mdlbear: (g15-meters)

Power is one of those things you don't think of much unless you're paying the bill or it suddenly isn't there. There was a power outage Friday evening, and we learned a couple of things.

The outage only lasted an hour, and the fileserver and network switch (which are on the same UPS) could easily have gone on another hour. The odd thing is that the gateway subnet (my Linux router and the UVerse "cable" router), on an identical UPS with basically the same steady-state power draw (around 25W) shut itself down after only 26 minutes.

It's pretty clear that the UVerse router is the culprit; it draws at least an extra 9W or so when there's data flowing, and sometimes as much as 20. My hunch is that it wastes a lot of power trying to reconnect to its satellite set-top boxes. Stupid.

There's not much I can do about that, except to move the DHCP server from the gateway to the fileserver, so that people with laptops can keep on working. That's basically me, since Colleen uses her netbook mostly for web browsing.

I moved DHCP this morning, with no obvious problems so far.

We also learned that it's really hard to find a bag of candles after the lights go out. Yes, we had flashlights, but those only work if what you're looking for is reasonably close to the last place anyone remembers putting it. It wasn't.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

A pretty good day, mostly spent puttering. Colleen needed to buy some fabric and patterns, so we went to Jo-Ann's and added a drive and a trip to Ross. I was sorely tempted by some very lightweight luggage, but had doubts about its durability. We did re-arrange Colleen's scooter bags, moving the black-and-purple shoulder bag to the front, and moving her supplies to the purple SwissGear mini-duffel in back (where they'll be much more accessible).

I also moved the folding cup-holder from her cane (where it wasn't particularly useful) to her scooter.

I spent much of the evening sitting out in the living room with Colleen, watching the news and cleaning out my netbook so I can give it to the Wolfling. I inadvertently deleted more than I intended, but no harm done: I just restored the deleted config files from git and my home directory on the fileserver.

Thinking about my experiences in junior high seems to raise my anxiety level. A lot. It wasn't exactly a geek-friendly environment. Or maybe it's anger; I got a similar reaction from Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis

More links down in the notes.

raw notes )
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

If I think about my finances or the state of the country or our stupid politicians I get depressed. Denial -- it's not just a river in Egypt anymore. See links in the notes.

My coffee cup has a hole in the top.

Went up to the Menlo Park office, early (for me), to interview an applicant for our embedded systems job, which left me with less time in the morning for music. I made up for it some during the hour-long power failure last night.

The gateway machine lasted only about half an hour; I strongly suspect that the extra power drain was coming from the UVerse modem, since my Linux router is only using about 17W. I'm going to move the DHCP server down to the fileserver, so at least the internal network can keep going if it happens again.

Go read sweetmusic_27: November 19th is International Survivors of Suicide Day.

raw notes )
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

Yesterday's main event, besides getting the shell script that I've been working on working, was a power outage at home. Wherein I discovered that the external disk on the router was what kept it from coming back promptly when the power finally came back.

It's less obvious why the net connection went out immediately instead of waiting for the UPS to time out; I suspect that a power strip isn't on the UPS that I think it's on. Growf.

An amusing link: How long until Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent?

Want to bet that, a year from now, IE has dipped well below 50 percent, and Chrome (including native Android browsing) sits around 20 percent, with Apple products not too far behind? I'd even venture a guess that IE6 will still be gunning at 10 percent or more. Old habits -- and old proprietary systems -- die hard.

In all, a pretty good day. Even managed a short walk.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

It was Mother's Day. I called my mom around 11; Chaos called around noon; a few of our kids-of-choice also called. Always nice.

I gave Colleen her new Kindle 3, which she loves. It seems to have problems, though; some books don't seem to have synced completely. Grump.

Colleen had gotten a huge slab of smoked salmon at Costco, so we had bagels and lox for brunch. One of the few things guaranteed to get the YD out of bed. While I was out for bagels I went across the parking lot to Whole Paycheck, where I found some nice rockfish for dinner. With a caprese-type salad and baby asparagus sauteed in butter with a little mint (Colleen's idea). Yum, on both meals. The wine with dinner was a Columbia Valley reisling, very big and fruity. Also yum.

