Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   occupancy sensor monoculture
Tuesday, November 13 2018
I left early this morning so I could swing by Herzog's in Uptown to see if their motion sensor selection was any broader than the one I'd see at Home Depot. But no, it was part of the same Lutron "occupancy sensor" monoculture, and I walked out without buying anything. From there, I drove directly to the brick mansion, mostly to see if I could find one of the two occupancy sensors I'd used there, forgetting that I had used one to plug the switch box hole in the wall (that was kind of stupid). I continued from there to Lowes, but of course all they stocked was Lutron-brand occupancy sensors as well. By now I was pretty sure the problem with the landing motion sensor apparatus was one of grounding (since the Lutron-brand occupancy sensors apparently, in seeming violation of all applicable principles, use the difference between hot and ground to power their electronics). I could imagine a system that could derive its operating power just from the current to a load (or that stores power in a capacitor when the load is switched off), but that would be trickier and more expensive. I tried to find such a motion-sensor switch on eBay, but found nothing.
At work today, I investigated another ExtJS issue while waiting to perhaps install the receipt-printing Electron app on a remote machine in a city downstate. But that city was having internet issues, and eventually I got tired of waiting. So I walked through the miserable cold to the center of the village in hopes of having a burger at the vegan burger place. But I'd forgotten that that place is closed on Tuesdays. Though it looked open (they even had a sandwich sign out on the sidewalk!), the people there with their open laptops were having a business meeting and the place was technically closed. So I had a delicious vegan burrito instead at the place that makes those nearby.
On the way home tonight, I stopped at Home Depot for two things: 50 feet of bare 12 gauge copper wire (to possibly implement a ground in that switch box at the brick mansion) and copies of two keys for that same brick mansion (one for the front door and another for the basement). It's been coming up regularly that I need to get in there and I've forgotten the keys, so I wanted to add just those two keys to my workplace keychain. I hadn't had keys made at Home Depot in awhile and was surprised to see the process was now almost completely automated. The key is read, stored in some sort of internal digital file, and then the blank is cut by a fully-automated process. I asked the old guy running if if the system had a way to store keys on USB drives, and he seemed to think it didn't (though I'm not sure he understood the deeper "everything is becoming data" concept I was alluding to here).
This evening, after jumping through a number of hoops on poorly-translated web pages (the hardest of which being finding out a part number), I managed to get an RMA for my 1TB SiliconPower SSD. Meanwhile Gretchen was trying to figure out where exactly in the file system the music files she'd "downloaded" using Google Play had ended up. It's a straightforward question, but Google itself couldn't deliver the answer. I had a feeling Google Play builds its own "file system" inside some file only it controls, perhaps to enforce rights management. But maybe it's doing it for some other vaguely-plausible reason. A hierarchical file system is a basic interface paradigm that has existed in its present form for something like 40 years, and people aren't really competent at computers unless they understand it fully. But you'd be surprised by the number of apps that attempt to abstract this away because it's "too technical," thereby forcing everyone (including computer professionals) to learn something completely new that applies to only one use case.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181113

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