Tech
Thoughts on Heat Pump Heating
The weather chilled enough that our new Fujitsu 36LMAS heat pump is fully operational transferring outdoor heat into the house (during the cooling season it does the opposite). Our equipment continues to be amazingly quiet, quite unlike the natural gas furnace the heat pump replaced. It’ll be interesting to compare costs with last winter, though heating a house with a fully variable heat pump doesn’t work the same as a single cycle furnace. The heat pump continuously runs but adjusts the pump and fan from heating at full to a trickle of heat to maintain temperatures. So temperatures stay constant, as opposed to a single cycle furnace’s swinging indoor temperatures from chilly to screaming hot (in our case). With the heat pump being so quiet and keeping the house temperature way more even, I’m far more inclined to heat the house more. Which doesn’t bode well for heating costs! But at least there’s no longer a NOx, CO, and CO2 generating machine in the house, right?
So Slate is suddenly increasing their subscription from $59 a year to $119. And I can’t find the cancel button fast enough. Oh wait, it is missing despite the FAQ saying it exists! Poor form, Slate. I’m sure there’s another news org not doing shenanigans to customers.
Used to be ddclient for dynamic DNS updates required
web-skip=’IP Address:’when checking the web for the WAN IP. But uh, seems like that’s been breaking my ddclient updates for a while now. Troubleshooting showed that removing web-skip in ddclient.conf fixes the problem.
There’s a thoughtful post on Fuji X Weekly. After spending several weeks with a X100V, I’m in agreement with the utility and power of Fujifilm Film Simulations. As a hobbyist, it is liberating embracing Fujifilm out-of-camera JPEGs. I barely need the RAW Power app.
I just tried Fastmail’s and 1Password’s Masked email. It’s pretty great especially since it worked with a custom domain on day one!
Because of Safari’s new clearly bad UI changes, I’m not installing the public iOS and MacOS betas. Just listening to people talk about the new UI makes me cringe. I’m super excited about Focus though.
Windows 11 requires UEFI firmware. I use VMWare Fusion 12 Player (free) for Windows 10. Seems only VMWare Fusion 12 Pro can change firmware from BIOS to UEFI. Maybe VMWare will be nice and enable the UEFI option for Windows 11’s reqs. firmware = “efi” works not.
No surprise why I spent today processing raw photos. Cool that Carrot Weather can report on my weather station.
One day at 111°F in my sunny backyard and another at 105°F, and my Logitech Circle View doorbell has not overheated. Its circumstances: 24V 20VA transformer, north facing in the shade all day. I’m quite pleased with it.
My #RaspberryShake detected a M3.9 earthquake in the Bartlett Springs Fault Zone just northwest of Lake Pillsbury in the Mendocino National Forest. I was asleep — happened today at 04:18 PDT. Probably just shook a few rocks loose.
MeteoBridge Email Weather Alerts & FastMail
MeteoBridge reports my weather station data to all sorts of services. To be rid of IFTTT, I finally set MeteoBridge up to send an email if certain weather conditions happen. And FastMail, to my surprise, has a rule Action for notifications! Yeah, definitely don’t need IFTTT anymore.
I just installed this Antelco eZyvalve 4 Zone Valve Box. I’m very pleased so far. We’ll see how durable and long lasting it is. I’ll be connecting drip to it. It’s wired to my Rachio Gen 2 irrigation controller.
Twitter Feeds in the latest NetNewsWire 6 beta are great. The key is to be really choosy.
Facebook/Instagram Harvests Location Metadata Before Stripping for Posts
I always expected this: Facebook/Instagram harvests photo location metadata before removing it for posts. That data is added to the poster’s data profile. Presumably for targeted ads. I presume when micro.blog crossposts photos to Twitter, locations have already been scrubbed by micro.blog?
Took a Potensic D58 drone photo today of the backyard (bottom photo) to compare against January 2020 (top photo). Looking real nice. Fun to have unusual views of the yard.
I’m experimenting with HomeKit Automations converted to Shortcuts. This one, when a Home member arrives, will turn on a welcome light if the Logitech doorbell reads < 200 Lux. Otherwise it’ll flash the living room lamp to indicate an arrival.
Secure ShellFish for iOS is wonderful. Its shortcut functions allowed me to create a Shortcut that shows all journals written “On This Day” from my SSH server. Slick.
