Updates, stories, HQ, blabber, plans, and more

I'm a big fan of the open rambling clips...

James Holmes

Speaking of techmoan, have y'all entertained the thought of doing a collaboration video?

Joey Kendrick

You're not doofy. Hush, you.

lohphat

Woo! Home automation for the win! I hope your SmartThings experience improves, I haven't used it myself but I'm super into home automation and want to see it succeed and get better. If you ever want to chat about it or bounce ideas around, I'm here. (I'm so obsessed I've rolled my own HA system for my house.... lol)

Aaron the Tinkerer

It's not that it can't, I've intentionally blocked it.

Technology Connections

my chromebook has Youtube built into it. Mine's an old HP. I'm surprised to hear that yours can't get to that website.

Howie Walters

I would not be surprised, sprints coverage is... unimpressive. I got lucky that I sprints long range band just barely reaches.

Jeffrey

I might be but as far as I'm aware there is absolutely no Sprint coverage in the area. My brother's first iPhone was with Sprint and when we were out there he had no service at all. Didn't get any until we were in the closest big town about 12-15 miles away. Granted that was some years ago, but I don't think it's improved. The only known good carriers out there are AT&T and Verizon, and since HQ is on the West end of the development, AT&T is better. I'll keep my ears open, though. Maybe I can get a burner phone or something to test Sprint reception. But I'm honestly quite doubtful that it will have improved

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Hey, maybe too late to the game, but something to look over. The option that I found that works for me to get unlimited hotspot data is the calyx institute. It is a bit janky looking, but the essentials are that “it’s a nonprofit, who, for donating members, gives their members a WiFi hotspot on sprint network with unlimited data” I have been using it for just coming up on a year, and have been extremely happy. If you are interested and have further questions feel free to ask, if not, i totally understand. Basically, yearly fee of about 500 dollars, fully unlimited data (I think me and my co-workers have used about 8 tb since last December) that is either just lte, or spark for an additional fee. More info: <a href="https://www.calyxinstitute.org" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.calyxinstitute.org</a>

Jeffrey

It's brand new--installed prior to the sale. It's not making much mechanical noise at all, it's just the suction sound. The fan is mounted outside, so the motor is not even audible from the basement. I don't anticipate it being an issue especially with a closet being installed around it, but unfortunately it is in the room where filming will be done. Time will tell.

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Am a sophomore in the infernal hell otherwise known as "high school". I'll probably have to go for community college or something along the lines of your route, for a few reasons. My financial situation is pretty poor (but not poverty poor) and I don't even have health insurance or healthcare at the moment, so going to a full college experience is most likely out of the question for me. I have a two older brothers who poorly managed their college and it ended up costing my parents a lot, which really put a dent in my future education prospects. Thankfully I've got some stuff going for me, and at the moment I have a small cash flow related to map development for games, so perhaps that could possibly appeal to any higher education establishments.

Hey! Heard you mention the Radon pipe and my ears perked. That is my bread and butter. Whenabouts was the system installed, as it may be a bit out of date and I cannot begin to describe my frustrations with the lack of inspections on them if they are older. If it is new, however. And making a lot of noise that is _not_ a good thing. How loud are we talking here? ALSO, shutting it off repeatedly can cause early failure of the fan motor, that switch outside is really intended for whatever local company is honoring the warranty to come out and change the fan if need-be. Been doing this for well over a decade now and am always interested when people I follow online mention radon mitigation in any regard, hah.

Brad Sparks

Well I'm very glad to have you along! So it sounds like you're a sophomore? I wasn't thinking much about college stuff at that time, but I would strongly suggest looking into your community college and the scholarships and programs they may offer. College of DuPage is admittedly one of the better community colleges out there so your local CC might not be what you're looking for, but I'd give it a shot. At the very least you should go to a college fair there. One thing that's getting more popular is for community colleges to partner with four-year institutions to provide a Bachelor's program at a heavily discounted rate. That's precisely what I did / am doing, and although I'm not super happy with how certain things went, I think I'm much better off for going that route, particularly on the financial side of things. That is, if you're in the US and are planning on going to college. It's not for everyone, and indeed I almost dropped out. But more on that later...