We took a nice drive out to the coast on Highway 9, and back via 17.

Glanced at the nameplate on my external backup drive's power brick -- it's rated for 65W on the input side. The outputs only total about 25, and I know that the drive is about half that. So... yuck. OK, it's probably not pulling nearly that much, given that it spends most of the time asleep, but the inefficiency is annoying. An internal hot-swappable mount would be nice.

Did a little noodling on the guitar, and later called Naomi and sang to her and Colleen.

No links. Must have been busy, even though it didn't feel like it.

mdlbear: (g15-meters)
raw notes )

The two things on the schedule yesterday were working on taxes, and acquiring a new UPS to replace the one whose battery died on Friday. The taxes aren't done yet, but I did get most of it entered. At this point only dividends and deductions remain. The Schedules C were easier than I expected, thanks to better tagging during the data-entry phase. I'm still running late, though.

I picked up the UPS, an APC BX1500G, at Fry's on the way home from taking the YD to her modeling class. It's taller and narrower than the older 1500's; I put it in the bedroom because it has an explicit mute button; it also has more outlets, which allowed me to replace the old power strip as well. It just barely fits on the shelf, though; I may want to move it to the floor. It also has a master-slave arrangement that allows something like a computer to control power to other devices like monitors. I'd really like that for the desktop, at some point.

The fileserver now has 170min of runtime, up from 11. Whee!

I appear to have no more serial-port UPSs in service; even the little 320VA unit by the phones is USB connected.

How to be Happy (the free e-book from 17000 Days that I finished yesterday) has a section on flow, starting p. 51. It points out that happiness comes after the flow state; while you're in flow you're totally absorbed in what you're doing. Wow, does that ever resonate! Especially with this last week at work. C.f. "The Little Computing Machine".

Several excellent links up there in the notes.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

A good day. (Though I've learned that potato chips are definitely a comfort food. Not so good.) The high point, definitely, was running into [livejournal.com profile] marypcb and [livejournal.com profile] sbisson in Barefoot while I was buying coffee. Had a good conversation, well worth not going for a walk; the weather was getting gloomy and cold by that point anyway.

Lots of puttering around the offsite backup scripts, disk drives on the router, and the the Starport's energy budget -- the three aren't entirely separate. The router and fileserver need to be upgraded to Squeeze soon, so a few extra reboots aren't going to be noticed in the general scheme of things.

A couple of good links under the cut. I particularly recommend A quintessence of dust - Roger Ebert's really nice ramble about the universe, evolution, and the consolations thereof. Definitely appeals to my particular flavor of scientific/druidic atheism.

mdlbear: (g15-meters)

There was a power outage yesterday evening at the Starport; no harm done, but it triggered some thoughts. Here's the raw data:

  : UPS battery life on nova is under 15min.  That's miserable.  
    stargate:  107min,  5.0% of 865W = 44W  (includes DSL router, switches) 
    nova:       13min, 16.9% of 260W = 44W  Oh.  (varies down to 33)
    trantor:	70min,  9.0% of 780W = 70W
    CPAP rated at 48W, but hopefully uses less -> 30 open; 6 idle  Eeep!  
      That's maybe 3h on its XS1500 UPS.  The alarm had better wake me up!

Ok, so there are two obvious problems here. The first is that Nova, the fileserver, has a miserable uptime. That's not so bad, since the network is perfectly usable without it as long as all you want to do is surf. The other is that my CPAP, which is on the same kind of UPS as stargate (the router) has a much higher power consumption than I thought. The battery wouldn't last the night. Which means that I would probably die in my sleep if the power went out. Not so good.

There are two less obvious problems: Nova's disk took over an hour to fsck. That's a long time to boot, but not not too bad because, as I mentioned, the file server isn't all that essential in the short term. What's more of a problem is the backup drive on stargate. I really don't want my router taking half an hour to boot.

I also discovered that my wireless phone base station is on its own UPS, a 500VA APC that beeps when the power goes out. One of the thing I really like about the XS series is that you can turn the power-fail alarm off. Great in the office. Not so great for the CPAP!

So the current plan is to move the bedroom UPS into the office for Nova, and for the short term move Nova's SmartUPS 420 into the bedroom. Because it beeps. Eventually I'll want something bigger.

