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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#361

Post by alexfoo »

chefandy wrote: post #303
alexfoo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1534 was the port used by the license manager (elmd - Elan license manager). The bane of many a Netcool installation until we joyfully ripped it out post IBM acquisition. -Alex (Micromuse 1997 to 2021).

I was wondering what it was. I only worked on Proviso out of Massachusetts so I never even touched anything that was Netcool proper.

I think I was in Lowell for a few weeks helping out on some App Packs when I heard about the acquisition. Working with JFK? and another guy with a short nickname that escapes me right now. Wedge?

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#362

Post by sampo »

stdbrouw wrote: post #222
jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Your experience also points to the limits of monitoring and subsequent behavioral change, though. I mean, yeah, it might prompt you to start your washing machine a bit earlier or a bit later to align with high production by your solar panels... but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you go…

> I think the jury is still out whether it'll actually lead to significant energy savings.

In Finland you can get an electricity contract that follows the hourly spot prices. Usually the hourly prices varies in the range from 5c to 20c/kWh, but sometimes it jumps up to 40c, even 80c/kWh. The record was 2€/kWh for a couple hours in one day.

Current hourly prices for today and tomorrow:

https://oomi.fi/en/electricity/electricity-contracts/active/...

People who have chosen this kind of contract, usually reduce their consumption during the ridiculously expensive hours, which usually occur when there happens both low wind energy production, and simultaneously some power plant being offline for maintenance.

You can also get a contract with a fixed price, if you want.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#363

Post by wkat4242 »

hales wrote: post #127
wkat4242 wrote: post #68

> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon and installed it the next day. Ummm. 3A is 720W. If that tiny box dissipated that much, the entire closet full of them would be a literal oven. Besides there's not much point in an energy meter using that much power. It defeats the purpose. It's like testing matches :P it'll be 10W at most. Even peak inrush current would be nowhere near that high. 1A fuse wo…

Depends on the fuse time rating and the inrush current for the power supply (which can sometimes be more than 10A). Some 1A fuses might occasionally blow when you turn the unit on.

Hm yreah but if it's 10A it will be really short like < 100ms. A physical melt fuse should have no issues with that. Most general-purpose fuses are really slow.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#364

Post by mnw21cam »

ncann wrote: post #59

> TCF seems to be closedly tied to Eclipse ecosystem. The Getting Started guide suggests several plugins for Eclipse as the main way to interact with tcf-agent. I tried installing these plugins on a new version of Eclipse and it is absolutely impossible. There are dependency issues everywhere and when you actually try to install the missing dependencies, Eclipse does not let you because they conflict with some other…

This is also what happens whenever I try to install anything that uses the package managers for python or perl. For some reason, these two always fail with messages about conflicting, non-existent, or failed-to-compile dependencies. I work in bioinformatics - everything is in python or perl. My life is pain.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#365

Post by wkat4242 »

alphabetter wrote: post #239
wkat4242 wrote: post #68

> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon and installed it the next day. Ummm. 3A is 720W. If that tiny box dissipated that much, the entire closet full of them would be a literal oven. Besides there's not much point in an energy meter using that much power. It defeats the purpose. It's like testing matches :P it'll be 10W at most. Even peak inrush current would be nowhere near that high. 1A fuse wo…

The 3A fuse is due to the way the UK wiring system works rather than what is optimal for this device. All appliances in the UK have a fuse where they connect to the building wiring, normally in the plug, but can be in a fixed fuse-holder like this device. Somewhere in the process it was recognized that having lots of different fuse values would be confusing and awkward for users, so these fuses are the same size and…

Oh yeah the UK system.. I lived in Ireland for a long time and it was a bit archaic sometimes.

I like the idea of fuses in every plug, mind you. Because some equipment just can't be trusted. I didn't like the switches in every outlet (even though they're not mandatory, they are very common). And the way the plugs are so huuuge and always fall with the pins up do to the design so they are a foot-piercer.

In Ireland 1A fuses were available though even in the fuse kits in Tesco. With the same size as the others. And the practice doesn't always lead to actual safety, I've seen a lot of tinfoil and paperclips. Yes, really.

But the thing I really thought was the worst was the concept of having only one tap connected to the mains water line in the house, and having all the others fed by a huge dirty water tank in the attic, full of dead insects brewing away in the summer heat (yes even there it can get hot in summer). It seems like an ecological disaster and locals were always warning me to not drink the water from the bathroom or bedrooms taps. It's also a big possible cause of leaks. Here in Spain and in my home country of Holland we just feed all taps onto the mains.

But overall I tend to prefer EU standards rather than BS. The "Schuko" does have a few serious design flaws like the ability to plug it in upside-down so neutral and phase are reversed, but the French have found a solution for that :)

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#366

Post by dmitrygr »

alexambarch wrote: post #116
kelnos wrote: post #53

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sal…

> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well. As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.

Because it be behind an NDA and a paywall and the cost of getting the info was not worth the speedup.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#368

Post by haswell »

tartrate wrote: post #367

I'm curious, how do people record the history of their adventures like this? I assume this doesn't all come from memory. And writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard. Or is it common?

Personally, I tend to create a master note for each project like this I dig into, and dump as much information into it as I can. This helps me keep track of what I’ve looked at and avoid retracing my steps too much, and in the end would be a good basis for a blog post.

I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2nd brain” tools like Obsidian.

One of the most useful habits I ever started is using Obsidian’s daily journal feature to jot things down every day:

- Things I’m working on that day

- How I’m feeling

- Ideas that pop up about projects

- References to useful sites / code snippets / various explorations

It’s one of the few tools I’ve found that lets me dump truly just about everything into it, and by the end of a project, I either have a nice collection of draft paragraphs to clean up in a blog post, or a nice future reference for myself when I want to do something similar in the future. And because of the automatic note-to-note connections that Obsidian builds, the daily journal always links back to the more concrete topic notes I’ve touched that day.

> writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard

It was only hard until I had established the habit. Now I can’t imagine not doing it because of the productivity gains that come with it. I get further on things because everything I do leaves behind a tangible bit of progress (in the form of a note) that I can pick back up later.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#369

Post by CliffStoll »

tartrate wrote: post #367

I'm curious, how do people record the history of their adventures like this? I assume this doesn't all come from memory. And writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard. Or is it common?

  Keeping a logbook is a part of experimental physics.  In grad school, I learned "If you don't write it down, it didn't happen." 

  And a diary is easy and fun - just a sentence or two every day (even on a wall calendar) reminds you of experiences, travels, travails, and the daily whatnot of life.

  Useful?  Sure!  My lab notebook and home diary were prime ingredients in writing m'book, The Cuckoo's Egg.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#370

Post by [deleted] »

haswell wrote: post #368
tartrate wrote: post #367

I'm curious, how do people record the history of their adventures like this? I assume this doesn't all come from memory. And writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard. Or is it common?

Personally, I tend to create a master note for each project like this I dig into, and dump as much information into it as I can. This helps me keep track of what I’ve looked at and avoid retracing my steps too much, and in the end would be a good basis for a blog post. I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2…

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