Adventures in Homeowning

Cycling Xtranormal Videos

2009-12-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

I don't have any other blogs these days than this one so I'll just post this off topic in here.

Collection of Xtranormal Cycling related videos:

Made with tools from "Xtranormal":

Hipsters discussing Cyclocross

Zone 2 (stupid crap cyclists say)

PDX Chat before CX Natz

Wheel Change

Colorado State Cyclo Cross Championships Discussion

Post Colorado State Cyclo Cross Championships Discussion

Typical pre-ride conversation

Typical post-ride conversation

TED5000 support with Google PowerMeter

2009-10-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

I was pretty excited last week to see that Google announced support for TED5000 in their newish PowerMeter application (announcement). I scrambled to get the new firmware installed and talking to the big Google in the sky as soon as I could. First impression is I'm a little disappointed in the lack of bells and whistles, but hey it's better than my hacked together RRD graphs! I read here or there that they are suppose to be adding more advanced features to come as it catches on. We'll see....

Essentially, the new firmware just gives you a section in the settings to hook up with your iGoogle account. When you get it rolling, it will add a new widget or whatever Google calls them (first time using iGoogle). I can't wait to see ways of comparing your usage to other users, or common trends in your area, or even +/- than in the past would be great too.

Makes me really wish I had a electric water and house heater as the temperature continues to drop in Colorado lately.

Project Updates, 8/31/2009

2009-08-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

I've been entirely focused on wiring the house for ethernet so I have not gotten to much else lately. Here's where everything is at:

Whole House Audio
I have not been wanting to invest any more money in this project until I made some progress on others so it's pretty stalled from a growth standpoint. I did work on the iphone interface a little bit but it still needs to be updated with other features I've thought of. As it stands right now I have the Mac Mini brains of the operation upstairs in a den with speakers, airport express in our bedroom with speakers, HTPC using the Speakers application in the living room. Right now I can play to three different rooms. Mostly I only play a local radio station KBCO or iTunes right now. I control it all from my iPhone (or IE on a desktop, firefox doesn't work for some reason).

Solar Sun Jars
I used hot glue to hold everything in place the last time around inside the lid. I didn't consider the how hot the sun could heat these up in the middle of the day. Yeah... that's not lasting.. I need to replace it with some sort of super epoxy. They are good looking at least with the colored gels in the lids sitting out on our new patio furniture!

Energy Monitoring (TED5000):
I received the display the same day all my networking tools and equipment came so I didn't really touch it for a few days. First impression is it's a bit cheaply made for what it is and costs. Just feels like one of those cheap plastic doodads you get at Bed Bath and Beyond BUT I will say it's a pretty sweet little device. If I didn't have the web interface on my phone or my own graphs going - this would be pretty useful for the majority of users! Also, I have hijacked some old scripts I had laying around for temperature monitoring and used them to pull data from the TED api and stick into some RRD's and export some graphs like this below. Quick and dirty but a little more useful for me if I start to have bad readings again.

Networking, Structured Wiring:
Short of it is I wired up ethernet in two rooms going to the basement where I have a patch panel and a new switch. Detailed post on it coming up.

TED problems and fixes

2009-08-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

I've been using the TED5000 for a little while now and am pretty happy with it. I have had two issues mainly so far and support has been fantastic.

1) I had been getting weird readings like HUGE numbers and negatives all of a sudden even after updating to the newest firmwares. Support sent me a beta update that took care of it right away and actually seems to make it work a lot smoother. One of the updates was for the gateway but the other was actually for the box that connects to the breakers. It must send the data over the power lines since it took about an hour for it to complete. Slick...

2) All of a sudden the other day readings were at zero. I didn't notice it but support pointed out that if I wasn't getting green lights, the gateway wasn't getting word back from the mtu. Long story short - through quite a bit of trial and error I figured out the outlet I was using in the basement for Datacenter 1.0 was the same circuit as an outlet in the garage which I had plugged an Airport Express and Bose speakers into. The Bose powered speakers must be putting some noise on the power line to interrupt communication.