I also want to put the big partitions on a once-a-week unmount / fsck / remount routine. Easy. Along with that I want to move the router to a 2.25" drive (which I just happen to have sitting around) for lower power consumption. (I'd rather move the router to a solid-state drive and make the laptop drive external. But that will have to wait.)

ETA: I just found a stack of unpaid bills including this month's energy bill -- 28.2KWh/day, as opposed to 35.1 last year, so a little under a 20% improvement. (The gas bill was 63% more, but we won't go into that. yet.)

ETA: (0403) Actual measurement on the CPAP shows that it uses between 6 and 12 W in normal operation, so the XS1500 will keep it running all night, barely. That's encouraging. May keep things as they are for a while.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

A very productive four days at work, having gotten over last weekend's case of the plague. I even went out for a walk on Thursday. Still nowhere near back in shape, and not exercising nearly enough. But the walk felt good, and I realized that my mood must depend more on the weather than I thought. Not so much hours of sunlight -- if the SAD light's having an effect it's a subtle one -- as whether it's sunny or gloomy during the daytime. Hmm.

Friday also represented the end of an era at work, as Peter Hart stepped down as Chairman of RII on the 20th anniversary of his start date there. He's the one who hired me 18 years ago. It also makes me the oldest person in the company. Ouch!

I found it oddly liberating Wednesday morning when LJ was down with its DDOS. Suddenly there was time to putter, mostly downloading lyrics for Tempered Glass. Hmm.

The power outage yesterday evening was somewhat helpful in terms of puttering, and I found myself making salad and shrimp by LED light. Power came back in time for me to zap the cauliflower. It then took an hour or so for the fileserver to fsck itself, which was annoying.

Large partitions ought to be fsck'ed on a regular schedule, I guess. Especially the one that hangs off the router -- the last thing I need is that taking half an hour to come back! More on that in a separate post upwhen.

A decent collection of links under the cut, as usual. Check out the World's Largest indoor Photo: Strahov Philosophical Library, Prague - 40 Gigapixel 360 Panorama. Try not to drool on your keyboard.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

Sunday was good. Not productive, but good -- Colleen and I went up to San Francisco for the Lamplighters' production of Trial By Jury and a condensed version of Gilbert's play Engaged. Trial was unmitigated fun -- pure musical fluff. Engaged was... mostly amusing, but my vicarious embarrassment kicked in at a couple of points. It was raining hard on the way home, and I had a nasty skid coming down the offramp onto Woodside Road -- we had dinner at Buck's.

Oh, yeah; Sunday was my 64th birthday. I didn't notice any hill.

Monday was also very unproductive, without most of the good part; I slept late, and spent the day at work mostly catching up. Some progress, but not as much as I needed. And there was a power failure at home that, for some weird reason, knocked out our WiFi router. Which had also been serving as the gigabit switch, ever since my 8-port switch croaked last year. Fortunately, all the router needed was a very hard (30-30-30) reset to factory settings and a reconfigure.

I think I'll abandon my idea of making the Netgear our main router -- I want the power saving, but not at the expense of an hour's worth of fiddling every time the power goes out. The routers stayed up for 50 minutes on UPS; that's pretty good. The fileserver only stayed up for 30 (it's on a separate, smaller UPS); that's probably ok.

Links, as usual, under the cut.

mdlbear: (g15-meters)

I went out to the garage a couple of days ago to charge a drill battery. No dice. Some further investigation showed that it wasn't the battery's fault, nor the charger -- it worked fine in the sewing room. So it must have been power in the garage. Still more investigation led to a tripped GFI outlet, which I reset.

And the freezer turned on.

Oops! I don't think anything was lost, but some items were noticably soft. So it must have been out for a day or two.

I'm going to have to install some kind of remote sensing alarm. Grump. But next time I might not get off so lightly.

mdlbear: (g15-meters)

The year's second utility bill wasn't quite as impressive as the first in terms of gas, but electricity usage continued to improve. I am now under 300% of baseline, which puts my marginal rate at $0.28, down from $0.40.

