Easter Sunday usually entails a special service with a bunch of extra music which means I generally try to do some video recordings for our YouTube channel. I’m trickling them out one at a time on our Facebook page, but you can see them all right now if you’re interested. We have some very talented musicians in our church! If you’re into organ music, our organist, Wyatt, is giving a free concert at the church on Friday night at 7:30pm. This concert is part of his organ PhD requirements at UW.
Heat Storm
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, get ready to bare those pasty white legs because a heat storm is coming! Ok a “heat storm” probably isn’t a real thing but it’s a good way to describe what’s going to happen today. Here in the early part of April when high temps are normally in the 50s, we are going to top out somewhere in the 80s! Cliff Mass has a great breakdown of the forecast, but the root of this is because of a huge high pressure ridge just off the coast. It keeps down the cool marine breezes, pulls air from the warmer eastern part of the state and creates downslope warming (air is warmed by compression as it flows down the mountain slopes.)
Get outside and enjoy it! We still have months of 60 degree rainy weather ahead of us before summer really takes hold.
Tulip Fields
One of the big spring attractions in this area is the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. The area up by Mt. Vernon has enormous fields of tulips and tons of people head up there to see them. Thankfully we were able to go up on a weekday morning while Mom and Dad were here to avoid most of the traffic.
It’s hard to pick just a few photos but I’ll try…
Silverdale Dinner
My family moved to Indiana in the early 80s right around the same time that Pastor Hintz arrived at the church we attended. Over the years, our families spent a LOT of time together. Chris now teaches at Christ The King school in Bremerton. Our parents were chatting and realized that we were all going to be here at the same time for Easter so we planed a get together.
It was pretty crazy having all of us (minus a bunch of the other siblings) together in a completely different state! Chris and Nikki made a great dinner and our kids had a good time playing together. The weather was beautiful and it was a great opportunity to catch up on old times and make new memories.
Ecobee3 Thermostat Review
For years I’ve had a thermostat project sitting on the back burner. The key features I wanted to build into it were:
- Ability to set the thermostat from our phones
- Support for remote sensors so the thermostat can use temperatures from around the house
- Logging of all the temperature sensors as well as the runtimes for the furnace, air conditioner and fan.
- Advanced programming capabilities such as: in the summer if it’s hot upstairs but cool downstairs, just run the fan more to circulate the air.
I’ve seen some Arduino-based custom thermostat projects and figured it was doable, but it never bubbled to the top of my list.
Procrastination paid off because now there are some great thermostats on the market and one of them hits almost all of my required features: the ecobee3.
The biggest thing that held me back from installing something like this before was the wiring to our thermostat. All of these new wifi models require a common (“C”) wire which provides power. There are some hacks you can do to make one of the wires perform double duty and the ecobee3 even comes with the kit, but I really wanted it done “correctly.” So when Dad and Mom were visiting last week, I descended into the crawl space while Dad helped from on top and we fished a new line through the walls. We left the old wire bundle in place so I now have 11 wires running to my thermostat (4 in the old bundle plus 7 in the new.) I’ll never need more than 5 but whatever, I’m future proof.
Setup was a breeze and it even told me that I had one wire connected incorrectly. The touchscreen on the thermostat walked me through connecting to the wifi and basic setup. I also connected the remote sensor and placed it upstairs in our bedroom.
I jumped onto the web interface and looked at the myriad of ways that I could customize the scheduling and also added the apps to our phones. (There is a beautiful Windows Phone app available and I’m sure they have Android and iOS too.) It’s so nice to program a thermostat by clicking around in a browser window instead of punching buttons on a little device. The default software has lots of nice features such as “use the upstairs thermometer to control things at night” and “run the fan extra when the difference between the two thermometers is greater than normal”.