It looks like I averaged about 30 kWh's a day over the weekend when it got to the 90's and the swamp cooler was on quite a bit while we were home. We'll see how that evens out over this week. Very interesting.... I am just itching now to figure out a way to track water and gas usage...

sure missed THAT at the inspection

2009-08-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

I do remember the inspector taking a second look at part of the insulation but he wasn't too concerned about it if I remember right. crap. From the first few days in the house I thought part of the insulation in the basement looked funny. As I have been rooting around back there trying to figure out the best way to lay out some network cable for my newest project (post on that coming!) I realized what was going on.

At some point in the past a mouse has moved in and ain't paying rent! I first noticed a few droppings, then realized some ripped up insulation went deeper than i thought and it actually turned out to be quite a nice little mouse apartment. a little digging and....ACK! A little mouse skeleton picked clean. What the.... Ok so I know now a) why the insulation on part of this wall looks jacked up, and b) why nobody fed on my mouse traps, but that brings to question 1) what the crap picked the bones clean and 2) It's not that large of a spot of insulation that needs replacing, but is that something I really want to do myself?

Sigh....home0wning.....

TED Introduction and Installation

2009-08-20T10:20:00.001-07:00

I've always been curious about the Kill-a-Watt device works but never could rationalize getting one since it's so limited. In a nutshell, it is a device (or powerstrip) you plug into the power outlet then plug in one or more electronics to it and it will read out your power usage. I read some models will calculate your cost of the power as well. Looking into gadgets for the new home I came across what I call a “whole house Kill-a-Watt” - The Energy Detective (or TED).

TED, made by Energy Inc, http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html has had their first generation product out for a while it looks like. I read that the next generation – the 5000 series – just came out this summer in 2009. I figured this was a perfect opportunity to get in on it as well as starting to monitor our power usage from almost day 1 in the house. I found they did not have the 5000 series listed for sale online but according to a few blogs you could call them up and make an order. I sent an email to find out more and their very helpful support let me know the main reason for not being for sale online was they only have a few still in stock and are totally out of the remote display device. I went ahead and made an order for the TED 5000-C which included everything I need for one electrical panel, the webserver that they call their gateway and a display that they will ship later. $256 shipped

The box showed up pretty quick and I was excited to get it installed that night. Everything looked to be included with nothing missing, great experience so far. I was pretty familiar with the electrical system of the house since the inspector I hired took the time to explain every bit of the house to me in detail. I knew all the breakers were being used but there was room for more. A quick jaunt to the hardware store (literally a minute from the house) to pick up a breaker and I was in business.

The MTU consists of two clamps that attach to the incoming power feed, that connects to a small box placed inside the box. Three wires come out of the box, 1 for the A phase, 1 for the B phase and another to attach to the ground bar. The only trouble I had installing was a slight fear of killing myself in one of the very first projects of the house, and that I ran out of sunlight. The wife and dogs weren't too happy about having the power shutoff while I got it installed. All said and done no death and still married! I do still need to clean up the box by attaching the MTU with doublesided tape to the side, right now it's just sitting on the bottom. Thanks to the wonders of battery backup, I noticed my computers and internet connection stayed up. Microwave clock flashing 12:00 was not as lucky.

“Well that was easy” I thought, “I'll surely have issues installing the gateway, I mean a company focused on a utility can't have that much experience with a computer device.” I went ahead and plugged in the gateway which consists of a wall wort sort of box, and an RJ45 port for a network cable. LED's started flashing as I read it should, excellent. I got onto a web brower and tried to hit up the web interface on the URL provided in the documentation, but all my systems are configured for my own search domain. This meaning it would try to autocomplete http://TED5000/ to TED5000.mydomain.blah.com or just TED5000.com. I pulled up my routers web interface and was able to track down the IP that TED got from DHCP and was then able to pull up the webpage. Granted this was mostly an environmental issue in my own network, it would be nice if they had a default static address – it's a trade off either way I suppose. Doing it this way is probably easier for the majority of users.

My first experience in the web interface was simply – WOW, this is well done. After walking through some simple setup wizards the gateway was picking up the signal just perfectly from the electrical panel. “It just can't be this easy” I thought. A day or two later I finally did hit a stumbling block, I started getting bad readings in the history, both huge numbers and negative. Even updating the firmware from the newest on their website was not fixing it. An email to support produced a quick email from one of their engineers, and a beta firmware update for both the MTU and Gateway. Now that's what I call service from what surely is a small company and not a very expensive device! After running for 12 hours on the new firmware it looks great. I could be wrong, but the interface seems to work a lot better, snappier between pages and the data seems to be more consistent and accurate.