    Gas:  this year: 4.3 therms/day	  last year: 4.9
    Elec: this year: 24.5 KWh/day	  last year: 33.7

So on the whole I'm still pretty happy about the household's power consumption.

mdlbear: (g15-meters)

The year's first utility bill was pretty impressive.

    Gas:  This year:  3.2 therm/day;  last year:  5.5
    Elec: This year: 25.5 KWH/day;    last year: 41.6 

... and I'm less than 10KWH into the top bracket, out of 740 total. That's, um... under 14W. Of course, we'll have to see what the YD's new TV and live-in boyfriend do to that total. But it's close enough that some smaller bulbs in, say, the garage and attic might make the difference.

mdlbear: (g15-meters)

My latest power bill is $100 less than it was in August. Of course, some of that reduction is due to the switch from air conditioning to gas heating. The more significant number is the comparison to October of last year: 747 KWH vs, 1080 last year, 26.7 KWH/day vs. 38.6. Only 62KWH were charged at the top rate of $.40.

This may still be partly illusory -- it's possible that my meter gets read only every other month, which would mean that this is partly compensating for an overestimate in September. We'll see how it settles out. But it's still significant.

62KWH at the top rate is a full-time load of 8.6W. One hard drive 86W. *eyes the router/gateway server dubiously*

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

If only all my problems were so easy to solve! Audio going away after I upgraded my desktop? It's because user "steve" wasn't in the audio group. Duh.

I did, finally, get the backup drive onto the fileserver in an external box; it seems to be taking on the order of an extra 3W when idling, so that's not bad.

Colleen and I went for a st/roll around the Rose Garden, followed by a nice drive. Followed by quesadillas for dinner, since I wasn't feeling terribly ambitious, and since I'd started by making guacamole with no tortilla chips in the house, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

Colleen and I now have Chrome running on our netbooks. Didn't realize it ran under Hardy Heron. Yay!

On the other hand... no scratch tracks. :(

A good day, on the whole, I think.

Less power

2010-09-25 01:20 pm
mdlbear: (g15-meters)

Some progress has been made on saving power.

Nova, the fileserver, is now using 13% of 260W = 33W, down from 54. That's about $70/year; I was hoping for more.

Trantor, the desktop, is using 9% of 708W = 63W, down from 93. That's more like it: 30W=$105/year savings. Total saving on the swap: 50W=$175/year; total spent so far, $90. Getting the new desktop configured is a non-trivial undertaking, but that part needed to be done anyway because Dorsai's disk was dying. Turning the desktop off when I'm not using it will probably save an additional 50% or so.

I measured the power usage of the living room TV: 2.2W idling, and 37W when running. It's not on full-time, either, so switching to an LCD wouldn't be worthwhile unless I can get a really good deal on one.

The LED therapy light I got used for $25 is only on for an hour or so in the morning; what it really does is free up a full-spectrum floor lamp for someplace else in the house.

Probably the biggest further savings I could make with computers would be using the wireless router as my main firewall. Actually I could probably get a lot of that by going to a solid-state disk. Hmm.

Power

2010-09-18 01:39 pm
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Just some quick calculations. My power bill is outrageous. Thanks to California's ill-advised experiment with deregulation a few years back, and Enron's immediate exploitation thereof, my marginal rate is $.40/KWH. Eeep. I needed to have thought more about this quite a while ago.

My power consumed last month was 1086 KWH. There were 360KWH = $144 charged at the top rate; the bracket below that is $.29. Could I save as much as $144/month?

I have a bad habit of leaving lights and computers on, and even though every bulb in the house is a CFL now, and we use gas for cooking, heating, and the drier, it adds up. Fast.

There are 720 hours in a month. If I shave off 10W, that's nearly $3/month, or $35/year. That's, um... a hard drive. Or a light bulb. If I shave off 200W (full time, or the equivalent in part-time usage), that would save me my $144/month.

Nova, the fileserver, is currently consuming 21% of its 260W UPS, so that's 54W. Um... $175/year to keep my fileserver going. I don't know how much the new Atom-based board will save, but probably at least 50%. It'll pay for the $80 worth of new motherboard in the first year.