Technology Connections

In this case, I'm not sure it's a minimum load thing. One of the switches now has 52 watts of LED on it, and I would think this to be enough. My guess is that it's electrical noise coming from the outside lights backfeeding into the incandescent dimmers, and combined with the reactive nature of the load from the LED's they themselves are trying to dim, it just sorta goes crazy. With an incandescent on the circuit, there is at least one purely resistive load which could smooth out those spikes. In any case, I added the same smart dimmer to the living room and dining room track lights and that fixed it. I kinda wanted those to be smart enabled anyway since they are most visible from outside the house and would be good to set some timer routines on. Now I just need to decide if it's worth buying more smart switches or if I should experiment with standard dimmers. I haven't even looked into what's available in the non-smart-switch market.

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I've read about flickering dimmers before, and from what I understand it's to do with minimum load. Some dimmers (and this I think is especially true of IoT dimmers) require a minimum load to operate correctly. You inserting an incandescent bulb in the same circuit that it's controlling and the problem going away is adding to the load that the dimmer is having to dim, and thus eradicating the problem. Some dimmers have the ability to trim the min/max dim levels which can help remove this problem without the need for a standard bulb in the circuit, but depending on the dimmer's minimum load requirements, it might end up being quite high (above your ~40% dim, which can be unacceptable). One of my dimmers does the exact same thing, but I trimmed the flickering out and the lowest dim level is still acceptable to me. YMMV. Good reading here about this: <a href="https://www.lightbulbs-direct.com/article/dimming-guide/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.lightbulbs-direct.com/article/dimming-guide/</a>

You definitely have at least one pre-college aged patron, if you were wondering. I became one of your patrons at 15 and I'm 16 now.

If you need general advice on Comms/data cabling and related wiring more than happy to help, as it is my day job, I’m qualified communications and security system installer

Paul Fisher

Is it plausible to, eg, take a residents petition to ComCast with a list of N people who would sign up if they built 12 miles of fibre? The business case for that sort of thing is hard to justify on “might sign up” but potentially easier if a bunch of people agree up front. At least here that’s, eg, the only way that large apartment complexes get wired with some new provider. And I’d guess the same thing could work for more remote areas. Maybe a thought if you move out there as a home in the end? Ewen

Ewen McNeill

Yep, slow Internet is pretty much a fact of life out there. There are workarounds, though. I've been doing speed tests at local places with public WiFi and there are some with decent speeds. I haven't checked the local library which might be quite fast for uploads. But even still, the AT&amp;T device works well enough. And if I can get a link established between HQ and my folks' house, then it would pretty much be used for uploads only and I could surely drop to the 50 gig tier. The frustrating thing is that Comcast is tantalizingly close to HQ (less than 10 miles away) but seems to have no plans to expand into the development. I think they're being rather foolish as I know (now that I've investigated further) that Frontier has 200 customers in the area with Internet access and they're capped at 12 meg, with most people getting 6 (seems they have a single Gigabit connection and don't want to install another). If Comcast would put in some cable lines they'd immediately get 200+ customers (Frontier is universally hated, probably even more than Comcast) and at $100/month, I'd think they could get their investment back within a few years. I'm sure people would like cable TV, too, as right now the only option is satellite. So maybe someday things will get better, but I'm personally thinking that Frontier sees the writing on the wall and doesn't want to bother making infrastructure improvements if 5G is around the corner. The question is, how soon will that be? And if it's too soon, Comcast is likely thinking the same thing.

Technology Connections

These videos reveal all: <a href="https://youtu.be/G_IpzlD1vu0" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/G_IpzlD1vu0</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/VRo0ACA67Eo" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/VRo0ACA67Eo</a>

toasterking

That makes a ton of sense, and I was probably being a little judgy about assuming there was a mistake made. But, I will add that it makes little sense to me to have wired them as phone jacks given their placement. Of the 6 total jacks, 4 of them would make no sense at all for a phone, and the remaining 2 would both be fairly awkward. But what can I say. I can't get in the mind of the builders (though I really, really want to!)

