so, posting here on snand has been slow lately, and I’m sure my audience is still arguing about my cleanup of old posts. well, I’ve been on a job hunt because cambria is a shit company with shit management; and so, I’ve been keeping a low profile.
it’s been hard as hell, this has been the most insane couple of months I can recall, at least in terms of of the world situation. I’ve been pretty bored between the job search, the housework and dealing with lots of relatives with health issues. I’m really glad to be going back to work, rejoining society,
anyway, just wanted to update, and hopefully get back to this being my social media replacement.
at the Wayzata basketball game tonight. I volunteered that I had a flashlight on my keychain. they made me throw it away. good fucking policy, next time I’m hiding my deadly weapons.
update- seriously, doesn’t every single person in this arena have a cell phone with a flashlight already?
had a craving for a chimi tonight, Michele found this place. damn tasty, I feel terrible for ordering such a lazy american dish. need to come back for some adventuring!
we purchased a Rinnai tankless water heater last year on the recommendation of a plumber we were working with. I bought one from Lowe’s and he installed it for us, been working great until this last weekend.
error 32, a fault with the output temperature sensor, so I popped it open to see what I could do (easy enough to swap a sensor). unfortunately the unit was full of water (ironically?), and it was immediately obvious which soaking wet sensor was to blame. so, I unplugged, shut it off and pulled the power and gently toweled out all the water. this cured the sensor fault but the next morning I looked and it was once again dripping.
I traced the leak to the core of the unit, where I dared not disassemble anything but since I could tell it was from the unit, not the installation, I tried to open a case with Rinnai.
I’m not a plumber, so they refused to talk to me. they told me that they could only speak with a licensed Rinnai technician and gave me a list of 8 local companies to choose from. Of those 8, I was only get one of them to respond and when they got here all they could do was confirm what I had already found. they were not able to perform any warranty work since they had not installed it so they were not even sure why Rinnai gave me their contact info. Further diagnostics would have been out of pocket and would have cost more than the unit’s initial purchase price.
I must have called 15 more plumbers but none would come out to look. most heard I had a tankless and just ended the call, the ones who said they could work on them all said it would be 100% out of pocket because they didn’t do the install (and most said they wouldn’t have even done the install because Maple Grove water sucks).
so, without any further recourse I got back ahold of Rinnai and they came up with 3 more options. The first had their number disconnected, one would not return my phone calls; but the last one, they saved the f’in day (at least so far).
Blue Yeti Setvices
not only was the dude promptly on-time, he was super friendly, and was able to very quickly get the issue diagnosed, and replacement service arranged for the part. they are being shipped to him and they will get reimbursed by Rinnai. turns out it’s a known issue with a gasket and Rinnai immediately approved the repair.
I can confidently say, in the last 3 days, they have been the single most helpful company I’ve dealt with. I will be calling them from now on when I need plumbing assistance (and I do have some projects coming up). you should too.
snand is exploring meshtastic. end goal here is to integrate it into the Chamboard, no idea how yet but I’ll either get there, or figure out why it’s a terrible idea. either way, super fun tech to play with and cheap; I’m less than 20 bucks into the hobby right now and I have successfully connected to about 30 nodes so far. I highly encourage anyone to pick up something like a Heltec v3 and join me in the fun. no need for a case, you can print one (or I can print one for you), but a battery wouldn’t be a bad idea, I had one of these leftover from another project, worked perfectly and gives me about a day of runtime. so, first run out of the gate for off-grid communication has been a wild success. I might even build some devices for Many Point this year so our whole family can stay in touch even if cell signal sucks.
snand is also working on our backup platform. I previously build a lego housed Raspberry Pi backup server but it fell off the shelf and did what legos do. clearly I needed a better case, but then once I had it put back together, I found that for some reason I put ubuntu on it, which let’s face it, is completly unacceptable. really needs to be debian or raspbian, so I might as well formalize it as a project. let this be the formal introduction to snand’s newest project, theirhouse – named for TheOffice (since all my home infrastructure is Dunder Mifflin themed), warehouse was just too obvious and generic and theirhouse captures the spirit of the project. watch snand and/or the repo for project status, just starting it right now.
I stumbled across a youtube video called “The end of mechanical optics – the game changer.” normally these sort of hyperbolic statements mean I won’t watch it. this time though, introduced me to something I haven’t seen before. WOW! this is really amazing, had a little trouble understanding what it’s all about but some further sluething and I found this:
this is pretty astonishing.
I still don’t know how they are recieving the beam without optics (as shown in the original video) but since they control the emission, they probably have the bare sensor just picking up everything, and then filtering down to the specific wavelength that the beamform non-optic is sending out:
“Basically, you send the light, and you measure when it comes back, and when it comes back, you know exactly where everything is.”
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