Author: davehamby

A modern Merlin, hell bent for glory, he shot the works and nothing worked.

Energy Management in the Roaring 20’s

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 26, 2023

Dismal Manor Ecobee 3 Lite setting navigation.

With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and changed utility tariffs, it is attractive for Virginia home owners to install residential photovoltaic generation systems. Most owners are likely electing a roof lease scheme where the solar company owns, maintains, and operates the equipment paying the home owner for use of the roof, net metered power from Dominion, and a receives a piece of the action on the generation in excess of needs. Panel coverage varies from what is needed for local use to the whole roof of east-west roofs.

Solar generation peaks in mid-afternoon and starts to fall off rapidly in the late afternoon and supper hour. Dominion’s residential time of use tariff reflects this fact and the peak that results from migration from work to home. The time of day rate is high peak from 3 PM to 6 PM.

Over night, Dominion is running its most fuel-efficient paid-for units to meet base load demand. Rates are lowest from midnight to 5 AM. During the summer, a day rate is used between base rate and peak rate periods.

So, when should we set our thermostats back? Read on to learn what Dismal Manor does. Implementation is specific to the Ecobee 3 Lite and EcoBee 4 models. What we are talking about here applies to electric power used for heating and cooling.

Personal Computing

Are you satisfied with your backup?

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 21, 2023

You can never have enough backups. There’s an old saying, “One is none, two is one (maybe).” In reality, media goes bad, backups are missed or fail, there’s a ISP fade, etc, etc, etc…

And we’re here in hurricane country. In the US we hide from wind (shelter in place) and run from water (evacuate). At least one on-site backup needs to be easy to take with you.

Recently, a Mastodon discussion aroused my curiosity when authors reminded me that two backup tools I use have some weaknesses. Time Machine, used for local backups can occasionally corrupts its output sparse images. BackBlaze, used for off-site backups, was also known to be subject to ISP fades and other issues.

What’s a poor old duffer to do? Read on …

Greyhounds

Rocky’s Paw Mended

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 12, 2023

Rocky has completed his convalescence but not without some Rocky drama. He started licking his IV patch. And got a nice lick granuloma going extending his sentence in Nurse Wretched’s care. It was looking gamey so Doc prescribed gentamicin topical spray. And keeping tongue and teeth off the inflamed patch. And Rocky’s antibiotics were extended for a second course.

When done with antibiotics, I continued the topical and dressing. Once it had a good sound scab, I discontinued the absorbent pad and vet-wrapped only. The dressing still kept sliding down. Fun. And I started applying cortisone ointment (left-over from my dermatologist). This calmed down the red and Rocky lost interest in licking it. I was able to leave him unmuzzled much of the day making Rocky a much happier camper.

And once the pink was faded, I switched him to O’Keeffe’s Healthy Feet foot cream. This is basically Chapstick for feet. Some moisturizer, some bee’s wax, and other secret ingredients including pH correction to neutral. O’Keeffe’s is good stuff, taming cracked, dry feet, heel cauliflower, and contact callouses. And kept Rocky’s IV patch moist and irritation free. He quickly caught on to earned time unmuzzled and stopped licking. His leg peach fuzz is returning to the patch.

Car talk Driving Electric

Mending the ID.4

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 25, 2023

On April 7, Millennium Falcon, my VW ID.4 AWD Pro-S vehicle was involved in an apparently minor mishap with a Virginia Beach EMS vehicle exiting Independence BLVD to merge onto Northampton Blvd to respond to a call. Two vehicles in front of us in the travel lane slow and stopped blocking both travel lane and exit lane. I slowed to avoid them placing the ID.4 in the path of the EMS vehicle. Both vehicles suffered collision damage but nobody was injured. Just the two vehicles. Millennium Falcon is still being repaired!

Photography

Can an iPhone 11 Shoot Raw?

