June 2016

Time to skin the cat

rmiles7721June 29, 2016Android

So a few weeks ago I cracked the screen on my current Nexus 6. Very slightly cracked. Not even enough to both OCD me. Unfortunately the crack spread last week and then I had two cracks. I decided to replace the screen. It’s tedious but not too difficult if you are careful.

Took me a little while to take the phone apart but I was almost finished and separating the digitizer from the LCD when my big old fat fucking cat decided it would be the perfect time to jump up on the counter scattering all my tools and parts. In the process the digitizer managed to get ruined 🙁

So a $12 repair job now turns into a $150 repair job. Ugh. Luckily I’ve got my old AT&T Phone so I’ll use that until I get the new parts in at some point during the next 7 days. Luckily my contract with AT&T isn’t up yet so I have not switched 100% to Project Fi.

It was good practice. Now I just have to hope I can remember how to put all that stuff back together lol.

Vacation!

rmiles7721June 17, 2016Site News

I’ll be out of town for the next three days. Unfortunately the BBS has been getting hammered 24/7 by asian hackers for the last month. Nothing that’s an issue other than bandwidth but it is causing my machine to overheat and shut down every couple of days. If you can’t login, or deliver Fido mail that’s what the problem is and it will be down until Sunday night.

I’ll be doing a preliminary update on using MQTT with Homeseer once I get back in town, as well as hooking up Apple Homekit.

Aeon Labs Aeotec Zwave LED Light Bulb

rmiles7721June 13, 2016Home Automation

Recently I picked up an Aeon Labs Aeotec Z-Wave LED Light Bulb, Gen5 on sale from Amazon just to check out and compare to my Hue bulbs. I like Zwave as it’s generally easier to control from my HS system and I don’t have to kludge it or control from a 3rd party plugin or through IFTTT which means it’s going to be quicker to respond.

The included directions tell you how to pair it to your controller (and remove if you need to) and that’s pretty much it. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not particularly understandable to any normal human being and once I started nodding off I had to stop reading. Anyway, I paired it with HomeSeer pretty quickly and immediately set out to try and control it. All I could get it to do was turn off and on like any other regular light bulb or smart switch. Rather than being smart and looking around the HomeSeer forums I got pissed off and set up a return to Amazon and then ordered two more from the HomeSeer store. As always, their shipping was pretty quick and so I paired to two new ones (I still had #3 sitting on my desk) and got the same results. At that point I figured out I had to be doing something wrong and started researching.

What they don’t tell you… in the box… or on Amazon… or at the HomeSeer store…  is that you have to set warm and cold white OFF in order to be able to change colors. Oh, that’s obvious. Not. Anyway, now that I know that it’s pretty easy but there should be a “dummies Guide to…” or something for the normal dumbasses like myself.

Here's how the lamp shows up on my HomeSeer devices management page. Notice the white's are turned off.
Here’s how the lamp shows up on my HomeSeer devices management page. Notice the whites are turned off.

The light bulbs themselves are comparable to Hue and using Homeseer events I can control them through my Amazon Echo’s in the house.  They, and the Hue bulbs for that matter, can be controlled by telling Alexa to “turn on the…” but unfortunately you can’t change colors that way. Hue of course has their own app and you can use the color wheel. You can control the Hue bulbs as well as these with an RGB picker on the devices page as well. That’s fine for a geek but what about the wife and kids? For that I had to set up a series of events. One for each color. Then I use an IFTTT trigger so all they have to do is say “Alexa, trigger living room blue” or whatever. The downside of that is that I have to manually set up an event for each color I think they might want. Meh. It’s cool but nothing we could live without.

Here’s what one of them looks like…

IMG_20160613_174844

The lighting is nice. They give off enough brightness to see but not so much glare that it interrupts while watching a movie.

There is really only one thing I truly dislike about the bulbs and it makes it almost impossible to use in most of my lamps. It’s the damned size. These things are fucking HUGE.

IMG_20160613_173647

On the left is a standard old light bulb like you would purchase anywhere. On the right is the Aeon Labs bulb. It’s a good inch and a half taller. Length definitely isn’t everything, at least in this case. It just so happens that my two living room lamps have tall thingamajigs that hold my lamp shades on so it worked out perfectly. I don’t have a single other lamp in the house that the third one will fit in. I thought about putting it in my bathroom over the tub and the glass cover wouldn’t fit. Rather than replace lamps in the house I’ll be buying Hue bulbs next time even though I have to work a little harder to include them in my Home Automation network.

