I had a long weekend this past weekend.
The intention being to reorganise LPs, cds etc.
As an experiment, in these days of massive increase in gas/electricity I decided to keep gas central heating off and see how much I use solely to warm up hot water in morning. Mission accomplished but bugger me it was nippy in the house.
Return to work today and had meeting with client. Topic of rising fuel costs comes up. I proudly, and to much admiration, explained my sophisticated remote control central heating. All controlled by the app I proffered. It’s even got geo fencing so when I leave home, heating turns off. Clever stuff. Admiring glances what do you use I was asked. I replied.
A little later when I got home I thought I would check the meter reading. Yikes. What’s this? I had used about 10x the gas when I was at work that when home yesterday.
Walked in the front door and met by a wall of heat.
Suspicious.
Pored over my multi faceted micro controllable app.
Then …
I had set the geo fencing to turn ON the heat when I left the house not turn it off.
Been like this as far as I know since inception
Explains why house was always toasty when I came home.
Anyone else with other technological embarrassments?
The timer for my pond pump hates me, I know that much. I just have to go near it and it rubs its pumpy slimy hand and gurgles “let’s be off when he set us to be on again. That’s always fun”.
Timers, yes…it usually takes me several goes to get them properly set up on the lamps in our (probably doomed) attempt to convince burglars we’re at home. And why are they all different? They all work in roughly the same way, yet somewhere in the world there are people engaged in designing them to be the same yet subtly different. (Like showers.)
Now I come to think about it, this is the first time I’ve thought, hmm, smart home, why not? The thought that you could just whip out your phone to set them up is appealing…
Covid must have made all the makers of lamp timers redundant, now that we’re all WFH.
I don’t think you need to be out of the house to use light timers. I hate switching off lights when I go to bed…. only to realise I’ve forgotten something and have to turn them back on again so I’ve set my lights to go off around 20 minutes after I normally go to bed. The landing light goes off a few minutes after that. Generally they come on a while after sunset.
The light at the top of our stairs is one of those funny compact fluorescent things which starts up dim and takes about 10 minutes to reach full brightness. It has lasted over 15 years, though. Perhaps I could train it to switch on before I get up.
At least if I fall down the stairs in near-darkness, it will be nice and bright by the time the Ambulance crew arrive.
Compact fluorescents consume about 5 times the power of LED lamps.
Also LED lamps come on instantly at the correct brightness and colour.
Ditch that compact fluorescent lamp, or just put it in the cupboard as an emergency spare.
It has one of those funny 3-or-4 pin Bayonet fittings, so I’d have to change the ceiling rose dangly bit as well. Can do, but can’t be bovvered.
There are light fitting adapters to be had. I’ve got a couple.
(Jesus. The dull is contagious.)
Those non-standard lamp sockets are a total PITA. The bane of my life when I was doing property maintenance on electrics. There are a few different ones. Trouble is that hardly anywhere else in the world (except us) uses 2-pin bayonet light fittings. Most other countries use ES (screw) fittings.
I doubt, when that lamp eventually fails, that you’ll find a replacement unless you’re prepared to order, wait and pay through the nose. Then you’ll HAVE to change that ceiling rose.
I have a MK pre-wired lamp socket ready for the occasion. If only the ruddy thing would hurry up and die, I’d be able summon the enthusiasm to change it.
It’s only on for about 10 minutes a day. If I thought it was really having much impact on my bills, I’d have done it already. Teaching the teenage Offsprings to turn lights off made much more of an impact.
We have lights on timers permanently, including our much admired outdoor illuminations. The only negative is that one must regularly adjust them according to the lengthening and shortening of the days.
If you connect them with a smart plug then that gets taken care of automatically if you use sunrise and sunset as the base of your timings. The only time I override anything is by voice control… and when we had visitors and someone switched off the landing light in the middle of the evening and I had no idea where the switch was – we’d only been in the new house about a month and had probably only used it once… in the light!
I should look into that. Also those timers produce some sound as they tick along, pretty softly but anyway.
Those plug-in daylight sensors that are used on top of modern lamp posts are worth installing for outside lighting.
Generally the ones built into exterior lights, along with motion sensors, are pretty crappy and don’t last very long. Plus they are fiddly to set up.
I have to say, Alexa may be evil but she sure beats setting up 6 clockwork timers before going away for 10 days.
I was about to post the same. Any smart bulb/plug/smart anything else worth it’s salt can have a time scheduled as well and you can group stuff so saying ‘Alexa Goodnight’ can turn of all the lights in our house. Particularly useful with Christmas lights.
Modern life – it’s brilliant.
Yep.
One little thing I built into our Alexa routines that has turned out quite nice: the garden lights come on at sunset, but only on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s my house’s way of letting me know I can crack open a botte, and I’ve come to rather love it.
As for the fairy lights at Christmas – again they’re just on a smart plug. Alexa switches them on an hour before sunset, and off again about 10ish.
And yes, she’s probably listening to me and letting Bezos know reams of terrifying data about my tedious life, but hey, when has trusting huge amounts of deeply private information to a faceless and omnipresent corporation ever gone wrong?
Don’t worry, Alexa’s circuits have already fried, having discovered how dull my life is.
“Alexa, explain audio bitrates to my family.”
“Not again, Steve.”
Steve would start arguing with the explanation.
“Well, in point of fact….”
“Not again, Robert.”
I just find talking to an inanimate object like it’s a person in the corner of the room utterly wanky.* I can switch lights on and off.
* No judgement implied. One man’s wanky is another man’s cool tech.
Cool Jerk, as it were
It’s ok. I feel worse waggling my foot under the rear bumper to open the car boot.
My dislike of technology is balanced by the pleasure of staying indoors for a week, with the lights off, with a baseball bat and a zombie mask, waiting for burgulars. For the hell of it.