Installed Logitech Circle View Doorbell Chime-Kit and Hardware Doorbell Chime
Why did I decide to install the chime-kit and doorbell chime after I installed the Logitech doorbell (and it worked fine)? Netatmo released their doorbell and in their FAQ they wrote this about why a chime is required (Logitech never explained but they require it despite their doorbell seemingly working without one):
The Smart Video Doorbell was specially designed to replace your existing doorbell and, therefore, to work with an existing wired chime. This chime is required in your installation because it creates a charge in the doorbell circuit. When someone presses the doorbell button, a switch closes the doorbell circuit causing electricity to flow through the circuit to activate your chime. Without a chime, when the switch closes the circuit, a short circuit would occur and cause damage to your Smart Video Doorbell.
After reading that, I decided to protect the doorbell investment by spending a little bit more time and $15 to install the chime-kit and hardware chime.
Installing the hardware chime and then the Logitech chime-kit in the garage was easy though I accidentally cut the transformer to doorbell wire; wire nut to the rescue. I did check to see if the doorbell would work with only the chime-kit installed and its switch set to no doorbell – it did. In fact, when I cut power to it, a green LED stayed lit up in the chime-kit above the switch, suggesting it keeps a charge like a hardware doorbell chime. However I don’t know definitively if that chime-kit charge would resolve possible shorting issues on doorbell press. With the chime-kit I can toggle the hardware chime to ring or not via the Home app — I have no idea how Logitech made that work. The chime-kit has a switch for analog chime, digital hardware, no chime, and analog chime.
So far the Logitech doorbell has been great with a perfect view of the front yard and super reliable notifications with videos. Video is pretty sharp and its HDR does work — the shaded porch and bright streetscape are all well exposed. It does well at night with just the almost-bug friendly amber porch light so I’ve disabled the doorbell light to keep light pollution to a minimum. That built-in light does not illuminate far so it is only useful when someone is at the door. So I wish I could set up an automation to turn on the extra light when it detects somebody at the door. I do recommend setting up Activity Zones on an iPad (easier to draw them on a larger video feed vs iPhone) to help minimize notifications. Turns out our street has more vehicle traffic than I realized. I’m very happy I patiently waited for a HomeKit Secure Video doorbell like this. If you think activity zones might limit what the HomeKit home hub detects, it seems as if when there’s motion detected in an activity zone, the HomeKit hub analyzes the entire scene for people, animals and vehicles.
Our data usage for uploads has gone down dramatically now that our Nest Outdoor IQ no longer has Nest Aware and is only useful for on-demand delayed “live” video feeds.
Logitech Chime-Kit at the top and the new hardware chime at the bottom. The included wire splices are nice.
Logitech Circle View Doorbell installed on cement fiber board lap siding, doorbell wire routed through a security door frame and then along the foundation, tucked out of sight between cement foundation and sheathing. I used foam as a spacer behind the straight mount to create space for the wire to come in through the side of the mount. The mounts are made for doorbell wire coming out of a wall, so creative thinking was necessary. Notice how the Logitech logo at the bottom is barely visible. Compare that to a Ring doorbell or the new Netatmo! I love that Logitech decided to not make their logo stand out.
Logitech Circle View Doorbell Initial Thoughts
Got a Logitech Circle View doorbell. I haven’t mounted it yet but I’m already pretty happy with it after setting it up and testing it. It can power up using USB with 2A power. Logitech says it needs a hardware chime but it doesn’t! It indeed has HDR video for dealing with shadows and sun. It looks nice with a very minimal branding logo on it. The HomeKit Secure Video function works well. The night vision light (white rectangle on first photo) is unexpectedly very bright. Its straight mount (second photo) is made to sit flush against an exterior wall with the expectation that doorbell wires are routed through a hole in the wall. Since I don’t have an existing doorbell wire, and will be routing the wire externally, I’ll need to shim a gap behind the mount to pass wires through its side. The real effort will be in disguising the wires and installing the transformer on a new electrical junction box in the garage. I can’t wait to stop paying Google for an Outdoor IQ’s Nest Aware subscription that currently monitors the entrance.
Apple is successfully getting me to put HomePod Minis all over my house. Bought one, liked it for my smaller rooms, so I’m slowly adding more. They all have U1 chips and Thread radios. I hope Apple takes advantage of this new network of devices. So long, Sonos.