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I'm feeling the effects of getting older. I spent most of new year's day talking about electronic radiator valves with my dad  He's been looking into switching all of their radiators to electronic valves, since they have 25 radiators and it would be super convenient to be able to regulate all of them from a PC, rather than slogging around and twisting all of them when they go on vacation. Plus, they won't have to come home to a cold-rear end house when they get back again. They also have a couple of rooms they only use once or twice a week, like the band's music room, so most of the week there's no reason to keep a comfortable temperature there. So as sort of a pilot project, I'm installing electronic valves on the 2 radiators in my apartment, to see how well it works. I found a kit with two valves, two window sensors and a control module, which was perfect for my needs. Unfortunately one of the valves was faulty and I'm waiting for the replacement. But even with just the radiator in my living room under electronic control, the radiator is cooler than before for the same comfortable room temperature. I have no idea how that even works, but I'll take any heating savings I can, last winter was brutal for heating costs. The system also reduces the temperature slightly at night and when I'm at work. That'll probably give another 5-10% savings. I'm getting older and more responsible. It feels weird. And of course there's an app for it.  It's like that Nest thing, but for civilized countries that use water-based heating instead of air-based heating. I've also learned that heating geeks are even worse than lighting geeks. Seriously, the things some of those dudes hack up with home automation and customized heating profiles. It's worse than PC modding. Unfortunately for my parents, 23 of their 25 radiators use return valve thermostats, and there are apparently no electronic return valve thermostats on the market. So they'll have to retrofit all of them with conventional valves. But when you're looking at saving ~10% on a $8000/year heating bill, it's probably a good idea anyway. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Jan 2, 2015 |
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Jan 2, 2015 13:01
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Tomarse posted:How big is their house to have 25 radiators! I've got 6 and I hate paying for them!... Around 900m², most of it is my dad's business. Offices, workbenches, storage and a garage take up a lot of space. Like I said, last year the heating bill was around ~$8000, and they're very keen to reduce it. The ones I have are branded eQ-3 MAX!, but they're also sold under various other brands such as ELV and Tricklestar, and there are a couple of different ways to control them. Firstly, you can obviously run each valve independently, the full-featured version of the valve can be programmed directly with weekly schedules and take care of itself. The second option is that you can connect multiple valves in a room directly to each other (it's pretty simple to pair them), to window switches and to a wall thermostat. The valves themselves will detect a temperature drop from an open window and shut off for 15 minutes, but it's best to use the window switches. With everything connected like that, the valves share the same schedule and if you turn up the heat manually on one, the others will follow. The option I have is for multiple rooms, which comes with a control box that acts as a gateway to my LAN. You download a small PC/Mac application which starts up a localhost web server on your PC. This allows you to configure everything including setting up individual rooms, assigning devices to those rooms and creating weekly schedules. I don't know why the web server isn't just built into the control box, but at least it's Java-based, so maybe I can get it to run on Linux. It's no big deal though, because you can also access your control box through eQ-3's website from any browser. So for instance, if I was on vacation and had the heating turned down, I could go in and shorten or extend the vacation program. The control box also lets me use slighter cheaper valves, since they don't have to be configurable directly. It runs on 868MHz, so no luck with your 433MHz system unfortunately. It does however seem to have much better range than wifi, which is nice. rscott posted:ketchup in it's modern form is way too sweet and is loving gross as a result American-style ketchup is way too sweet, but proper ketchup is still being made elsewhere. mafoose posted:A little late but I wanted to add that curry ketchup is delicious and I've been putting it on everything! Absolutely 100% agreed. Currywurst is one of the few things the Germans got right.
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Jan 3, 2015 11:35
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ssjonizuka posted:That could certainly be part of it. My tab is the larger one (12"?) There are just some behaviors that irk me. I tend to browse reddit lazily when not on the forums, so the tendency for gifs to be full screen (and then some) is a major annoyance. It also has some memory leaks somewhere - network traffic just gets bogged down and responses are slow if it's been on for a week plus. And the chrome browser seems gimpy at best even on a "high power" tablet like this. I know it's not a full x86/64 architecture, but for it to be so unpolished is a let down. Re: your problem with network traffic getting bogged down, that's not exclusively due to a memory leak, although that is probably a factor as well. The main problem is that the network stack in Android is very bad at handling multiple connections at the same time. If you want to see it really struggle, try running a Bittorrent client. It'll bring everything to a grinding halt. I agree 100% about the gimped browsing experience. I used to have a Transformer Infinity, but I just couldn't stand the limitations. Now I have a Chromebook instead, which is ~1 million times more pleasant for browsing, since it runs actual full-blown Chrome instead of the useless mobile version. meltie posted:Hang on, Low power consumption is a big selling point for ARM architectures, but they're not nearly as flexible when it comes to power management as current x86 designs. This is why you see stuff like big.LITTLE setups and dedicated low-power cores and so on. For instance, my Chromebook has an Nvidia Tegra K1 processor. It's a quad-core 2.3GHz ARM Cortex-A15 chip, but it also has a dedicated "battery saver" low-power core that it can switch to and disable the main four cores in order to conserve power. The main ARM cores can't throttle very well, so they had to add the battery saver core as a workaround. Cat Terrist posted:It's a wank that gives hypercars "green" credentials while being nothing of the sort. The green credentials are what they use to justify still building ridiculous supercars, but the real reason is torque fill. The electric motors work to help initial acceleration where the main engine isn't quite into the powerband yet, and they fill in during gear changes or on sudden acceleration as well. Engines need a little bit of time to react to throttle inputs, but electric power has no such limitation. It gives the P1, 918 and LaFerrari instant throttle response. It's not all bullshit when they mention the green credentials, though. When driven around normally, the P1 supposedly averages 25mpg. That's the same as my 160hp family sedan. If that's not impressive, I don't know what is.