Burgulars? These people are criminules!
PS. Nice togs…
Mrs. Cutout (to husband, while twitching the net curtain aside in the front room): Oh look, the Simpkins are still at home – the lights are on on their upstairs landing, I thought they’d gone to France for the week.
Mr. Cutout (to wife, without looking up): Yes, dear. I saw them driving away the day before yesterday with the car stacked full of kids, dogs and baggage. They must have come home early in the middle of the night.
Mrs. Cutout (to husband, still looking out the window): Oooh, the upstairs lights have just gone off. Oh, but look, the kitchen light has just come on, I can see it shining through the blind. Nice to know they are safely home again. Whose is that rusty Transit van on their drive, I wonder?
Mr. Cutout (to wife, while absent-mindedly turning page of newspaper): No idea, love. (yawns)…
Mrs. Cutout (to husband, while returning to armchair) Oooh, look at the time, let’s watch that nice Repair Shop.
(fade)
^ It’s only a matter of time before Stephen King pinches this.
A rusty Transit?
Much more room in a Mercedes Sprinter when you’re looting people’s homes. People have so much -stuff- these days.
“Alexa, tell me where they’ve left their stash. Because they have – stoners forget everything”
On the other hand..
I was driving along at a decent lick the other night when some (probably under the influence) idiot ran out in front of me and, to my own amazement I was able to stop dead with inches to spare. People having close scrapes often bless themselves or salute lady luck, but it has been my habit for some time to do my “praying” to those everyday heroes who give us things like ABS, seat belts, regenerative braking and crumple zones. Thanks to them, he’s unhurt, my motor is undamaged and I didn’t bonk my head off the windscreen.
And, per Massive Attack’s (granted, wrong on both counts) “Invented by Marconi, perfected by Sony” line, it’s not just the headline innovators who deserve the credit, but the army of everyday dudes who come along afterwards, making tyres or brakes just a little bit better all the time. As much as I congratulate myself on my speedy reaction, that wasn’t the deciding factor in keeping Mr Moron out of hospital or worse..
In one of my School outreach presentations – really, I am very dull, they need to find someone younger and more sexy – I show a picture of an iPhone (first-gen).
“Who recognises this?” – all the hands go up.
Next slide is a picture of Jonathan Ive. “Who recognises him?” – a few hands go up.
Third slide is a picture of my pal, ex-colleague and Apple hardware architect, the man who designed the iPhone electronics.
“Who recognises him?” – my hand goes up. And mine alone.
We should all be knighted by now.
Excellent!
Physics at Work (an outreach thing held at the university Cavendish Labs to encourage Physics GCSE students to take A-level) is back this September, after a 2-year break.
My first task: find 12 presenters younger and sexier than me. Shouldn’t be too hard.
Jonathan Ive went to the High School my youngest daughter goes to. (So did Dave Gorman – apropos of nothing
My view is that there is far too much light pollution. Do outdoor lights really deter burglars, or just make it easier for them to see what they are doing?
My opposite neighbour’s alarm went off at 3am when they were away on holiday. I rang the local rozzers: “Sorry, we don’t attend domestic burglaries. The alarm should be programmed to stop after 15 minutes”.
My ex-Met Protection Squad neighbour jumped over their fence. I went back to bed and stuck my fingers in my ears.
I suppose with so many Ring door bells, a bit of light might help get a better mugshot of the Perp.
“Sorry, we don’t attend domestic burglaries. ” Well, that’s quite a crime deterrent, isn’t it?
“Also, if you get assaulted, don’t bother us. We’re too busy sniggering at corpses and exchanging rape jokes. Keep paying your taxes, we like that”
Yes, this reminds me of one of my early attempts at deterring wild boar. Before I installed my electric fence I figured – naively – that a sudden burst of a motion sensor floodlight would keep those hooligans away. The truth was they seemed to find my newly installed light extremely helpful in guiding them to the juiciest roots, and the powerful beam would come on at all times of the night, wake us up, and then proceed to drain the batteries on our solar system. It wasn’t long before I was disconnecting the light.
I have 2 current first world problems.
Firstly, my venerable laptop occasionally (mostly, it seems when actually switched off, then on again), switches off its (recently replaced) wifi card, and I can’t turn it back on without using a dropdown when I click the wifi icon that says “Manual/In 1 hour/in 4 hours/In 1 day”. I can’t work out how to do it manually, so I have to wait an hour, whereupon it will turn on, as if by magic. I now just put it to sleep every night.
Secondly, a propos of nothing except seemingly the recent update of the BBC Sounds app, when I plug my iphone into my Kia to use the BBC Sounds app, my downloads are in the app in (say) A-Z order, and appear in that order in the Carplay interface, but they are *labelled* in Carplay in Z-A order. So I want to play what is labelled as ABBA but get ZZ Top, and vice versa. Or, I play the first item in the list, which is indeed ABBA, but it’s labelled as the GAYLHMs.
Oh Massive, help a poor boy out if you can?
I had a problem with a Bandcamp download (complained about on a thread somewhere here) in that 3 of the tracks unzipped OK after download but could not be persuaded to show up in my Media Monkey library. After a lot of headscratching and a bit of mild headbanging, I discovered that the problem was the really long names of the files in the really long-named folder. Windows would not let me alter (shorten) the filenames until after I had shortened the name of the folder they were in.
Problem now solved and the album is now in my library complete with artwork and playable from there.
Windows does not like more than 256 characters in filename + path of a file.
Our printer started playing up a couple of weeks ago, just before we were going away, and just when we needed boarding passes, covid vaccination certificates, health forms, airport parking codes, hotel details and so on. You’re stuffed these days if you can’t print stuff. Yeah, I know you can have it all on your phone, but I never trust that will work!