Another big reason for buying this specific unit is that it has a nice API. I spent some of my free time in the next few days writing a program to download all of the data from the thermostat and upload it to my SQL Azure database. That database now has information about furnace, air conditioner, and fan runtimes as well as individual sensor temperature and humidity values. It’s all recorded every 5 minutes so I will have tons of data to play with. The API also means that I could theoretically do fancier things like write a program to text message us if we should open the windows in the house or turn the furnace back up when we drive within 15 minutes of the house after being gone.
At $240, it’s a chunk of money to pay for a thermostat but if you’re at all interested in tinkering with this stuff, it’s a great product. I think it will shave some money off our bills too so we’ll recoup some of that cost, but mostly it’s just fun!
Easter Recap
For my entire life, major holidays have always been celebrated at someone else’s house. This Easter was the first time that the big holiday meal happened at our house. What to cook?
I wanted to have a full table but also not stretch myself too thin so the plan was:
- Ham
- Green bean casserole (simple recipe from the back of the French’s onion container)
- Stuffing (simple recipe from the back of the box, baked with celery and onion)
- Gravy (from a packet)
- Mashed potatoes (homemade with garlic, butter, milk and salt)
My plan was to focus on the ham and keep the other stuff simple. Mom gets credit for finding a good ham recipe that used a grill. I liked this because grilling is fun and it kept the oven free. In retrospect, the stuff that went in the oven would have been fine at the same temperature as the ham so I think next time I’d do it there.
It was raining for much of the cooking time and it was a little tricky keeping the grill at the right temp as the rain came and went. It took a little longer than I thought, but eventually the ham made it up to the right temperature and I ran out of basting juice. The result was pretty good, but I think most of the credit there goes to the butcher who sources some great ham. There were plenty of people around to help with the side dishes and everything came together nicely. It was a full house with Don, Nancy, Logan, Megan, Ken, Dad, Mom, Tyla, Elijah and myself.
Oh, and dessert? Homemade rum cake!
How To Buy Wood
My very first “fine woodworking” project was the jewelry box for Tyla. It took me forever to get started because I had no idea how you get the right wood. Up until that point, all of my projects had been made out of pine from Home Depot. All the plans I used were built around those common dimensions (1×4, 2×6, etc.) But the plans for the jewelry box called for some wood that was 1/4″ thick and some other pieces were 1/2″ or 3/4″. What was the best way to deal with that? I had a hard time figuring it out so I thought I’d write a “wood buying 101″ guide. I’m FAR from an expert but I do feel more comfortable buying wood now so I can share what I know.
When you buy hardwoods, you’re not buying the specific size pieces you’re going to use. You’re buying pieces are wider, thicker and longer than anything you’re going to need to cut. Then you have work to do when you get home to mill the wood to the right dimensions.
If you want to do this at home, you’re going to need at least one tool: a thickness planer. In my case, I knew a guy with one and I’d borrows his for projects. (Thanks Tim!) A thickness planer lets you reduce the thickness of your board. You have to do it in small passes but you can turn an entire board into sawdust if you so desire. It’s pretty wasteful to take a 3/4″ board and plane it down to 1/4” but it does work and that’s how I built the jewelry box.
The band saw was a big step up for me. Now I had the ability to saw a wood into halves (or even thirds) and then plane off much less wood to end up with two or three pices that were all thin.
And the third tool that you might consider is a jointer. A jointer helps you make one side completely flat and then make an adjacent side flat and 90 degeres to your first face. This is very important when dealing with very rough lumber.
Once you know what what tools you have to work with, then you are ready for a hardwood dealer. Home Depot isn’t a bad place to start. They sell very clean boards that are already jointed (perfectly 90 degree corners) so all you’d have to do is plane them down to the right thickness. You don’t get a wide variety, but the prices aren’t outrageously high.
To really blow your mind, check out a real hardwood dealer like Crosscut Hardwoods in Seattle. They have dozens of different hardwood spieces in a variety of sizes. You can also buy them in various stages of the milling process.
- S4S will be the easiest to work with. That means “surfaced four sides.” It’s planed and jointed all the way around.
- S3S is planed and jointed on three sides with line “wild” side.
