According to the wifi setup (which pretends to be Windows-specific, which caused me to skip it the first time but turns out to be generic) access to the Filtrete thermometer is through the radiothermostat.com servers. Which is where they lost me (again.)
For those who might be wondering why this is such a big deal: I’m renovating a 130+ year old adobe house in New Mexico. Adobe is not the greatest insulator in the world but it holds heat amazingly well for good or ill, and NM has some pretty extreme daily temperature changes. Which works nicely if you use a heat pump to partly track the outdoor temperature with the indoor setpoint. And doesn’t work for shit if you have to access some server somewhere with its own idea of control algorithms from a rural location that doesn’t have great Internet connectivity.
Oh, yeah: and the current thermostat connections are to a point in the house that’s not at all representative of the temperatures in most of the living spaces, so I need to have two remote temperatures control the system. Wiring is not a great idea because you can’t pull wire through adobe and the under-roof space is full of insulation.
Not, I confess, a typical customer from a large well-connected city.
The ISP I use to get Internet access gives me a few Megabytes of web space. I could pay for more if I wanted. I expect most customers, like me, hardly ever use it. It’s there, though, and unwalled.
@jethrick Just to be clear, I’m not greedy, I’m lazy.
Maybe nobody cares enough to hack them. It’s quite possible that the next ten years of the “Internet of Things” (which is a terrible name, by the way, and should not be used), just elicits a big yawn with most people.
There will be some rich early adopters who believe they have to have all these gizmos, but judging by the way young people (and not-so-young) are ditching their cable TV, it may well go not much further than that.
I love new technologies, but I don’t need a FitBit to tell me I’m doing Tai Chi right. Nor do I need a thermostat that connects to Google.
You may like the trick for pulling wires in such spaces. The insulation is unpleasant (don’t ask how I know) so crawling on it is the plan E or F.
Drill a hole into the ceiling. Attach a steel rod to the end of the cable, push it through the hole and the insulation so it peeks into the attic space. Get into the access port of the attic, visually locate the rod that should peek up or lay on the insulation. Use a fishing rod or a broomstick with attached strong (e.g. salvaged from an old hard-drive) magnet, stick it to the steel rod, pull it to you.
Attach a length of string to a steel rod in the other room, do the same. Tie the string to the cable end in the attic space, while comfortably perched in the access port. Pull the string with the cable through the hole. Voila, cable from room to room.
It is advisable to wrap electrical tape over the cable-rod or cable-string joints, so they are nicely smooth and don’t seize on the edges of the holes.
That is a nice trick. Unfortunately, recall that part about “130 years old?” Yeah. There is no uninterrupted space up there, and just getting to the portion above the main house is a belly crawl through blown-in insulation.
But, hey! It’s one for the files. My kids are still in the home-acquisition phase. If I ever live in another house (as distinct from assisted living etc.) it’ll be one I build from the basement up. Conduit and waveguides everywhere.
Ahhh. That makes it yet more complicated. I’d go for wall-mounted cable channels but I am always yelled at that I am not in a factory|datacenter|bunker… so may not be the best one to ask.
Use intumescent materials in the wall-passes, and other tricks, to keep eventual fire from spreading. Cable ducts are a royal bitch in these cases. See the Browns-Ferry fire for a nice fun example of how cables burn. Especially power cables have tendency to overheat, and data cables can do the same even better, due to their lower rating, in case of a power line (mains, or a stray low-voltage but higher-current DC) short to them. And then they overheat the most in the place where the heat losses are the lowest (think a distributed resistor, with constant heat production but variable rate of heat removal along its length).
I really don’t think $HERSELF would appreciate surface-mounted cable runs. We have those and they’ve been declared bad for my sleep. As for the adobe, the only way control runs are going to be anything other than RF or power-line is if we find an easy way to run them under the floors. Not likely (remember: house predates electricity.)
As for fire, well, the (hypothetical) next house is going to be ICF so fires in the walls are going to be difficult to arrange. Besides, the main content for conduit is optical fibre – which is a trick to set afire even when it’s not in a concrete pipe. Electricals get their own channels and subpanels (with GFI) for overcurrent protection.
Yes, I made a mistake saying that. So I think the salient point is the difference between a walled garden and a regular one, regular as in you’re not locked into anyone’s particular implementation.
As I remember Compuserve (never had an account), it grew into a huge mega BBS around the same time as the burgeoning public access to the Internet accomplished the same thing. Compuserve ended up being a walled and lesser version of what you could easily have without them.
That’s what I’m reading into “walled garden” and Compuserve.
