Michael Graves

Lights Out, Please! Enlightened Devices Support Darkness

Today, the simple fact is that IoT devices are excessively, unnecessarily, intrusively bright. This is not the first time I’ve addressed this matter. Sadly, the trend does not seem to be improving. All manner of techno-gadgetry has power or status LEDs that typically cannot be disabled. In the hallway of our home, where the network core and IoT hubs reside, there are several devices with status lights that likely made the product designer proud, but they convey no useful information at all. They merely make it impossible to have a dark room.

“You are beginning to damage my calm.” – Jayne, Firefly.

I am recently reminded of this in the course of dealing with our elderly Labrador. She’s had trouble sleeping the past few weeks. This is quite common in very old dogs. We’ve tried many things to help her sleep at night. Anti-anxiety medication only sorta works. Brown noise helps a little to mask the noise of nearby traffic.

Last weekend we installed a couple of calming pheromone dispensers. These are like Glade scented plug-ins, except they dispense a pheromone that is supposed to have a calming effect.

Each pheromone dispenser covers 700 square feet. So, two of them handle our entire home. Further, they last about 30 days under normal circumstances. Pheromone refills are $22 each.

Backup Power: 9kW-ish Portable Invertors

Just a few days before Christmas 2021 we bought a Predator 9500 portable invertor generator. Back then, it was one of the first of a new generation of inverters delivering 7,500 watts continuous power, with 9,500 watts peak.

The Predator brand is sold by Harbor Freight. The 9500 model was introduced in 2020 at $1899. Demand was strong, and they were in short supply for a long while. By the time supply was improved the list price had gone up to $2399. It has since gone to $2499, but you can still get them for less during special promotions. We managed to get ours using a last-minute pre-Christmas coupon good for a discount of 25%!

Over time, similar models have emerged from several other companies like Genmax and DuroMax. It’s quite apparent that these are all made by the same manufacturer. They vary only a little in specific features and the color of the plastics.

Three Inverter Generators

Not long ago, Gavin’s Garage offered an unboxing video of the Pulsar PGD95BISCO Super Quite Dual Fuel 9500W Home Use Backup Portable Inverter Generator.

Household Projects: Irrigation & New Grass

April 4, 2023
Michael Graves
Family

We’ve had a rough couple of years here in Houston, at least from the perspective of our yard. Unusual extended periods of hard freeze the past two winters basically killed off most of our grass and some of the garden. We were especially sad to lose the Tangerine that has given us bushels of fruit in recent years.

So it was that we decided it was time to undertake a major project in the yard. We’d hire a contractor to install a proper irrigation system, then put down new sod across the entire yard. We’d had this quoted several times over the years, but the cost was always prohibitive. The state of the yard now forced a hard reset, so the decision was basically made for us.

In February we had several contractors visit. We described exactly what we wanted and had them provide quotes.

Stated Requirements

We were very specific about what we wanted done.

The old grass/weeds removed
The existing flower beds cleaned out (except for specific marked plants)
A multi-zone irrigation system installed, addressing both the grass and garden beds
Three existing downspouts from the eves tied in to an existing drain in the back yard
One flower bed along the rear, south side of the house removed
Additional top soil added to all the flower beds
Flower beds mulched
Areas to be grass prepared as appropriate
New Palmetto St Augustine sod would be installed
The crushed granite path leading to the office doors would be renewed

We eventually settled upon Byron’s Landscaping. Quoting $9k for the project, they were not the cheapest, nor most expensive. We’d seen them working elsewhere in the neighborhood. They seemed credible and the salesman appeared to listen to our stated requirements. He was quite enthusiastic, and seemed to understand what we wanted.

We now regret our selection. What follows details our experience as the projected unfolded.

Another Episode of Living with Mint Mobile

March 22, 2023
Michael Graves
Uncategorized

Stella is presently on a trip to The Netherlands. She’s travelling with our niece, who is visiting our great-niece who is going to school at the University of Maastricht. It’s literally a European Vacation.

It fell to me to do the best I could to help Stella prepare for her trip. In particular, to help arrive at a strategy for providing mobile phone service while abroad. As we are Mint Mobile customers, I checked their site for the potential of international roaming. Mint requires that we prepay some funds toward international roaming.

Mint-Roaming-Costs

Mint Mobile is quite expensive. Most especially the data costs, which could also be expressed as a whopping $200 / GB! Clearly their offer was not the way to go. We needed to consider alternatives.

Further Adventures in Power-Over-Ethernet Land: POE Extenders

January 13, 2023
Michael Graves
networking

For the past month or so we’ve had a couple of foster dogs on the property. They are a Husky and a Rottweiler, both less than a year old, who were wandering nearby and I (unthinkingly) took them in. This has caused me to want improved coverage of the yard by our security cameras. I need to keep an eye on them so they don’t become destructive.

In particular, I want to add another IP camera to our front porch. The two existing cameras were intended to monitor our on-street parking. So, they are west facing, pointing toward the street. I’d like to add one looking at the porch and the front door. That view would include several chairs. The Rottweiler is inclined to play with the cushions from the chairs on the porch, which I simply cannot allow.

We’re a Unifi House

Each of the existing cameras has a Cat 5e home run to the Ubiquiti Unifi POE+ switch in the central hallway of the house. I selected the Gen 2 managed Unifi switches for the best combination of price, POE+ and a fanless design. I like silent.

While I could run another Ethernet lead, that would be tedious, and hardly seems necessary given the limited bandwidth and power requirement of our Grandstream IP cameras.

How-To Geek: Be Careful Before Running Your Computer From a Gas Generator

October 10, 2022
Michael Graves
infrastructure

The web site How-To Geek has long been a useful resource. Last week they published an article entitled, “Be Careful Before Running Your Computer From a Gas Generator.” Given our experience during the Great Texas Freeze of 2021 this hits close to home. It’s a reasonable article overall, but it has a couple of holes that I’d like to fill.

Mr. Butler is absolutely correct, a traditional generator can be a problem when running sensitive electronics like computers or TVs. We discovered this in February 2021 when our reasonably new furnace would not run reliably on the generator. I would not have guessed that a gas-fired furnace would present a problem. However, the electronically controlled, variable speed blower struggled to start when connected to the dirty and lumpy generator power.

He suggests using a UPS to protect your sensitive devices from the generator. That’s a nice idea, but there is some subtlety to that as well. The type of UPS matters.

Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS)

Our older, admittedly inexpensive, line-interactive UPSs absolutely freaked out when connected to generator power. They saw the variability in the generator output as something to be corrected, but way beyond their scope. They reacted very badly, cyclically putting backup power in/out of circuit every couple of seconds.