I also came across an unofficial iPhone app that simply connects to the API of TED's gateway and shows all the current information. Not having the display yet, this is pretty handy to walk over to some lights, check the usage, turn them off and re-check. I am slightly disturbed that the 20 year old clothes washer that came with the house uses so much dang electricity! Newer ones have GOT to be more efficient.

In summary, it seems totally worth the cost as just being mindful of usage day to day, and parts of the day will go a long way to efficiently turning things off when not using or tracking down something I left on. Time will tell though, I'll be sure to track my progress here.

Sun Jar Project

2009-08-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

I built the first of many solar powered lights for the deck this past week. I wont dive into the details as I just followed plans from lifehacker and instructables. Here are some of the specifics and changes I made.

The first jars I tried came from The Container Store but the lids seemed entirely too small even with a heavily gutted light. It was the flip top mason jar looking ones but just couldn't get it to work. Next I tried a hard plastic (and watertight) square jar from Wal-Mart that worked perfect.

My parts:
6 pack of lights - Portfolio brand, from Lowe's $22
Jars $3/each from Container Store
Frosting $3 from Lowe's

I pretty much dove into this without doing too much reading of other peoples advice. I'll probably go back and read through all the comments to find the best way to color the lights as the green soda bottle I tried seemed to filter too much light.

I ended up needing to solder the two wires for the solar panel because they kept getting disconnected when I took apart the lights. Basic soldering I am fine at but it's no where near pretty! I couldn't find much to use as a cover inside the top to hide the electronic bits, ended up using a cardboard square. I should find something metal and hopefully black to pretty it up.

The frosting was much easier than expected, dead simple. I thought it was going to bunch up or streak or have SOME sort of problem on the plastic but it went on just fine.

Everything worked fine after putting her together. Looks to be water tight and a few days later looks like it's charging as well.

Next:
- Frost the top to hide the bits
- Research where to get filters for color
- Build more!

I'll get some better pictures of them on the porch when I get more built up!

edit: yes i see the layout of the pictures is all jacked up. i need to figure out a better composer for this blog!

There, now I fixed it - the first home WIN

2009-08-12T21:10:00.000-07:00

We closed on the house this past Monday and moving the small stuff car load by car load since it's only a few miles. I wasn't sure what the first project I was going to end working on in the house since despite it being about 19 years old it's in perfect condition. Turns out it's the phone system.

The DSL modem was delivered on Tuesday. The Qwest tech left a note chastising me for not being home when he came by (even though the customer service person said I didn't have to?) so I wasn't sure if the service would work. I tried every outlet I could find with the modem with no luck. Long story short, I traced the cable from the spot in the basement I wanted to use all the way to the garage and found the picture to the right. Interesting I thought. That's "There, I fixed it" worthy. Cables going every which way. Great.

After a bit of research I found most phone companies provide a customer access port of their demarc that should have a port that can be used for testing. I tracked this down and behold, the modem connected! Excellent, the service works at least....

Looking cloesely I noticed the cable running into the garage, that connects to the birds nest, doesn't look connected to the screw terminals. Some quick wirestripping and connecting the red and green wires because that seemed to be what was used on the other end, got the modem connected at the birds nest terminal now! One last test, is it working at the far end in the basement? YUP!

Amazingly, speed tests look actually decent too. We'll see if I keep this wiring long term because I just can't see how I'm suppose to get 12mbps service over this jury rigged mess but hey it works for now! The first of many savings in do it my damn self repair (tm).

Basement Datacenter 1.0:

Fight Like Susan / Don't Say She Lost

2009-08-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how different peoples lives can be at any given momemt. We are so excited to be closing on the house on Monday to start the next chapter in our book, "Playing House," and last night I read the FatCyclist.com wife died after her battle with cancer.

The picture to the right is the main page of the tshirt and jersey company TwinSix, displaying the old WIN mantra they came up with to symbolize their fight against cancer and Susan's struggle. The tear drop just kills me. Can't wait for the next round of fundraising gear to be announced. I'll be the first in line to grab a "FIGHT LIKE SUSAN" full kit!

