If you have ever in your life thought that math was even remotely interesting, watch this video and be amazed. I’m not really going to say more than that because I don’t want to ruin the surprise. But if you want to read more, you can start here: Tupper’s self-referential formula.
Open Sprinkler Review
When Tim installed my irrigation system, he was kind enough to throw in a free irrigation clock that he had sitting around. It’s a standard Hunter model (probably $75-100) and it worked great, but every time I looked at it, I thought about how simple the device really was and that I should be able to control it from my computer. Standard industry offerings are hundreds or thousands of dollars with monthly fees. They’re mostly intended for commercial use.
After a little searching, I found opensprinkler.com. Somebody else had the same idea and made such a nice package that he is able to sell it. The basic model is Arduino based but there are Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone versions too. I chose the standard model for $155.
Installation was a snap. I labeled all the wires from the existing clock and transferred them over to the Open Sprinkler unit. I also ran an Ethernet cord from the clock in the corner of my garage up into the network closet. (It is SO convenient having the network closet share a wall with the garage!) I turned the unit on and very quickly was turning the sprinklers on and off from my computer. With a little extra configuration I was able to do it from my phone.
Why? Well yes, it’s a toy, but it also makes it very easy to walk around the yard testing zones or turning them on to blow out the line. Also, last summer I’d wake up to hear the rain and realize that my irrigation was scheduled to run in the morning. To avoid wasting water, I had to turn off the house alarm, go out in the garage, turn the program off, come back in, turn the alarm back on, and go back to bed. Now I can just reach for my phone and adjust it… if I even need to (more on that below.)
Aside form the convenience factor, here are some other features that I love:
- I can completely manage the system from the comfort of my couch instead of standing in the garage.
- Programs can be set to start based on sunrise or sunset. General recommendations for lawn watering are to do it a little bit before the sun comes up to avoid the hot sun burning off the water but also not let give moss a wet, dark place to thrive. This setting makes that super easy.
- By checking the weather online, the system can automatically adjust the programs based on the humidity, temperature and precipitation from the previous days. This either means skipping an entire program or just running it for fewer minutes.
- Programs can be set to run every N days instead of on specific days of the week.
- You can view a log of when each zone was on. This will be nice when I try to track water usage and also to evaluate how well the Open Sprinkler system is performing.
- As the software gets updated and perfected, I can update my unit with the click of a button.
All in all, I highly recommend this product so far. As long as it actually does the job of controlling the irrigation system without ever crashing, I’ll be very happy!
Free OneDrive Storage
OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) has been continually improving their offering and they have a pretty impressive service at this point. I regularly use it whenever I want to share a bunch of files with others, but it’s also great just for storing your documents, photos, etc. I’d put it one step behind a dedicated backup tool like CrashPlan.com but it’s a solid option whether or not you have another backup solution because OneDrive allows you to easily access your files from any computer and it also caches the files locally so you don’t have to be connected to the network to use them.
If you ever use OneDrive or you even think there’s a chance that you might use it in the future, be sure to click this link to receive an extra 100GB free for the next two years. That’s on top of the 15GB free you get just for having an account. Go get yours before this freebie is gone!
Comcast Speed
I do a lot of bandwidth speed tests, and I don’t really know why. I even know that Comcast optimizes for sites like speedtest.net to make sure your report shows you are getting what you paid for (at least on that site.) And yet, I still run the tests.
A while back, I started noticing that I was getting more than the 50Mbps down 10Mbps up that I paid for. In fact, my downstream bandwidth was more than twice that! I figured it was a fluke and it would go back down immediately, but it hasn’t. In fact, I found some news articles saying that Comcast was rolling this out across the country. Yay!
As much as I’m thrilled to be getting about 120/10 service for the same price, there aren’t many occasions where I make use of the extra download speed. I’d rather double my upload speed for doing cloud backups and uploading videos to YouTube, but I’ll take what I can get. The extra speed does come in handy for the video games that I download via Steam or on the Xbox One.
It’s a good thing they did this speed boost because it’s just enough to stay ahead of my Verizon phone. There’s one part of Bellevue where I can get over 90 Mbps down and 10 up on my cell phone. That blows my mind.
P.S. Insert old timer quote here about remembering 9600bps modems.
P.P.S. 123Mbps is about 15 megabytes per second, a CD every 46 seconds, a DVD every 5.3 minutes, or eleven 3.5″ floppy disks per second.
P.P.P.S. This post should be good for a chuckle in the future when everything is so fast we don’t even think about it anymore.
Online TV Queue
One of the longstanding complaints about people who want to get rid of cable is that there isn’t a great way to watch live sports without it. That roadblock is pretty much gone with the announcement of Sling. For $20/month, you get 20 pretty good cable channels and one of them is ESPN. Couple that with an over the air antenna and you can watch a lot of sports. Note there are a couple drawbacks of the Sling service, the biggest of which is that you can’t pause or record most of the channels so it’s live only. And of course, there are many of us for whom a digital antenna just won’t work at all for those local stations.
