Tralfaz

Author: gander

  • Product review: Whirlpool WHER25 RO system

    Product review: Whirlpool WHER25 RO system

    When we bought our house in South San José, I learned that we were on Great Oaks water. Having experienced that when I lived in my first condo, I knew the water was hard, and had a “taste”. (it is well water)

    While there was a filtration system, it was a simple cartridge system, and by how frozen the cartridges were to the manifold, it was clear that it had been installed and neglected for a long time (so long, that the cartridges went end of life and couldn’t be replaced).

    I looked for a little better system, and bought a Whirlpool Reverse Osmosis system for the under sink filtration. I will admit defeat on the installation (I hate plumbing), so we hired a handyman to get it fitted in July 2015. (more…)

  • Down with the Sickness

    Down with the Sickness

    Down with the sickness Album - DisturbedA few weeks ago, I regaled you with my quest for a replacement to the venerable Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor temperature monitor. It had become somewhat unreliable (the radio exterior sensor would lose contact many times a day with the base station), and the replacement with a La Crosse unit that so far seems vastly superior in its reliability (of course, it has been less than a month compared to the 13 or so years I had the Oregon Scientific hanging).

    At that time, I did a little digging on more robust weather monitoring systems. Something that tracked humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, temperature (and not impacted by radiative heat), wind direction and speed, in short a real weather station. (more…)

  • Back in the Saddle

    Back in the Saddle

    The downside of working full time again is the dearth of time to exercise. Little over a year ago, spending some down time between jobs, I was able to get out for lengthy exercise sessions every day. That included typically 3 bicycle rides a week, often up to 30 miles at a through. Alas, that freedom to get out and pound the pavement was severely curtailed with a regular job.

    I still did get out on the weekends to walk and hike, but the bicycles have remained (mostly) parked in the garage. Earlier this spring I did get out a few times, but ouch, the acclimatization of my derrière to the saddle was punishing, so apart from isolated rides, they remained hung up in the garage. (more…)

  • Goodbye to a Friend – Oregon Scientific Thermometer

    Goodbye to a Friend – Oregon Scientific Thermometer

    An old friend, an indoor/outdoor temperature monitoring station, made by Oregon Scientific. I am pretty sure I bought this while I lived in my first Condo in San Jose. An impulse buy on one of my trips to Fry’s Electronics, it has a head unit, and one remote sensor. The remote sensor communicates with the head unit via radio, and it worked quite well. (more…)

  • Tinkering part 2

    Tinkering part 2

    The last installment I mentioned how I branched out in my tinkering, and bought a basic FPGA board to play with. While the major makers (Alterra (now Intel) and Xilinx both have prototype boards, they are typically focused on the high end, and are quite expensive. I bought the Embedded Micro “Mojo” board, a modestly priced unit with a suitably powerful Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA.

    I did get the IDE working, it is a pretty simple Java application, however, it requires a pretty hefty development package from Xilinx, their ISE Design Suite tools. As that is supported only on Windows and Linux, it does force me to keep a functioning Windows system around. Following the instructions was pretty straightforward, and I had to apply for a webPACK license (free) to use the toolchain. Simple, but it was a monstrous download (about 7 gigabytes). (more…)

  • Tinkering – FPGA

    Tinkering – FPGA

    If you have been a long time follower, you might remember a flurry of activity in late 2015 and early 2016 when I was diving into tinkering with an Arduino board. At the time, I was building bits and pieces to make a remote weather station. (that was derailed by an unrelated life change, but I have slowly gotten back into it.)

    The Arduino is interesting as it is a pretty complete SOC, with memory, microcontroller, CPU, and a pretty robust set of digital and analog IO’s. Plenty of cool things you can do with it, and it is really simple to program. Ordinary C code, solid libraries, and third parties make a pretty complete set of sensors and widgets, with libraries to support them. (more…)

  • A decent “Free” PC

    A decent “Free” PC

    My mother inlaw has been in an assisted living community for a couple of years. As part of the move in, my brother inlaw got her this service called “Grandcare” that provides a touchscreen PC with a very customized user interface.

    The first PC that was sent to her room was a pretty large HP Envy 20 AIO touchscreen system. First manufactured in 2012, it has a HD resolution, 20″ touch screen display, and is licensed for Windows 8/8.1 (there is no sticker on it, the OEM code is in the BIOS ROM.) It has a 3.1 GHz Pentium G870 chip, which is a dual core, 4 thread processor with integrated Intel HD graphics. Just fine for this system. (more…)

  • Review: Doc Martin

    Review: Doc Martin

    Doc Martin

    Netflix had been offering me as a “recommended” show to watch a series called “Doc Martin”. I had successfully ignored it for months, when one evening, as I was scrolling (and scrolling and scrolling) looking for anything decent, I saw it roll up again.

    What the hell, I fired it up, expecting it to be like many of their recommendations. However, it quickly sucked me in with the story, and the cinematography.

    Set in the seaside village of Portwenn (actually Port Isaac) in the Cornwall region of England, it is the story of a once masterful surgeon who developed haemophobia (fear of blood), and having given up his senior posting in London, became the GP of the village. (more…)

  • The downside of Public Transportation

    The downside of Public Transportation

    I am lucky. I get to ride public transport to the office. Heck, there is a tax break, so my employer even gives me a pass to ride for free. About a mile from my house to the train station, so I even get a little exercise. What’s not to love about it?

    Well, I will tell you. I seem to share the air in the train with anywhere from 2 to 40 of my peers within the human race. That means that at any one time, somebody is sick on the train.

    And many of them are probably contagious.

    So, every bug that runs wild through the population is likely to come to my nose.

    So far, this year, I have been sick 3 times, twice enough to miss a day or two of work. That is more in 5 months than in the prior 10 years. Ugh. I doubt it is because I have suddenly an impaired immune system. It is just the proximity with disease vectors.

    This last week, I took a combination route twice, starting with the bus, which is about 2 blocks from my house. Turns out that a parcel of school kids gets on at Snell and Blossom Hill, and ride for about 5 stops. That was enough to give me a gnarly head cold. Congestion, sneezy, sore throat. Yep, I am miserable.

    Thanks Obama.

  • Free at last

    Free at last

    In October 2013, I woke up one day to the news that my hosting provider, MediaTemple, had been bought by GoDaddy. That set off a furious search to find a new home for my web properties. I moved all my hosting away within a few days, but I only moved my domains away after they expired.

    Except for two, I just kept getting lazy when the renewal time happened, and at $15 per year (versus $8.92 with my new registrar) it wasn’t a big deal to leave things as they were.

    Until last Friday. I got the notification that both WordsByBarbara and ScriptsByBarbara were coming due for renewal. (more…)