Dorsai, my desktop, is on an 708W UPS and eating 12% of it, so that's 93W. GAAK! (That includes the monitor, though.) Leaving it off while I'm at work and overnight is going to save a bundle. Swapping the CPU with Nova will help, too. Going from there to another atom board might not save me all that much.

Stargate, the router/gateway, is taking 5% of 865W (along with the cable router, the wireless access point, and the ethernet switch) -- that's 43W. But its CPU is already a fanless C7; the only way I'm going to save any power there is by using the WAP as my firewall. Somewhat less by taking the 500GB drive off and port-forwarding to Nova.

Colleen's floor lamp has 3 13-W CFLs in it, and tends to stay on 24/7 because the switch is hard to reach. That's 28KWH/month! I don't know what the standby usage of the two ancient CRT TVs is; the one downstairs is rated for 75W. I don't know their duty cycle, either.

There are probably at least 50W worth of lights in the garage and attic. They tend to stay on because it's inconvenient to reach the switches, especially when you're carrying stuff. Motion sensors?

Stay tuned. I can get 100KWH easily, at least.

mdlbear: (hacker glider)

There was a brief power glitch this morning; the Bay Area is in the middle of what's predicted to be a three- or four-day storm. UPSs carried the household servers and my workstation through it with no problems, but I need to make sure the kids have UPSs. The recording box is on a UPS but seems to have croaked anyway -- I see a trip to Fry's in my immediate future.

The chumby simply turned off and had to be restarted using its power button, making it clearly unsuitable for use as an alarm clock (though there's almost certainly an auto-restart hardware hack for it). I need a UPS for the CPAP, too. Last thing I need is to wake up in the middle of the night with a dead facehugger gripping my nose.

Oddly, I've noticed that some (all?) LCD monitors turn themselves on after a power glitch even if they'd been turned off.

10:00 Terrific. The most recent power glitch seems to have knocked out my DSL connection. The old connection, which I never got around to getting rid of (because I'm still using it for email), is still working, but it's slow and just barely usable. Knew I should have bought into the Meraki mesh network...

11:20 Dumb bear. The recording box died because it was plugged into the surge protector side of the UPS, not the "surge protector + battery" side. Figures. There was stuff blocking my view of the labels, but still...

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

(8:30am) Power is still out at work -- at least on the circuit our router is plugged in to. Just as well that I'm going to be spending the morning taking my car in for an oilchange. I should really have powered down the two Linux boxen in my office before I left, but since they're backed up daily in several different places I'm not going to worry too much.

Next week I'm off to OSCon -- I'll be in Portland Tuesday afternoon through Saturday afternoon. contact info behind cut )

(9:55am) The car's likely to run me somewhere north of $400 by the time you add two new tires, an alignment job, and diagnosing the problem with the driver's side window to the oilchange it already needed. Power is still out at work.

I've been thinking again about getting a rolling duffel so that I can take my travel guitar (31" long) on plane trips. Still probably a bad idea; the duffels are awkward, wouldn't work well with my rolling briefcase, and in any case the travel guitar in its gig bag fits in the overhead rack. Looked briefly at some smaller travel guitars -- basically just six strings on a stick -- that might fit in a regular-size suitcase. About the price of two rolling duffels, but less than a car repair. It'll just have to wait, I guess.

mdlbear: (hacker glider)

Had a power failure at home today -- some idiot ran into a power pole, most likely. Fried [livejournal.com profile] lisa_marli's husband's computer, a block away from us, but we were fine. There are two of the cheap Windows boxen that are not (yet) on APC UPSs, (one ancient Tripplite supply just up and croaked, and the one in the Y.D.'s room died when some idiot person who thought they were being helpful plugged a vacuum cleaner into it).

Unfortunately, getting the network back up was another matter. The gateway box tends to hang -- waiting for a BOOTP packet, I think -- instead of rebooting, the firewall seems to come up in an odd state sometimes, and in any case the ADSL modem came up weird and had to be power-cycled. Everything needed to be smacked upside the head for a while before it all settled down and worked. I'd work on the gateway some more, but that means taking it down, so I'll have to wait until I'm alone in the house, or at least the only one awake.

I really need to set up off-site backups, don't I?

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