COVID cases are still climbing up for Georgia. We’re headed toward the record high for the state we had back in January.
The good news is it seems the shots in January are working.
Narrative: Georgia can be rather humid and the garage feels it even worse because of the water that runs under the door. I put a dehumidifier in the garage which can easily maintain 55% humidity. The problem is that the bucket can get full in two days. The larger units have a pump that can vacate the water, but that would generate too much heat for our small garage. I bought a tiny pump the other day, and I do mean “Tiny” to put in the bottom of the dehumidifier bucket.
I was truly surprised at the amount of water that came out of this tiny pump. (It emptied the bucket in only 90 seconds.) In the end it serves to start a siphon as the water falls toward the driveway. I can run the pump for one minute and that will empty the bucket with the siphon finishing off the remainder. I tried vinyl tubing inside the dehumidifier, but it was too stiff inside the bucket chamber. Silicon tubing was a much better hose since it is considerably more flexible. I switched to vinyl tubing once outside the dehumidifier for durability on the garage floor. There is a small chance that the input to the pump will get clogged with debris, I’ll deal with that if it happens.
Our prescriptions were accidently sent to Pahrump. We’ve got a friend down the street that moved them out of the heat for us.
We’ve got to find, sort and give all the medical expenses to the tax guy on our next trip out to Pahrump. (The scanner will come in handy.) The estate currently owes $3000 in Federal Income taxes.
The cases are up a tic, but they are not very bad. Still the Gwinnett County Schools are mandating masks for teachers and students.
Narrative: Just woke up, checked the news and the COVID report. I posted this morning’s report to yesterday’s blog entry. I spent too much time reading the news, it’s awful these days.
I am updating my two Linux Mint laptops (Champagne and Perl) and it appears that they MUST have IPV6 to update. (That can be problematic on some networks like the one in Nevada that’s IPV4 only.)
I have one laptop that is intermittent and i couldn’t get to boot and the other one is W7. I think I’ll carry both Mint laptops to Vegas.
The cases are up a tic, but they are not very bad. Still the Gwinnett County Schools are mandating masks for teachers and students.
Narrative: Just woke up, checked the news and the COVID report.
Joined the team at the school to learn the new light board. It’s MUCH smaller and the controls are clunky. But hey, they spent 10K on it!
Found the hard drive from the red Netbook, i copied the documents to the NAS using a Pi4. Which mine is late by the way. I ordered one next day on Tuesday and it’s looking like it will arrive after we leave.
This is the spread of the Delta variant in the month of July.
Spent the rest of the day cleaning and trying to mow the lawn before it rained.
We played scrabble before retiring for the evening.
The cases are up a tic, but they are not very bad. Still the Gwinnett County Schools are mandating masks for teachers and students.
Narrative: Just woke up, the plumber is coming today.
This is a water pressure regulator. Our home is below the level at which a proper pressure is applied to the water supply. (Pressure is too high) In fact the pressure is so high it will cause the overpressure on the water heater to vent. (If you are not paying attention.) We added a tank on our water heater many years ago and now the warning is simple, you turn on the faucet and the water sprays onto the countertops.
Digging these things out requires a bit of thought, you can’t just dig it up with a shovel. I dug as deep as I thought I could go with a shovel then used the hose to loosen the dirt around the lines. (Which makes a terrible mess)
I added these blocks to get my boots out of the mud.
All done, and for the record I was correct that the regulator was bad. Like before the plumber put a regulator on the house to check the pressure and it was fine. I tried to convince him that the pressure would rise until the faucets started leaking. His response was that the water heater was expanding and raising the pressure. He recommended replacing the expansion tank. I wasn’t convinced. He asked me to turn on the water heater and he’d watch the pressure, it didn’t change much. He then removed the expansion tank and checked the bladder pressure 55psi! (Perfect) Then scratching his head he went back to check his pressure gauge and it read over 100PSI. TADA! What we both missed was that we could turn off the hot water heater and isolate the expansion tank from the cold water supply. Then any problem with the regulator would be immediately apparent.
I’ve been growing ever more concerned about privacy with the major search engines, Google Chrome browser reporting everything we do and risks from getting malware from visiting a website. (Drive By Malware)
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I slept in a little this morning. Checked my E-Mail while I considered what to do today.
Drilled into my mom’s HP E-Print Printer in Florida to change the name on the HP E-Mail address and test the interface. I successfully printed from here and we’re trying R’s phone to make sure it can print. R’s tablet was able to print. Eventually I want mom to be able to print from her tablet.
We’re going to buy this Printer/Scanner on our next trip out. I want to scan documents before we start sorting / shredding them just in case we need the information later. This printer is also network accessible whether at home or in Las Vegas.
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I slept in a little this morning. Checked my E-Mail and i received a large number of them from Nevada around 1AM in the morning.
Apparently there was a large thunderstorm that flowed through Pahrump early this morning. Some of the lightning triggered the motion sensors of the cameras to varying degrees. A lightning strike is only about 3-6 microseconds, it is a very small amount of time.