The good part on not being able to get a girlfriend is that so many things turn from a potential problem into “so what”. Giving up and accepting defeat oddly liberates. And I can wear whatever I want (pockets!) and lead the cables wherever I want. RS485, here I come!
ICF is good for no in-wall fires (these were a mystery to me, growing in brick-and-mortar style city, until I saw some post-hurricane footage that shown me that the Tom&Jerry cartoons did not joke about the flimsy walls with spaces in between). However you still have the cable conduits passing through the walls, and these are the places for fire-stopping devices.
GFIs are good, but they will protect you only against design-level failure. A wrong wire broken off, an odd short circuit, welded switch contacts, fire caused by something entirely irrelevant and eating the cables (unless you shell out for plenum-rated fire-resistant ones), and you still get a problem…
Random thought: ceiling panels made from low-melting plastic, filled with dry fire suppression agent. When something starts burning underneath, the fusible links on the panel above give way, the panel swings open, the powder spills down on the nascent fire. Would that work?
Todo: find how optical fiber cladding burns.
Edit: Also todo: get the intumescent fire-resistant paint, try its resistance against CO2 laser. The laser cutter beam in the unfocused area between the mirrors has the same ballpark energy density as the US tactical airborne laser at operating distance. Such paints could significantly harden the targets against this weapon.
[quote=“teapot, post:51, topic:36637”]
if boingboing made visitors have to log in to read the posts, as well as making it difficult/impossible to export the posts to read where the user wants then, he may have a point. [/quote]
The disagreement might be a matter of degree, then. The wall around the garden could take many forms, depending on how you pose the challenge. There’s still a wall around the garden, though.
It’s a matter of facts. BoingBoing is not a waled garden. Requiring users to log in to comment does not change that.
You have an IP address that identifies you as the user of that connection at this very minute - Does that make the entire internet a walled garden? No.
You can view BB on any device you like. You can read BB via TOR if you want to anonymise yourself. You can export a pdf of it to view offline or print it for public display if you want. You could repackage BB’s content on your own website as long as it’s not a commercial application, thanks to BB being Creative commons BY-NC http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/
[quote=“jethrick, post:56, topic:36637”]
…one shouldn’t have to create an account to participate in a post thread.[/quote]
Please propose a viable mechanism how to maintain a pseudonymous identity on a blog without registering such identity (and obtaining login credentials for it) by some way, which would maintain said pseudonymity (e.g. not being linked to one’s govt-issued ID) and provide a degree of safety against being used by an unauthorized third party…
May you please share your level of experience with semantic text analysis? If you are aware HOW to achieve such task, please don’t keep it for yourself. If not, please accept that there are classes of problems that are rather hard to solve. Given the scale of the antispam market, the lack of such tools, and the corresponding lack of millionaire developers, can be taken as an indication of the difficulty level of such problems.
Please propose a viable mechanism how to maintain a pseudonymous identity on a blog without registering such identity (and obtaining login credentials for it) by some way, which would maintain said pseudonymity (e.g. not being linked to one’s govt-issued ID) and provide a degree of safety against being used by an unauthorized third party…
Are you serious? Isn’t it as simple as a text input field for “pseudonymous identity”, and a textarea for post/comment content? I mean, yeah, that requires entering the “pseudonymous identity” each post, and of course other (generally sick) people afraid of revealing their “true” identity could confuse things by using the same “pseudonymous identity”. But such is a world wherein people weren’t raised to behave with integrity. I don’t think it’s the responsibiltiy of software developers to solve a problem that only quality parenting can address.
May you please share your level of experience with semantic text analysis? If you are aware HOW to achieve such task, please don’t keep it for yourself. If not, please accept that there are classes of problems that are rather hard to solve. Given the scale of the antispam market, the lack of such tools, and the corresponding lack of millionaire developers, can be taken as an indication of the difficulty level of such problems.
The key word in that assertion being “can”.
Heck, the way teapot was flapping his/her know-everything-about-web-development mouth in these parts, I’d assume even someone of his/her calibre could solve it. But maybe I read too much into his/her self-aggrandizement?
Okay, that was sarcasm, an especially difficult form of textural communication to parse, even for humans.
You got me on the semantic text analysis point. I don’t claim to have a solution. I’m just silly enough to believe that if humans can program a computer to win on Jeopardy, they ought to be able to solve limiting a blog thread to those serious about exchanging ideas and facilitating mutual enlightenment. I mean, even doing it by brute force, an obvious criteria would be rejecting posts that begin with personal insults, examples of which teapot and L_Mariachi1 provided in spades in this thread.