TwinSix - Order some gear, support the cause

FatCyclist.com

First handyman WIN, pre-home!

2009-08-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

I stupidly put all the skins of carrots from dinner last night down the garbage disposal. Yeah, not a good idea. Dealt with a clogged sink while trying to make burgers, and the running dishwasher filled it almost to the top! DOH!

A bottle of some sort of unholy chemicals didnt make a dent. We're still in our apartment for another week so I know I could call in a service request, but they took three weeks to replace our faucet when it broke. And then they did again two weeks later for no known reason. I GOT THIS, i thought.

Now I need to preface with the fact that I am pretty much dumb when it comes to anything that's not a computer. Literally. So much so that I started working on my own bikes this year just to teach my damn self how it all works. Too many tools, too many mistakes and too many curse words later I have a good understanding of it all.....and will gladly pay the shop to wrench for me.

So I took a look under the sink to see what it all looked like.... pretty simple - all PVC with tool-less connectors. I assumed the clog was between the disposal and the other side since the left side of the sink drained fine. A few turns later, and smartly for once realizing I should put a bucket underneath to catch the unholy mess, viola! We have a clog in a pipe! Easily cleaned it, put her back together again and we're draining! Yeah, pretty elementary in the big scheme of things but it's a step! And I didn't break anything or cut myself. That's a win.

Whole House Music Party (part 2: first steps)

2009-07-31T14:27:00.000-07:00

I made a decision on a direction and dove in recently. I did not want to spend too much money right out of the gates in case it all fell apart. I decided to pick up an Airport Express and a pair of speakers to get started.

For the first set of speakers, I wanted something small and powered with good sound. I went with a pair of Bose Companion 2 speakers. The only bad things I read about these in reviews was that the bass can be a bit overpowering. I have found this to be true but it is not bad. I am keeping them in the kitchen for now and the little nook they sit in is a bit enclosed so it's not helping the strong bass either. So far I am happy with the quality and performance of the Airport Express on wireless N. It is not dropping out all that much - really only when I am transferring huge amounts of data across wireless which I rarely do as most of the network is wired.

Also, I came across an application new to me made by Rogue Amoeba, makers of Airfoil. They came out with 'Airfoil Speakers' recently. Speakers runs on OSX and Windows - drumroll - even on iPhone/iTouch! This eliminates a need for an Airport Express for the living room since I can run Speakers on the home theatre PC I built last year.

In addition I picked up a RadioSHARK 2 and am pretty happy with it as well. Very basic functionality of course but it does it's job well. I am not using the intended use of it as they market it as a DVR for radio.

For next time:
Putting it all together with centralized and remote control

Tab:
Airfoil (family pack) $46
Airport Express (Kitchen) $89
Bose Speakers (Kitchen) $89
RadioSHARK2 $47

Contents so far:
Whole House Music Party (part 1: planning)
Whole House Music Party (part 2: first steps)

Tour de France on TV

2009-07-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

Over the past 7 years or so I have started to notice how I watch the Tour is an interesting footnote about where I was at in life each year.

My first Tours I was employed at a cable ISP as a entry level technician. I didn't have too many responsibilities at the time and was blessed with bosses that were also cyclists as well. One of them brought in a TV, plopped it down on my desk which was at a centralized spot for everyone and we let it roll live every day. Awesome. I think I was at this job when Beloki had his carreer ending fall and Lance showed off his cyclocross skills without flinching. I still remember a few of those commercials - the DR Field and Brush mower! And something about a pancake.

Over the next few years I watched it every evening by way of the Tivo - only one of the best invention made has ever created. This allowed watching at night, on my own schedule and without commercials. One year I attempted to use the Tivo tools to pull recordings off the device and onto a desktop.

In 2005 - and Lance's last win (well, his original "last" win) - we were in Europe and had the opportunity to see the final time trial and the loops in Paris. Amazing!

For years in a row Versus was rumored to be finally doing HD. Murphy's Law Of course this year in 2009 I wasn't ready for it since we canceled cable late in 2008. I did sign up for the online streaming which was nice but not the same as watching it years past. I was able to find we still got Versus since we still had cable internet service albeit not in all the High Def glory i saw clips of. Blast! Even worse, I figured I would be able to catch some of the replay's at work in the break room since they have Dish service and nice HD tv's. Nope. They don't get Versus. BLAST! One good thing about working the terrible work shift I am on (10am to 7pm) is it let me watch most of the stages live in the mornings. I was even able to get morning workouts in, see the last 30 mins of a stage and get to work on time.