All the microSD cards arrived and were inserted into the 7 cameras I am carrying. I intend on having a Raspi Home Automation and a Raspi for remote access in the garage. I’d like to set them where they can dissipate the head, haven’t figured that out yet. I had a thought of setting them in oil that would average out the temperatures and dissipate the heat into the cement floor. I need to get the blower working in the swamp cooler, if not just replace the entire thing. I need a way of circulating the air in the afternoon. The mass of the building delays the heat until about 4 in the afternoon. Then the temp rises pretty steadily even though the outside temperature is cooling off. It would also pretty awesome to have a NODEMCU control the unit remotely.
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I made this rough list of things I want to accomplish, I need to add how much time to allocate to the important ones.
Church service was the first thing I had to accomplish today. It was the most complicated service I’ve ever run with 14 channels being recorded and a few more broadcast. We had one bad cord that took a minute to find and I was a little slow in getting setup today. I thought service went fine and the recording is being checked.
Took a long nap after getting home, I was tired! I used a high quality XLR cables from the old stage wires to the recorder. I am thinking it’s too bulky behind the board to keep them. I bought a 8 ch snake that will be here tomorrow.
Spent a good part of the evening testing our 16 ch digital recorder. The last two inputs are a mystery that I had to solve today!
Narrative: Just woke up and got my coffee, trying to get organized. I made this rough list of things I want to accomplish, I need to add how much time to allocate to the important ones.
I’ve received all the cameras I plan on installing in NV on our next trip out.
I’ve spent the better part of two days updating and configuring these cameras. Originally I was going to have them delivered to us out there. But I just didn’t want to waste two days out there updating and configure them. The going in plan for these cameras is NO centralized Digital Network Recorder (AKA DVR). Each of the cameras will have storage for their own recordings and will forward clips of movement to a Network Attached Storage and my E-Mail.
I need to find a place in their estate to hide the NAS (Network Attached Storage) so that it’s just not sitting on top of a table somewhere.
I found out today that they’ve made a TINY micro SD card that’s 1,000 Gigabytes, which is the same capacity as both the 10Lb Network Attached Storage shown above.
We’ve not heard from the Estate Lawyers, but we are hoping that things are moving forward. We want to address the mail, garbage, Van and Electric company on this trip.
I spent a lot of long hours working out a plan for the 5V power needed for the cameras and NODE MCU uProcessors for the Home Automation. 5V cannot be carried very far and running extension cords across entire rooms is also a significant hazard. These wires will fall apart if tripped over. The power supply is good for voltages up to 24V so very long runs of several hundred feet could easily be accommodated.
By far the greatest contribution to these extended wires is this tiny connector. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it works. The clasp on the wires is pretty tight provided the wire dimensions are within tolerance. (It is A very small tolerance) There’s also not much in the way of polarity markings either. I ended up using the above picture and putting a copy of it in the bags of connectors so I wouldn’t forget it.
Another problem I ran into is the stripe on twin wires like the one above. The stripe looks very much like the side of a capacitor so I guessed incorrectly on the “Standard” polarity marking. Apparently DC wires have the positive wire marked and the negative wire unmarked as shown above. (Although I’ve run into several cases where it wasn’t over the last couple days.)
Another Amazon non standard is this so called POE injector. (Not really) 100Mbits requires two pairs (Normally Orange and Green) and the remaining two pairs Brown and Blue are hard wired to the barrel connectors. I thought they would have paired them but they didn’t. The center pin uses both blue wires and the sleeve uses both brown wires. Still though this would be quite effective to bring 12VDC out to a camera especially considering they are doubling the 24AWG into a ~21AWG power wire. You can tell if the “Bean Counters” got to a product when you open it up and there’s 28AWG power wires that have 7 strands of stiff maybe steel 32AWG wire.
I modified the 2.5mm Barrel connectors to the generic connector I am using on all these small wire projects. Now I can provide virtually any kind of power to the end of a Ethernet connection. The only thing I don’t like about this modification is it involves eight crimp connections, if any one of them fail, the power will fail.
Mock Arnold schwarzenegger all you want to but he’s the guy that stopped manufactures from making 80% efficient chargers that sell for $30USD to save three cents. It was costing Californians millions of dollars in electricity. (MFR doesn’t have to pay that!) Not to mention California doesn’t have enough power for its population. I probably have 30 USB chargers lying around, i think i’ll setup an inverter and measure the efficiency to get rid of the cheap ones.
Narrative: Still working on replacement cameras for Nevada. I really like the Amcrest cameras, but I don’t want to by their DVR if I don’t have too. The cameras come with the option of saving the movie clips to a Networked Drive.
The thing I found out this morning with the D-Link DNS-321 is that they have an underscore in the file path which is not allowed in the camera. Boo!
I dug up an old DVR that I bought waay back in 2018, i didn’t like it then and I still don’t like it. It’s home is in China and updates/cloud/Active X plug-in’s are all from China too. I took the HD out of the unit and disposed of it. There was hardly anything in it, just a box with a HD.
I found a solution after 5 hours playing with these cameras. SD Card will reduce the bandwidth on the network AND I don’t have to buy a NVR! I have two 128GB cards, I’ve ordered 6 more of them.