That being said, I ditched ESPN about a year or so ago and haven’t missed it. We saved $40/month and I think it was well worth it. I’m actually pretty willing to cut the cable TV cord completely, but there’s one thing that has me hooked: I really enjoy having all of my shows in one place. My custom DVR records all the shows I want to watch and I also have it set up to download all of the YouTube channels that I watch. That means pretty much everything I want to watch is available in a single interface and I instantly know when new episodes are available. My cable package is only costing me about $15/month right now and that is well worth the convenience of one stop shopping.
The online TV market has grown incredibly in the last year or two, but it lacks the “one spot for everything” feature. It feels like there is a market for some kind of web service that would look at all the shows you watch, figure out where you watch them, and then give you a big queue showing the unwatched episodes. It’s probably technically difficult given all the various sign in requirements on the different sites and this information probably isn’t readily available. If a couple of the major services could get together to do something like this, it would be a fantastic app. I’m not going to hold my breath though.
Transaction Stats
I’ve been happily using Mint.com to track my finances for the last three and a half years. One feature they offer is the ability to download all of your transactions. I did that, popped it into Excel, and found some interesting stats. Note that these are for 2012-2014.
- Our two most popular merchants are Amazon (544 transactions) and Safeway (521.) Home Depot (238) is next on the list. This means that we are spending money at Amazon or Safeway an average of once every two days. By the way, our favorite butcher is #14 on the list!
- Since one of our grocery stores is #2 on the most popular merchant list, it’s no surprise that the biggest spending category (by count) is groceries with 818. Restaurants (332), home improvement (300) and gas (280) round out the top four.
- What are our most visited restaurants?
Chipotle (31), Dairy Queen (25), Whidbey Coffee (17), Five Guys (14), Red Robin (14), Papa Murphy’s (13), Brown Bag Cafe (11), Fiesta Mexicana (10), Factory Donuts (7), Mod Pizza (7), Qdoba (7), Sushi Zone (7), Cafe Veloce (6), Jimmy John’s (6)
This list is a little bit skewed because sometimes another party will pay and then we’ll give them cash, but it’s a good rough idea of where we like to eat. - One third of the money we spent ran through a credit card. We average around 1.5% cash back so that adds up pretty quickly. I recommend the American Express Blue Cash card and the Amazon Visa for places that don’t take American Express. (This only works if you don’t carry a balance on your credit cards.)
If you don’t have an idea what your spending would look like in a similar study, I encourage you to at least sign up for Mint and let it start tracking your spending. Knowing where your money is going is the first step towards making important decisions that could dramatically affect your life.
P.S. It might sound a bit crazy that we go to the grocery store every two days. It turns out that going there is a great activity with Elijah. He enjoys it and we can either walk or drive because it’s less than a mile down the street. It also gets us out of the house so Tyla can have some quiet time to herself.
New PCs
Our church is using some ancient computers. It was about 5 years past the time when they should have been update so I volunteered for the project. While the details of the project probably aren’t interesting, if you’re in the market for a new computer, you might be interested in what I picked out.
The main office computer is the most heavily used. It runs our financial software and is the hub for just about anyone who needs a computer at church. It’s also going to act as the network file server. For this computer, I chose a Dell XPS 8700 for $699.99 plus tax. The key specs are a Core i7-4790 processor and 8GB of memory. Dell doesn’t ship them with an SSD (that seems insane to me) so I picked up a Samsung 840 256GB SSD for $216. There are cheaper ones out there but these Samsungs are great. The end result is a nice machine for right around $1000 after tax. This would be good if you’re planning some slightly heavier than normal use of a computer and/or you want it to last an extra year or two before it feels old.
The second computer goes in the school and 99% of the time, it’s just acting as a sign in computer. The teachers will also use it for some basic web browsing every once in a while. For this computer I got a Dell Inspiron 3647 for for 399.99 plus tax. This one came with a Core I3-4150 processor and 4 GB of memory. I left the old fashioned 1TB 7200rpm hard drive in there. It will be good enough. And that’s the key for this machine: it is more than capable of doing basic web browsing, Office documents, etc. If that’s all you need, this is an excellent deal. Note that neither price includes a monitor. I’m just reusing what is already there.
They are two very different machines for very different purposes. If you’re in the market and want some advice, I’m always happy to help. The biggest thing I’ll say is that an SSD is the most important piece of equipment you can get in your new computer. I won’t ever buy another computer without one. Unfortunately they aren’t always included when you buy from a place like Dell. I’m sure that will change soon with rapidly plummeting SSD prices, but never fear, you can generally add your own in later. Just make sure you factor that into the price.
I said I wouldn’t go into the details of the new setup, but there’s one key piece you probably already guessed: all of the computers on the property will be running CrashPlan for offsite backup!