Since we are moving into our new house soon I am pricing out our options for the future. I'm leaning towards Dish network at the moment. I will have the Tour timeshifting in High Def next year!

Whole House Music Party (part 1: planning)

2009-07-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

Owning an Airport Express years and years ago, I have always thought the idea was excellent but never had a huge use for one in apartments. Walking through the house, listening to the same music sounds like a dream to me. I am starting to put together a plan for playing whole house audio throughout the new diggs. It is going to rock. Literally.

Options considered so far:
- Sonos
- Logitech Squeezebox
- Airport Express
- Roku
- Creative Sound Blaster Wireless

Requirements:
1) Must be easy enough for the better half to use
2) Must be controllable by both of us
3) Not too expensive Want to haves:
4) Interoperable with iTunes
5) Controllable remotely
6) Does everything, even walks the dog
7) Some sort of connection to other services & streaming radios (satellite, FM, Pandora, Last.FM)

Batter up:

A) Sonos

Holy price prohibitive...! This is definitely the high end / does it all / no need to fiddle with it option. Reading up on it I truly did give it a chance based on everything it claims to do and the apparent ease of the remote control interface, but in the end this is not for me. I'm a geek. I want to fiddle. I want to break it, then put it back together better the second time.

Cost: $999 for remote and two rooms (one amp'ed, one not)
about $550 for additional rooms (for amped unit + speakers)

Sonos Pros:
- Keeps it simple
- Free iphone native app
- Audio quality is stellar in reviews Sonos

Sonos Cons:
- Cost, way too high $/room ratio

B) Logitech's SqueezeBox Duet, and other products in same line (Product Line Link)

Looks like in 2006 Logitech bought SlimDevices. The Squeezebox Duet is the latest product from this lifeblood. The brain of the Duet is the wifi remote which piqued my interest right away. All the marketing material makes it seem like it hooks up great into Pandora and XM/Sirius. I already knew it connects well into Firefly (mt-daapd). What ultimately killed it for me was lack of any iTunes interoperability and lack of iTunes purchased music ability. I drink the koolaid, I'm not going to lie.

Price:
$399 for controller and main unit
~$350 total for additional rooms (classic unit + speakers)

C) Airport Express + RadioSHARK + Airfoil
$ 99/Airport Express retail
$ 45 for RadioSHARK
$ 46 Airfoil (family pack) estimating ~$150/room
3 room total: $541

Airfoil : Airport Express : RadioSHARK: I knew from the start I was going to gravitate towards this option but to be fair I tried to give everything else a shot. Years ago I had the original Wireless G version. I was curious if the Wireless N version was going to be more stable as I did I have trouble streaming while a bit of data was transferring around.

The new house does not have a wired network installed but I am very strongly looking at installing Cat6 throughout. This would hopefully eliminate any trouble with audio dropouts and possibly even allow me to extend the wireless even further with the Airports scattered in different spots. If you aren't familiar, you can stream music from iTunes to multiple Airport Express units (Apple recommends only up to 3).

The software Airfoil goes a step further and will accept audio from any app on the mac and stream it to one or many Airports. I came across the RadioSHARK device recently and what I read online makes it sound like it would be perfect if I can remotely control it. A simple USB FM tuner with software that will let you tune to any station you want. I listen to enough local radio that I really wanted this as part of the feature set.

D) Roku Soundbridge
$129/unit

The Roku has been around for a while, possibly the first of it's type. From my initial reading it looks like there is no way to play the same music on multiple units. Looks like you can if you use the SlimServer but not iTunes. The interface still looks pretty basic these days. Leaning away from this one.

(E) Creative Sound Blaster Wireless for iTunes

This device came out on the mark right about when I was researching all the options. I was excited to see something new hoping for new features. This device is amazingly poorly named. It does not really do anything special in iTunes as it will stream many other products, and it uses 2.4 ghz for transmission not Wireless G/N. Looks like the reviews are specing it at about 100 feet range. Not exactly what I am looking for.