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Thanks for the update. I’m a wee bit alarmed at the idea of 12Mbps down / 1 Mbps up Internet still being a thing. Let alone 4G being better than a wired option. But I’m glad you’ve found a suitable home gateway to have Internet access for the whole house via 4G. As someone else said I think you just got lucky with Cat 5E being used for phones. It’s pretty cheap cable (in bulk) these days so often used for short phone runs (apparently it’s not ideal for long phone runs due to not being designed for audio frequencies, but over say 30 feet the loss isn’t really noticeable for audio). Glad to hear you figured out a way to hide the radon pipe too — a cupboard sounds good if it doesn’t block video sight lines. Ewen

Ewen McNeill

As to the why--I plan to make it pretty much the production facility for the channel. It was built as a vacation home for its original owner, but was never lived in due to the untimely death of her husband. Since 2013 or 2014 it's been vacant and in a semi-unfinished state. It just happened to appear on the market around the time I was looking to make a move on this idea. I'm familiar with the area and it's one I very much like, and since it isn't really finished, it was affordable. To condense a long story, I will probably move there within a year or so but need to finalize some things. It costs about the same monthly as a very small office space locally, so I am currently (and will continue to) treat it as an office space, and my dad and I will be constructing a studio in the basement. Until and unless that decision is finalized, the house is staying unfinished and unfurnished. If I make it my full-time residence, I'll simply bring my stuff there. There are a lot of options with many pros and cons (some personal, regarding lifestyle considerations) so nothing's written in stone.

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I'm rather late to the game, so why do you call what sounds like a weekend/vacation house "Headquarters"? Anyway, it was nice to hear what else you're up to, and knowing that you're working and in school while also managing to produce content makes you even cooler. (Not that I'm an authority on that sort of thing.) As for social media, in 2009 I decided to finally try Facebook and then gave up within a month; Twitter was okay until they started messing with what showed up in my feed, so that's gone. It seems that everything that isn't Facebook is either trying to be Facebook or being bought (and then destroyed) by Facebook. Forums for particular interestes seem to work best for me. Thanks again.

Have to vehemently disagree with you there. For example, the outside lights--there is no timer switch on the market that will A) allow you to set dimming levels B) auto adjust for sunrise/sunset C) allow you to monitor it's status and adjust it remotely AND D) also run with other triggers such as motion sensors or mobile presence detectors. And a Z-wave dimmer is $30. Yes, SmartThings is being annoying as hell for some things, but Z-wave isn't the problem. I could have chosen another service/hub but I already use SmartThings at home and understand how to use it. As I see it, I spend $60 for the hub and $30 for the switch, and I've got more precise control than I could ever get with a dedicated device. Are there drawbacks? Sure, but the switch will always function as a standard dimmer during internet outages and since it's Z-wave it's not tied to SmartThings. Still, overall I've had almost no issues with SmartThings. In fact, the only real pain has been the fractured app situation which I only just discovered, but this isn't affecting how it works in the slightest. Routines are still functioning perfectly.

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Other note: Basically CAT5e cable is what most electricians / contractors that do telecom / data wiring stock. The reason is, it's not more expensive than CAT3 or such, but it's usable for both voice and data 99% of cases. That's why the house has CAT5e wiring. :)

I mean, your first mistake was buying 'smart' products. They almost never work as intended. And require Internet (at least periodically) to function. Let's be clear: Nothing about 'smart' devices would be complicated if they didn't want to datamine everything down to when you turn on your lights for profit. But they do... so everything IoT sucks these days. Also they outsource like all programming to India and they don't test before releasing anything.

Woah, is that a screen behind your shelves? How big is it?

Tedd

I forgot to add! The T-shirt I'm wearing isn't one that you can buy. If anyone knows the circumstances which would present someone with this particular T-shirt, I'll be really impressed!

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