Rain
With all the drainage that we installed in the yard this year, I’ve been wondering how much less water ends up in our yard. Subjectively, it seems like it must be a lot because our yard is usable in the winter now as opposed to the mudhole we used to have. But what’s the actual number?
Our house is 2660 square feet and two floors. If we estimate that it’s split evenly between the floors that’s about a 1300 square feet footprint, or 187,200 square inches. If we get one inch of rain, that’s 187,200 cubic inches or 800 gallons. In November, we got more than 10 inches of rain which means that our roof collected more than enough water to fill the pool at my parents house twice! But there’s more! We also installed French drains in the yard to catch water that runs down the hill into our property and to protect the retaining wall. And we also plumbed the sump pump into the yard drainage so the water that does make it into the crawl space (much less than before!) ends up off our property too.
The bottom line is that yes, adding this drainage is moving a huge amount of water off of our property. If we had more room, it would be cool to collect this in a basin and then pump it back out for irrigation, but we just don’t have the room to make that happen.
Computer History
As I rebuilt the server a while ago, I started thinking back to all the computers that I’ve ever own. Here’s my attempt to list them out along with estimated prices. This should be good for a laugh in 20 years. Aside from the first computer, none of these prices include monitors. This list only includes computers that I purchased new, not used ones I bought or was given.
- 1998 – Gateway Pentium 2 350 with a 10GB hard drive and a tape backup.
- I bought this when I was heading off to college. I don’t remember the exact price but it was somewhere between $2000 and $2500 which was pretty much all the money I had left. It lasted me all the way through college though.
- 2002 – Dell P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. $900
- 2006 – Dell Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive. $1200
- This one is still in use 8 years later! It’s running Windows Media Center 24/7. It can record 4 HD video streams and serve them simultaneously to the three XBox360s around the house. One wall of the case is a cardboard beer box, but this thing still runs like a champ.
- 2010 – Core i7 860 2.8GHz quad core with 8 GB RAM. $1000
- This was the first computer that I built on my own. It became my file server and is the machine that had the CPU and motherboard replaced earlier this month.
- 2011 – Lenovo Thinkpad Edge $700
- I can’t find any info about this, but it was the first laptop we bought for Tyla after we got married.
- 2012 – Core i7 3770 3.4GHz quad core with 16GB RAM. $1400
- While I retrofitted the 2006 and 2010 computers with SSDs, this was the first one that started life with an SSD in it.
- 2013 – HP Pavilion Touchsmart 15-b154nr AMD A8-4555M quad core 1.6GHZ and 6 GB of RAM. $550
- Though I had used many laptops from work, this was the first one I ever paid for. We got it for Tyla when her previous laptop died a surprisingly early death.
This last desktop computer from 2012 is still plenty fast and I would be very hard pressed to find any excuse to update it. Maybe once we start seeing 8 core CPUs then I’ll make the jump.
Our current laptop (the HP), on the other hand, has been a pretty big disappointment. It’s my fault for being cheap. I bought the most inexpensive laptop with a touchscreen that I could find and yikes, it’s not great. The biggest flaw is the 5400 rpm hard drive that you can’t replace without tearing apart the entire machine. If I could just put an SSD into it, it would probably be fine, but I’m not very confident that I’d ever get the machine physically back in one piece after installing it. We’re trying to eek out two years with it but hopefully it will be replaced soon and I will not be going cheap.
It’s fun to look back at the performance/price ratio even in just 16 years. Moore’s Law is alive and well!
[UPDATE] Changed Murphy’s to Moore’s. Thanks Jim. Although accidentally typing Murphy’s makes it a true statement as well.
Bad Motherboard
I wrote previously about my two failed hard drives. The story, unfortunately, didn’t end there. A few days later, I started getting some goofy boot up behaviors that pointed to a bad BIOS. It would get stuck at “Loading operating system.” This was a transient thing that I had seen before but now it was consistent. I tried to update the BIOS and that said it succeeded but after that it never got past the logo screen for the motherboard. Oops. I tried pulling the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS but nothing I tried got me past that logo. I decided it was time to replace the motherboard even though it was only four years old.
The CPU was an LGA1156 socket and unfortunately they don’t make motherboards for that anymore. I had to buy a new CPU too. I really didn’t need any additional power in that server box, but I did upgrade a little. Here’s what I got:
- MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate LGA1150 Motherboard $90 after rebate
- Intel Core i5-4590 $179
The swap went pretty quickly and easily with no problems. It booted right up and I didn’t have to reinstall Windows or anything. I did have to reactivate it but a quick phone to a robot call took care of that.
I kind of suspect that the second hard drive failure was more of a motherboard failure than a drive failure. I’ll run some thorough SpinRite tests on it before putting it to use again.
P.S. Happy Birthday Dad!