Notes From The Cave

I can’t help but feel that the days are numbered for the Great Lakes Invitational hockey tournament with the announcement that the 56th GLI will be showcase at Yost and Munn. Attendance at the games has not been great for several years and the Pistons move to Little Caesar’s arena has made it difficult to schedule games. I hope that I am wrong.

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What made local area and wireless networks happen are industry standards that enable different vendor products to work with each other. The Internet Of Things is nearly the exact opposite, in my home is a case in point. I have Hue lights that require a Hue hub for management and I have a number of sensors and smart switches that use Zigbee that I manage with Samsung’s SmartThings hub.

The SmartThings hub can control the Hue lights, but the Hue hub only knows Hue products. I started first with the Hue lights and the hub, but if I had could have seen in the future I might have just bought the SmartThings hub. On the other hand, one big thing I get with the Hue hub is the use of a catalog of scenes that combine different colors to make for some pretty nice lighting in our basement.

I recently bought two cheaper Sylvania color smartlights when recent heavy rains suggested it might be nice to have a color smartlight in our living room, right now we have a non-color Hue light in the living room. We have a moisture sensor in the sump pump pit that works with the SmartThings hub and an automation in SmartThings that turns on all of the lights when moisture is detected. The automation sets the color lights to purple (homage to Prince) but obviously cannot do that with non-color lights. It happened the automation was recently triggered during the evening when the living room light might normally come on so I realize it just turning on might not be enough notification. Thus the idea to buy a color light, thus the purpose of the Sylvania light because the Hue light costs $50.

Before putting the new Sylvania light in the living room I decided to test it in the basement, where I have the color Hue lights, and here exposes the problem. The Hue lights are controlled by the Hue hub that knows nothing about the Sylvania light, this the Sylvania light cannot be part of the any of the Hue scenes. Perhaps I can find a “third party” app that works with SmartThings to replace Hue scenes, but I have not yet done the research.

Better, yet, would be an industry standard for controlling these color lights that would enable me to fully control them, with scenes, from one hub or “smart device.” Of course, this is a known problem and industy leaders appear to be working together to address it by developing a protocol called Matter. Hopefully, there will be a day when all I need is one controlling device, technically right now I have three: Hue hub, SmartThings hub, Amazon Echo, and Google Home.

P.S. I really hope the Matter protocol addresses how smartlights handle resumption of power after a power outage. Hue added the ability to enforce the last known state, if a light was off when the power went off then it is supposed to stay off when power is restored. However, I’ve found that doesn’t work well with multiple successive short power loses. Worse, is the fact that the Sylvania light appears to not have such a setting. When power is restored the light turns on, regardless of its prior state.

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It doesn’t take make to figure out why the Chicago Cubs have faded and out of the running for the playoffs. Team batting average is nearly dead last, ranked 28 of 30 teams. On base percentage is ranked 23, and slug is ranked 19. I am surprised that Cubs pitching is as good as it is, their team ERA of 4.10 is puts them in the top 10, although their WHIP of 1.32 ranks them 18th in the league.

Bottom line is that the Chicago Cubs lineup is not very good. If you are another team looking to pick up a bat to help you make the playoffs, given the stats, beyond Kris Bryant, which other batters would you trade for to help your lineup?

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I managed to undo what I did that prevented me from getting into my servers, which enabled me to successfully move my 1999.io server and River of News to a new virtual machine on Google Cloud Platform.

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I borked the server that has been hosting my instance of nodestorage, which in turn provided the editing for my old 1999.io blog. This blog was the direct predecessor to this site and I was publishing to it from May 2016 to February 2018. Before that, from 2014 to April 2016 I was publishign to this site using Fargo.

Right now I cannot SSH in to the server but I do know that it is running and serving up an old Bitnomi default page. I decided to build a new server to replace it, but won’t be able to move any of the data on the old server if I cannot get in to it.

I had nodestorage configured to publish the content to a S3 bucket, which is serving it directly, so I was not expecting the outage to affect the published site, but it does. When you first access the top navigation bar is delayed in loading. Looking at the page source I see variables that contain URLS back to that old site, one which appears to be defining a chat log socket. Unfortunately, this means to not have this affect on the old blog content I need to keep nodestorage running at the URL provided.

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Just checked the Google Play store to see if I can directly install an app to my smartwatch. I searched for watches faces, selected one, and saw that there is an option under Install to select whether to install on Phone and Watch or Either or. I don’t think I saw that option yesterday.

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Why is it so freakin’ difficult to find what is the most current version of Wear OS? Right now I have Version 2.28 on my Fossil Sport, is that the most current version?

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I’ve seen two articles today reporting that Google has updated the Play Store on Android Smartphones so that it can remotely (directly) install Wear OS apps on the watch. One of my main complaints about Wear OS is that it requires me to install/manage apps directly on the watch, which is too difficult given the small screen. In the beginning Google enabled one to install/manage their watches from the phone and they took that away in favor of a standalone app store on the watch, a move that made no sense to me at the time even if that is something done on the Apple Watch.

So far I have not seen this update appear on my Pixel 4a. While I can see the Wear OS category in the Play Store, it still really is a list of Android smartphone apps that have Wear OS components, meaning if you have to first install the app on the phone and then go in to the Play Store on the watch to install the associated Wear OS app, which is a totally braindead approach!

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I bought an Airthings Wave Mini that is placed in the basement of our home, which is also our home office. It’s currently in day two of a seven day calibration period but I have already seen a trend on air quality affected by the air conditioner.

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BreezoMeter provides location based air quality maps.

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