DreamScreen TV

rmiles7721June 13, 2016Home Automation

Browsing around Reddit this afternoon I ran across a relatively new product that looks to be pretty neat. It’s called DreamScreen. Basically it’s a series of LEDs that you stick on the back of your TV like you would with a Hue strip. The main difference is that with DreamScreen they include an HDMI splitter. You hook the DreamScreen HDMI controller into it along with your video source (Fire TV, Chromecast, an HDMI cable from your AV receiver, whatever you want) and then run that to your TV. The DreamScreen controller has Bluetooth so you can pair your phone (android or ios) to it and manually control the lights as well as to set it to audio or video mode. It looks like the developers are also working on allowing you to control your Hue lights when it’s in Ambient mode as well.

Since you are running both your source and controller through the splitter, it reacts to the digital content that goes through and judging from the video (and a couple of unboxing videos on Youtube) it reacts fairly quick to changes in lighting on the TV. Here’s a promo video from their web site.

This was a Kickstarter that is over now but you can pre order the LEDs and controller from their web site, linked at the bottom of the post. It’s not terribly expensive, starting at $139 for enough to fit a 32-42″ TV and there are two larger sizes as well. You can also just order replacement or extra LEDs as well. They start at $50 which is comparable to RGB LEDs that you might pick up at Home Depot or Amazon. Yeah, you can get the Milights that are much cheaper but they aren’t specifically made for your TV.

Hoping I can pick up a set after payday, although it might wait a while. Have a roof to replace 🙁 but that’s another story for another day.

Anyway, once I’m finished posting this I’m going to shoot them an email or tweet as I have some questions. It would be nice if there was an api that I could access so as to control them from Homeseer or through MQTT and then back to HS. I haven’t thoroughly looked around their site yet so there very well may be one. At the very least I could always power the LEDs with a Zwave plug for on/off control. I’ll update the post with whatever info that they send me.

DreamScreen

 

 

Wink Hub Updates

rmiles7721June 10, 2016Home Automation

I think I may have posted elsewhere that I have a Wink Connected Home Hub. Apparently they are currently beta testing a Vacation mode subscription that’s going to cost $9.99 a month. What the holy hell?

If the Wink hub weren’t only using half it’s sensors, that only work half the time, on a hub that’s only online half the time….I could see paying $9.99 for a year of service. I pay $30.00 a year or so for the premium myhomeseer service. I don’t really need dynamic dns as I have a subdomain already mapped here but it’s nice with the HStouch android client and I can also set up multiple accounts for everyone’s IFTTT accounts in the house.

The “vacation lights” that Wink is supposedly rolling out? Already part of HomeSeer through events with NO INTERNET CONNECTION needed.

If you are a big Wink user I can see where it might be useful though. Let me know if this is something you might use.

Comments Working Again

rmiles7721June 10, 2016Site News

I mentioned down below (back in March) that I thought the comments were fixed. Apparently not. Someone contacted me about not being able to post a comment a few days ago and I have been troubleshooting it all week. I finally contacted @Livingdot tech support last night and that (like quite a bit of tech support) was half-assed and hit and miss.

Sent and received 20+ emails since last night that went along the lines of:

“such and such is the problem”

“ok, it’s fixed now” and they close the ticket.

I check and it’s not fixed so reopen the ticket and email them back

“no, it’s not fixed”

This went on five or six times and finally I emailed them back and asked if they actually tried to post a comment and then checked to see if it’s there.

What the fuck, do you just assume that whatever little fix you’ve done has corrected everything without bothering to check? What the hell kind of tech support is that. I pay $300 a fucking year for hosting and except for the occasional outage only contact you guys a couple times a year. Most of the time the help I’ve received has been spot on. Maybe the real support folks are on vacation or something.

Anyway, after I woke up this morning I saw they had emailed me again and asked for the steps I was taking and screenshots so I sent them. For a second time. After most of the day has gone by  They emailed me back saying that it’s my plugins and when they disabled all of them the comments worked. Fuck. Most of my plugins are stock. Jetpack, WPsupercache, etc. Couldn’t be bothered to actually tell me which one so I went through one by one and started disabling. It’s the comments module of Jetpack along with WP Super Cache. Both of which I need. That sucks. I have them disabled for now which means the site will be slower.

