Buyer Beware

rmiles7721March 8, 2016Reviews

I love coupons and deals. Hey, if I can save a buck or two that’s usually a good thing particularly if I’m in a situation where I can see the goods beforehand. Groupons, not so much. Now, for services they seems to be ok. I’ve purchase meals ahead of time and concert tickets once. Goods however? They are currently 0 for 2 and I’ll just go stick with eBay if I can find a really good price.

A couple of years ago a pretty good deal on a CCTV DVR came across so I picked it up. It’s one of those where you have to supply the hard drive. Not a big deal as I had them in abundance at the time. Anyway, when it arrived it wouldn’t even power up. I had to ship it back and wait for it to get there to get my money back. At least with Amazon if you ship something back they credit the money to your account as soon as they receive the info that the shipping company has it, or that’s been my experience.

Anyhow, right now I really don’t have any extra money but a pretty awesome deal came across for a projector and screen. I read the reviews on the same on over at Amazon as well as a couple of AV forums I lurk at and they were pretty good. It was a great deal considering the screen (most likely a heavy cloth tarp) was included. I went ahead and put it on a credit card. I can always pay it later.

Said projector arrived today all by it’s lonesome. I’ve emailed Groupon waiting for a response but they don’t normally do any kind of swapping out or anything like they. They are really just the middle men in the deal. I figure they will offer a refund and then I need to decide if I want the refund or not. I can get it from Amazon for $20 less without the damn screen and just “borrow” one from they school or something.

Either way, that’ll most likely be the last thing I purchase through Groupon.

Updated 3/9 – Received an email overnight fro Groupon. Apparently most orders ship separately. That’s all the info I received so maybe I’ll get the screen soon.

3/10 – Received another update last night that the screen is definitely shipping and I should receive a tracking update soon. That makes me feel better but maybe they should put something in the receipt that says products may ship separately so assholes like me won’t get their panties in a  wad.

Android Remote Control

rmiles7721March 7, 2016Android

Seems like such a simple thing. I’ve been trying to find an app that would let me remote control my Nexus 6 and my Nexus wall-mounted tablet from my PC. Not as easy as you might thing.

I checked out VNC first simply because I’ve used it before. No go unless you are rooted. Then did some searching on el Goog and looked into Teamviewer and Airdroid. Both work fine for mirroring and Airdroid will let you control if you are hooked to the PC via USB but that’s fucking useless for what I wanted.

Vysor is a pretty good app and I trust the developer as well. I’ve got it installed for later use but again, you have to have the device hooked to the phone.

Desktop Capture showing control of my phone over Wifi.

FINALLY found one with Mobizen. Initially I thought it would be simply screen mirroring with no control but once you’ve given it admin access in the security settings it works just fine.

New Gadget

rmiles7721March 5, 2016Home Automation

So my thermostat crapped out yesterday after 16 years. Luckily it’s the time of year where it’s not a humongous deal. Picked up a Zwave thermostat on sale at Home Depot, which is awesome.

Putting the damned thing in proved to be a trick. Only four wires in the thermostat but the one I got (and most modern thermostats it turns out) require a C wire (common ground.) It won’t power up without that bad boy. I ended up having to get a wire adapter thingy overnighted from Amazon just so I could hook the damn thing up.

It actually wasn’t too difficult fortunately. Got the thermostat wired up and placed on the wall and then had to tackle switching a couple of wires on the control board in the basement. All in all it took maybe 30-40 minutes. Then the fun started.

Somehow my router and homeseer server had turned off in the process which was weird as shit as I didn’t touch the breakers they are on. Once I had everything back online pairing the Honeywell to Homeseer was a cinch. Control from my HA page as you can see from the below pic.

HomeSeer Web Control
A portion of the HA server web page.

Since I’m using Homeseer’s Amazon Alexa api for voice control that seems to be working ok. Still have some work to do on that though. It’s cool but not something I use all the time anyway. What’s nice is that I can set up heating/cooling schedules on my HA server (in addition to the thermostat itself) or just have it completely cut off during nice weather if I want.

WordPress Help Needed…

rmiles7721March 1, 2016BBS

I could really use some help with WP from an “expert”

Currently shadowscope is installed in it’s own subdirectory off of my main site but I have it resolve to shadowscope.com

In order to do that I had to make sure that my .htaccess pointed in the correct direction. Everything seems to work OK. You can get to most of the pages and I can post things. For some reason, ALMOST every time I try to log in to the backend, I have to reset my password. I say almost because for some reason I was actually able to log in this time.