- S2S has been run thorugh a planer leaving you with two flat faces.
There are others but those are the basics. Then you need to decide on the thickness. You’ll see this listed as 4/4, 5/4, 6/4 or something like that. It’s pronounced “four quarter”, “five quarter”, etc and it’s fractions of an inch. So 4/4 is one inch thick. Note that it might not be EXACTLY one inch, especially if you’re buying wood that has been planed for you already.
The final thing you need to know is “board feet.” Prices will be listed per board foot. To calculate how many board feet a board is, multiple the thickness, width and lenght (all in inches) and divide by 144. A 1″ thick board that is 12″ square will be exactly 1 board foot. But don’t worry, you rarely have to do that math in the store. Each board usually has a number written on it in chalk and that is the number of board feet for that specific piece of wood. Multiple that number by the unit price and you’re all set.
You might not have to buy the entire board either. At Crosscut, it’s not uncommon to see 12 or 16′ boards. They will let you buy small pieces of the wood as long as you leave at least 8′ for them to sell. They will also crosscut the boards for you for transport, but all that cutting happens after you have paid your money.
Hopefully this demystifies hardwoods a bit. Happy woodworking!
Internet of Things
You may have heard about the “internet of things”, but what is it? At it’s core, it’s the idea that we can collect a lot of data about various parts of our lives with simple little devices. (IoT also includes the ability for the devices to perform operations, but I’m mostly interested in the data side for this post.) All those datda points may seem insignificant if you look at a single source for a single day, but if you start looking at these data streams over years and combine them with dozens of other data feeds, you can learn some really interesting things.
My main frustration is that all of these different devices are silos of information. I can’t take information from my fitbit and combine it with my GPS data from my phone or data from my spinkler. Why would I? Who knows, but that’s kind of the point. If you can’t get at these data sets, your ability to learn from them is severely limited.
Thankfully a lot of these devices have APIs available. I’ve started writing little programs that pull the data down to my computer and then dump them all into a single database. Right now I have tables that show the weather each day, how long my sprinklers were on, and the weight reported by our WiFi scale. We’re upgrading to a WiFi thermostat soon so I hope to have another table that shows how long our furnace was running. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get per-circuit monitoring and logging for my electrical panel too.
Some day we’ll have a great service that combines all of these things for us, but until then, I’m hoarding the data. It’s a fun data science distraction every now and then.
Toll-Free Times On 405
Last week, WSDOT changed the tolling procedure on 405. The HOT lanes are now open to everyone between 7pm and 5am and on weekends. You don’t need a pass, you don’t need multiple passengers, and you don’t have to pay money. I love this change, but I’m surprised they did it.
If you read the notes from the meeting where they decided this, it’s clear that they have a lot of data available. Some of those charts are incredibly interesting. If you’re a data nerd who travels 405, you’ll love it. But the main problem I have, as I’ve stated before, is that they aren’t optimizing just for maximum throughput on the road. You can see it in their notes. They always talk about how much money each of the options will cost them in lost revenue. The system is in place to generate money and give rich people a fast lane. I’m fundamentally opposed to that. The highway is a shared resource. Let’s maximize throughput. End of story.
So why am I surprised that they created a toll-free time? Because people are going to start realizing that the toll isn’t the part of the system that is important. The important part is having separate lanes with limited entry and exit points, just like a standard express lane setup. There are already calls for WSDOT to experiment with no-toll times during the day instead of just at night, but I can’t imagine them doing that. They’d be giving up a lot of money and that’s a higher priority for them than just improving throughput. Making it free at night and on weekends costs them 3% of their total revenue and removes traffic jams that the HOT system added on the weekends so it’s a nice PR win and actually does improve traffic. Changing the daytime rates would be a much bigger hit to their bottom line.
Instagram
I know Instagram is a very popular service, but if you haven’t signed up, give it a shot. You can see the full list of people I’m following, but to wrap this up, I’ll share a couple of my favorites: