registered rubyforge project.

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John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set.  Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit.  There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing.  One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it.  It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse.  The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.

Thanks to John for bringing that over.  I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up).  While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way.  I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.

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While our new woodstove insert is really great, and is definitely reducing our oil usage, it causes a bit of an issue when it comes to distributing the heat through the house.  When running on wood heat we get warmth right up the center of the house.  The office at the end of the upstairs hallway ends up being the warmest room in the house.  It is far too easy to make the upstairs unlivably warm, while the rest of the house is quite cool still.

Fortunately, we have a central air HVAC system, so the solution is to just turn on the furnace fan to redistribute the heat through the house.  This works pretty well, and at least mellows out the hot spots.  Ideally we wouldn’t run the fan all the time, but would duty cycle it on for some portion of an hour.  Honeywell makes a thermostat that has a cyrc fan mode, which runs the fan 35% of each hour, which was an option, but something else caught my eye.

The Proliphix Internet Thermostat NT20e is quite a nifty device.  It has a bit more programing than our current thermostat and has the advantage of having a web interface.  You plug the device into your ethernet network and get a web interface for all the controls and programming for the device.  What’s even better is that Proliphix designed this with further customization in mind by publishing an HTTP API to the device as well.  This makes is very easy to have a computer create further logic for the device, like forcing the fan on for certain hours of the day, while leaving the defaults for programming in the device itself.

I’ve now ordered mine, and it is on it’s way.  I can’t wait to get this thing hooked up.

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We’ve been running this all weekend, heating the whole house.  What a wonderful thing a woodstove is.

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Just installed in our living room.  Here’s to a winter of wood fires.

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From our vacation last month.  Something about the juxtaposition of muscle car vs. self propelled boat amuses me.

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It’s Monarch season.  No, not the dreaded form of government, but those butterflies that manage to migrate from the north east to Mexico every year.  Because Susan has both milkweed and butterfly bushes in or garden, we’ve managed to attract a few this year, including one that is currently pupating.

And that left me with a question.  I saw the caterpillar hanging from under the leaf when I went to work on Friday, and I saw the pupa when I got home, and the pupa is smaller.  After a bit of searching on the internet I found a video which actually shows that transformation in time lapse, and it is definitely weird.  I might have to rig up something to get my own time lapse of them next year.

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For the past six months, Verizon has been spending a lot of time in our neighborhood. I was as likely to spot little tented trucks with big spools of cable spilling out, as deer on my way to work. Every day this last week there were Verizon trucks working on poles. And, as I suspected, it was because they were bringing in fiber.

Yesterday morning the Fios Internet flier went up on every mailbox in the neighborhood. The offer for our area is the enhanced deal, so 10 Mbs down / 2 Mbs up for the lowest level of service, and 20 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up for the next level. Given how often the cable modem falls over, and how while they increased the downstream recently, they decreased the upstream, which is annoying for things like NX sessions to work, photo uploads, and a host of other bits.

I’m still trying to figure out what the phone quality is like, before I make the plunge, but I’ll probably look at switching some time this summer.

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Things you’d rather not hear your wife say first thing in the morning:

We don’t have any water in the house. None of the faucets work.

2 hours later, we have a new well pump, and we have water again, as the old one was burnt out. Not cheap, but given all the other issues that it might have been, at least it was relatively quick and straightforward to fix.

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