In addition, I can’t seem to connect my site to IFTTT. It used to be, but no longer will let me connect. Same with wordpress.com, I was able to write a post and publish it earlier (the first one of today, about InterBBS games) but it won’t let me save any posts now.

I’m pretty much at a loss and not sure what I need to do to fix it. A simple solution would be to get rid of the .htaccess and make everyone come to shadowscope.com/blog however my site has been up 17 years and I really don’t want to break any existing links in to the site.

Anyone have suggestions please comment, shoot me an email or PM me in Hangouts. I’ve got a ton of stuff on my plate and don’t feel like spending the next two days trying to dig up an answer.

Update.

I fixed it. The WordPress Codex has some good stuff here and I ended up having to fix the blog URL in one of the SQL tables in order to get it working properly. Since my site is under /blog and redirected using the .htaccess it was this bit.

In this event, double-check your wp-options table siteurl (WordPress address URL) and home (Blog Address URL) values to make sure they reference the same base externally available address; i.e., http://blog.yourdomain.com. The standard install may set them to your local (internal) host name, such as http://servername

Once I fixed the site URL all seems to be good.

 

Another Update. I spoke too soon. This is fucking irritating. I can’t connect IFTTT to my site, can log in about once every fifty times or so, wordpress.com loses connection constantly. Ugh. I think I may export all my shit and start over.

Primary Day

rmiles7721March 1, 2016Politics

So today is the primary elections here in Georgia. I had completely forgotten until a friend mentioned it in Hangouts just a little while ago.

Hadn’t planned on leaving the house until later but I guess I will go out pretty shortly. Have to go to the grocery store and get some fixings for a pork roast anyway, which is much more important than going to vote for any of the clowns on the ballot.

That having been said, I will go vote, today as well as in the general election in November. It’s a civic duty and nobody has the right to bitch and protest if they at least don’t cast their vote.

InterBBS Games

rmiles7721March 1, 2016Site News

Planning on adding several InterBBS games to the BBS pretty shortly. Rather than using my mailer and all the extra configuration I’m doing it the easy way and planning on using BBSlink.net as they already have a boatload of games set up and working properly. Planning on adding LORD, LORD 2, Lunatix, DoorMud, and Tradewars. They don’t currently run a BRE league so I may look into adding that the hard way lol in the near future.

Home Control

rmiles7721February 26, 2016Home Automation

Finally finished the move of my home automation software off of my PC on to it’s own server (actually an unused laptop.) For a while I had it running on one of my Raspberry Pi’s but unfortunately with all of the logic and events it really bogged things down. Not only that but not all of the different pieces I use are compatible with Linux (at least not without great effort and workarounds.) That freed up the Pi to be turned into an emulator anyway. I’ll post some pics of that later.

Currently the HA system tracks house occupancy, turns on and off lights based on motion, occupancy (including vacation), time of day, etc. I get emails and pics if there’s motion and the house is unoccupied. Eventually I’ll add streaming video into the mix so that I can check up on things.

I am able, through and Alexa skill, to control everything through the Amazon Echo that I can control through my HA software, even though it’s not one of the “listed or included” systems. I am also running a remote Alexa instance on my PC that gives me voice control from my bedroom as well. Later this week I’ll be adding an unused Kinect in my living room into the mix. The mic’s on the kinect are much better than my pc or the Echo so that will be nice. On my todo list is to write my own skill so that I can just use a local server and not worry about having to parse everything through Amazon.

Slowly but surely I am replacing all of my 15 year old X10 hardware with Z-Wave devices. I have played around with Wemo and Zigbee, along with a Wink hub, and have a few things in use but Z-Wave by far has been more reliable. One of the downfalls of Zigbee is that people (the wife and kids) have a tendency to turn off the lamps via the lamp toggle and that disables any sort of control or monitoring of the device. As I add voice control that should help. I’ll also mention that I have added control of the Hue bridge to Homeseer (my HA software) as well.

Once I have added a few more pieces I’ll post a couple of videos to youtube explaining some of what I am doing with all this junk.

Another fun day in the ER

rmiles7721February 13, 2016Site News

So the eldest daughter and I are at the hospital currently. Anna passed out/had a seizure at work a couple of hours ago.

She seems OK and in pretty good spirits right now. Just got back from a CT scan, it’ll be a while before the doctor gets the results back I’m sure.

They called me around noon, I had just dropped some equipment off at one of my stores in Carrollton. Made it to villa rica in about 8 minutes. Lucky I didn’t get pulled over.