(For my Texas friends:) Support Texas parks and nature: Vote Yes on Prop. 5 on Nov 5th!
From 1993 to 2017, the state has collected nearly $2.5 billion in revenues from the Sporting Goods Sales Tax that was supposed to go to parks, yet only 40 percent has been spent on state and local parks. Prop. 5 will prevent those funds from being diverted every year.
For more info, see the Texas Coalition for State Parks .
I recently built a networked PoE (Power over Ethernet) speaker system and installed it in the wall at the top of the stairs. By using PoE, I only had to run one cable to the device – a Cat6A ethernet cable that provided data and power.
I used the following components:
The $236 cost was lower priced for better quality than pre-existing devices I considered, with the major expenses being:
The general assembly steps are:
Now configure the device to act as a network speaker:
Now test and use your new network speakers! We’ve found many uses for the device, including:
I went on a home automation improvement kick recently! The changes include:
OpenHAB – I switched from Misterhouse to OpenHAB for home automation. Why? OpenHAB has a cleaner codebase, more active development community, more efficient event-driven model, increasing device support, a better UI, charting, and a functional mobile client. I completed most of the conversion in a few hours, and further lingering issues within few days.
WeeWX – instead of WView for my weather station. WeeWX uses the same DB format as WView so all the historical data is still present. WeeWX has a more active development community, lacks a rainfall bug that was plaguing me in WView, and supports MQTT (see below) allowing me to get weather station data from WeeWX to OpenHAB.
MQTT – an IoT (Internet of Things – another buzzword) message bus becoming more common in home automation. It allows publishing of data and subscription to data channels, decoupling devices enough to make it easier to connect devices lacking explicit support for each other.
DoorBird – a video intercom, motion-sensing doorbell with a documented local (non-cloud) API and hard-wired power (no batteries to worry about). I integrated it into my OpenHAB instance – here are example instructions.
Garage door automation – I added garage door controllers and sensors, so now when I ask “did I remember to close the garage door?” after driving 30 (or 300) miles I can check, and close it if I did forget.
More intelligence – Decorative lights come on at dusk instead of a fixed time, adapting to the season automatically. The container herb garden on the back porch skips drip irrigation if it has rained more than 0.2 inches in the last 24 hours. A reminder is pushed to our phones if the garage door has been left open for more than 30 minutes. If motion is detected on the front porch, a photo is taken by the doorbell camera and archived.
Whew! I have a few more ideas too, but I better wait a little bit and have a burn in period before making more changes – and trying OpenHAB 2.0.
One of our garage door openers died of old age recently – it was an old builder-model (in other words, as cheap as the builder can get) chain drive opener that was incredibly noisy. I took advantage of the opportunity to reduce the noise made by the garage door opener and the door itself especially since there is a room of the house above the garage.
Here’s what I did in order of increasing cost and effort:
After making all of the above changes, we believe the garage doors are about 75% quieter than before!
Hope this helps someone!
I upgraded our server to Fedora 16 from Fedora 14 recently, so I thought I’d continue my tradition of posting the solutions to the problems I encountered to help others.
Two major changes in Fedora recently increased the difficulty of this upgrade: the switch to grub2 from the grub legacy bootloader, and the switch to systemd from Upstart and SysV-style init.
I used the PreUpgrade method once again to reduce downtime and avoid burning a disc.
References to read first:
Melissa from Hunters Chase pointed out that Cycled Plastics in Austin recycles foam products, which are not taken and recycled as part of the single stream recycling from the City of Austin and Texas Disposal Services.
From their website at http://www.cycledplastics.com/Services.html :
Public Drop Off Site: Cycled Plastics maintains a public drop point at it’s facility in Austin (at 10200 McKalla Place). The following items are accepted Monday through Friday, 7am – 5pm. (click here for a map)
Another good opinion article on CNN, this one by John Avlon advocating voters rejecting hyper-partisan candidates.
via Voters should fire Bachmann, Grayson – CNN.com.
A great quote: “We need to stand up to the extremes on both sides to stop the cycle of incitement before it gets even uglier.”
I try not to define myself as liberal or conservative – but some of the fear-mongering and end-of-the-world fatalism being used in this election cycle is inappropriate and ultimately destructive, rather than constructive and adding value to the debate.
David Frum has a good opinion article on CNN about it –
Lisa and I recently went on the Austin Cool House Tour co-sponsored by the Texas Solar Energy Society and Austin Energy Green Building.
We realized the efficiency retrofits to our home were pretty similar to what we saw on the tour, so for fun I thought I’d write up the green feature list of our house in the same format as used by the tour book.
Built as a traditional non-green building, this Austin home has been retrofitted for energy efficiency and simple but high-tech living.
Owners: Lisa and Jason Spangler
Solar PV: Texas Solar Power Company
Any other ideas for increasing energy efficiency or going more green? Leave the in the comments!
Update: Here is an aerial photo of the metal roof and solar panels from Google Maps:
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