I feel like it might have something to do with the site being hosted in a subdirectory of my domain and then mapped to that. I’ll do some looking around at the WP site and maybe I can get some answers. If not I may back everything up again and wipe it and do a complete reinstal in the root of my domain. Hate to do that for security reasons but this has been a pain in the ass for the last nine months trying to get everything working properly again.

 

Update — Received an email back from my host.

“Hi,

Thank you for the update.

The issue was not related to subdirectory, its was due to the interference of plugins installed on wordpress site.

Please let me know if you need any further assistance regarding this.”

 

Wow. So the problem with my WordPress install was plugins written for WordPress by the guys who make WordPress. Someone should tell them. Or not.

Fucking tech support morons.

I’ll fix the shit myself. It’ll just take longer.

GoControl Security Essentials – Updated

rmiles7721June 1, 2016Home Automation

So Home Depot has been carrying GoControl Z-Wave “security” kits for a while now. They are compatible with Wink which is why I guess they decided to carry these products as Home Depot sadly decided to back Wink in their Home Automation stuff. I have exactly ONE product linked to my Wink hub only because that’s the ONLY way to control it. Anyway, that’s for a different post and not relevant to this.

Unfortunately the GoControl stuff has been hit and miss for me so far. It’s no wonder some of the Home Depot stores are selling it for half price. I’ve been dealing with this for a couple of months now and trying to get at least a response from their customer service. Hell, any response at all would be nice. I emailed them the first time  on May 18th. No response. Then I tweeted to @NortekControl over on Twitter (Nortek is their parent company) last week. No response. Finally I made a slightly nasty tweet a couple of days ago. Once I went into asshole mode they finally responded with:

“ Hello Richard, please contact customer service directly via this link for email or live chat support: “

At least I’m not being ignore now. That pisses me off more than anything. Bad service happens. Sometimes things are defective. Not a big deal. You fix it and move on but as a company that sells products or provides a service what you don’t do is ignore your fucking customers.

So on to today. I’ve sent them this email using the addresses provided on the support page:

I have attempted to get support for this issue from the GoControl web site and thus far been unsuccesful. Your corporate Twitter account sent me the link to your support page.

Over the past couple months I have purchased one GoControl Z-Wave Home Security Suite – Premium and eight GoControl Z-Wave Home Security Suite – Essential. That’s a total of one Alarm, nine motion sensors and 19 door/window sensors. The alarm and motion sensors are all working well, however, the door/window sensors not so well. Out of the box only ten of the door/window sensors work. That’s almost a 50% fail rate.

The sensors were all bought at Home Depot (two different local locations to me) on fix or six trips. Unfortunately all but a couple of them have been discarded and originally I just chalked it to to buying cheap shit and figuring at least with the motion sensors I still got my money’s worth. After the last purchase I decided to contact GoControl customer service on May 18th and ask for a replacement or refund. At the time I also didn’t realize just how many of these I had purchased. I told them it was seven when in fact it was nine. That request has been ignored and as a matter of fact nobody has even bothered to answer my email at all. It took TWO different messages to @NortekControl on twitter just to get someone to respond to me there and now I’m pissed. This level of customer service is unacceptable and I’ll be sure to buy Aotec for the rest of my doors/windows around the house.
I would like replacements for all nine of the non-functioning door/window sensors as soon as possible.  Please contact me for a mailing address.
Guess we’ll see if I get a response. Even a poor response is better than none at all.
6/9/16 – So I did as @NortekControl (the parent company of GoControl) suggested and contacted their customer service. Three frigging times now. Still no response. While their stuff may be a great deal, almost a steal, I’ll pay extra next time. Buying something cheap that doesn’t work isn’t any kind of a deal. Thanks for nothing.
6/10/16 – I contacted @NortekControl once again last night to make sure they knew how disappointed I was and this time they put me in contact with someone in their tech support department. Apparently for anything z-wave related you are supposed to call rather than email. wtf? Anyway, they are sending me the nine replacements and I have the phone number if there is any other problem. Still doesn’t explain why all of my emails were ignored for over 20 days but they were very pleasant to speak to on the phone and prompt in getting me taken care of. Should these all work, or if they don’t and I’m able to get support, I may rethink my opinion. Should be getting the replacements shipped out toward the end of next week and I’ll update this post at that point.
7/2/16 – STILL waiting for the hardware to be shipped. I emailed them about a week ago (June 22nd) and was told that the person that was going to test them had been out of town and they would check. Haven’t heard a word since I emailed them that last time ten days ago. I’m shocked.