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Jan 4, 2015 21:21
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I stand corrected 
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Jan 4, 2015 22:16
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some texas redneck posted:The manufacturers of the players assume they'll be used with earbuds (which barely use/handle any power at all; we're talking milliwatts) instead of traditional headphones (which have larger speakers, and thus, need more power); they put out power in the milliwatt/millivolt range these days. For comparison, my car stereo puts out 4 volts on the RCA outputs (no idea on wattage, I'd assume it's miniscule, but still) - I bet if I wired a set of modern earbuds up to the RCA outputs, a lot of magic smoke would escape in a hurry. Another reason is that due to EU legislation, "personal media players" sold in the EU must have a soft limit of 85dB using the stock head/earphones. Up to 100dB is allowed, but the device must display a warning which the user has to acknowledge if they want to turn up further than 85dB. Some manufacturers just stick to the 85dB limit because they can't be bothered to implement the warning prompt. All of this probably bleeds over into other markets as well, since most manufacturers are lazy and can't be bothered to make EU-specific firmware versions.
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Jan 5, 2015 16:33
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Two words: White. Christmas. Black Mirror is one of the most intensely hosed up and amazing TV shows ever. some texas redneck posted:Finally got the police report about the identity theft. Scanned it, emailed it to Verizon. Called them about 30 minutes later, the guy I spoke with said someone had opened it, marked the account "not fraud", and closed the file with no comments, which had him sounding like he wanted to track down that person and smack the poo poo out of them.  indeed, that's shady as gently caress.
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Jan 6, 2015 10:25
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Armed, masked gunmen attack the offices of a French satire magazine, killing 12 people and injuring 7: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30710883 They're currently on the run and France is on high alert. The magazine Charlie Hebdo is known for publishing strong biting satire bordering on the obscene, and they were among the publications that published the infamous Muhammed cartoons back in 2006, which they have also republished a number of times since. In 2011 their offices were firebombed, possibly related to these publications.
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Jan 7, 2015 15:01
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mariooncrack posted:Probably your ROM. Are you using the stock kernel that comes with SlimLP or another custom kernel? 1100T here  It's still more than plenty fast enough me, I generally don't play the newest games anyway, although it does struggle a little bit with Grimrock 2 in 1920x1080 at max settings. Then again, that game brings even i7s to their knees somehow. GPU is a Geforce 460, so I might upgrade that at some point. That would let me switch from DVI to displayport, which is a lot more convenient since it carries audio as well. Right now I'm using TOSLINK, which works fine, but I'm all about reducing the mess of cables behind my desk. I could actually buy a totally rockin' rig right now, with all the money I got from the insurance after my motorcycle got stolen. But then again, who really needs an i7 with 32GB RAM and dual/triple 980s?
KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Jan 11, 2015 18:44
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I've spent about $7650 on gas over the last two and a half years of car ownership. Kinda depressing, really.
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Jan 21, 2015 22:43
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kastein posted:I spent about $6300 on gas just getting to/from work in the first 8 months of 2014. I paid $8500 for the car, it feels odd that I've soon spent more on gas than on the car. I'm sure you crossed that particular line a long time ago
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Jan 21, 2015 23:30
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Rhyno posted:I have a 40" tv I bought on Black Friday sitting here and I just realized I have no use for it so I'm returning it. I feel like I've failed at life. No, you're winning at life. There are so many more integrating things you can do than watch TV.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:53
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I missed Goatse Guy's avatar, what was is?
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Jan 26, 2015 12:42
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rscott posted:...1 large onion... Speaking of onions ( ), here is The Onion's guide to winter driving. I think you will find it most accurate.
It's certainly extremely accurate around here on the rare occasions that we do get any snow to speak of.
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Jan 26, 2015 13:23
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InitialDave posted:The album art of Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell with the red-text claim of her being the "Genghis Khunt of AI" Haha holy poo poo, that's something else. I mean, we're pretty much all shitheads here, so somebody must really have taken offense at something completely trivial.
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Jan 26, 2015 13:27
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Pham Nuwen posted:I think I'll be watching this tonight: I've got the Tolkien Edit version that's 4 hours. Maybe I should compare them or something. I'd rather sit through both than sit through all three full-length Hobbit movies again.
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Jan 26, 2015 20:34
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fjelltorsk posted:I will not go quietly into the night Good on ya, man. Kick that cancer's rear end. bolind posted:Just booked a test ride in a Tesla S! Three weeks out, here's to hoping that there's no snow or ice so I can push it a bit. Nothing will prepare you for how fast a properly powerful electric car feels. The smoothness and silence really screws with your perceptions. Also, take the test drive past where I live so I can bum a ride in a totally awesome car of the future.
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Jan 27, 2015 12:55
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some texas redneck posted:I also bring at least 5 copies of my page with references, certifications, etc. I always assume it's going to be a group interview. poo poo, I don't even know if I have papers for all of my certifications etc., or even where the ones I do know about have wandered off to.
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Jan 28, 2015 18:38
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