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 22, 2023

Missy in the Raw, iPhone 11, Halide, and Luminar Neo

Time to replace your iPhone? Lusting after RAW photography? Too cheap to shell out $400 more for RAW capability (and fancier lenses and processing). Well, entrepreneurs have an alternative for you, a replacement camera app that better utilizes your current iPhone’s capabilities. This post will introduce the Lux Halide camera app and review manual exposure concepts.

Greyhounds

Rocky’s Poorly Paw

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 13, 2023

Greyhound rear foot showing a broken little toe and impingement on the adjacent toe. — Broken little toe rubbing middle tow

Rocky came in from the dog garden with a limp one evening. Dismal Wizard looked for foreign objects between the pads of the limping leg and found all clear, no blood, no cuts, no sticks, stones, acorns, or pecans. So next morning when Rocky was still limping, it was time for another look. Oh, and Rocky was licking the affected foot. That needed to stop before further complications developed. So, we tried the obvious, the satellite dish E-collar. The reaction was somewhat violent! It didn’t stay on long enough for a photo. The tabs popped loose and off it came.

Time for plan B, and C, and frantic shopping, and consults with our rescue…

Personal Computing Photography

Taming the Photo Image Catalog Problem

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 22, 2023

The Dismal Retired Moocher has been taking photography since high school and digital photography since the early Oughts. His first camera was Dad’s Argus C3 bought when we moved to Gales Ferry, Connecticut. Dad didn’t use it much so it went to college with DW.

DW’s first digital camera was a Sony point and shoot styled like a range finder camera. It had a built in flash, optical finder, and a bit of a zoom lens. Later, a Panasonic Lumix point and shoot replaced it. Then a series of iPhones and iPads, and Sony mirrorless DSL cameras. And a sequence of photo editing and managing applications, Apple iPhotos, Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Phase One Capture One Sony Edition (retired by Phase One), and most recently Skylum Luminar in its various editions.

So we have a lot of files in a lot of places dating back to the beginning of digital photograph time here at Dismal Manor. It became a mess with multiple copies of everything as Apple struggled with iCloud’s hierarchical file system and the iOS services that used it. And various MacOS updates forced photo product updates as Apple had “better ideas” and migrated from one product to another in a forced photographical death march and DW flirted with various “serious photography tools” like LightRoom and CaptureOne.

This post is about our journey and how it led to some of the workflow I now use and the photographical computing problems that they solve. In particular we look briefly at CYME’s PeakTo product. The more you fiddle with it, the more it amazes

Personal Computing

What’s a NUC

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 8, 2023

11th Generation System76 Meerkat small form factor IA64 computer

NUC is an Intel trademark for its line of IA64 small form factor computers. Intel offers a broad palate of NUCS. Some are designed for general use and others are tailored for various OEM channels. NUC is often used as a workstation device in industrial control systems. These may have specific legacy interfaces for FieldBus, Control Area Network, and VGA for legacy displays mounted in industrial control bench boards.

Dismal Manor has a NUC. We use it as a host for our Roon ROCK music server. An earlier post talked about putting our ROCK together. Here I want to spend a little more time with NUC.

/more

Audio Home automation Personal Computing

Dave Rolls over a ROCK

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 5, 2023

System76 small task-oriented IA64 computers

For many years (2017 or so), Dismal Manor’s Roon Server has run in a virtual machine on a TrueNAS Mini or home-brew storage server. To do this Dave installed a BHYVE virtual machine, added a System76 POP_OS guest, and installed Roon IA64 Linux edition. It worked but TrueNAS had its own agenda. That got old so Dave opened his purse. Read on to learn about the Roon ROCK experience.

Audio Music

ROON Update Planned

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 16, 2023

Roon Website masthead image showing key features of Roon.

Roon had been running badly on the SuperMicro servers. Time to see if we could figure out why and what to do about it. A little tinkering around found that our POP_OS VM was paging out over night and when we resumed play, it would page fault back in. Not the best UX. So, time to come up with a fix.