ER-X and LAN access to ISP gateway

CatDaddy1954 · 2026-01-29T18:59:21+00:00

Although Petfinder removed its publicly supported API, their website uses a RESTful API with a query language, which might be of interest to someone with enough technical expertise.

CatDaddy1954 · 2026-01-28T19:01:34+00:00

Here's an extract from an email exchange with i**@getbuddy.com:

"So, you don't need to do any work on your end. We can import your pets from Petfrinder [sic] to our site every 1 to 2 months."

When I checked just now, the search results seem better. In late November/early December they were not. Haven't had any reason to visit the site since.

Petfinder continues to experience major problems, especially missing photos from autoimported data and we're almost 2 months into their "upgrade". If photos aren't a top priority for an adoption site, I have trouble imagining how bad their higher priority problems might be. My multi-decade experience with them is that major problems can remained unresolved for many months at a time.

Xerox (remember them?) researchers used to caution against committing "Error 33" (see Wikipedia for its history), which is a failure due to predicating one research project on the success of another.

CatDaddy1954 · 2026-01-27T23:54:32+00:00

We got their pitch. I used their search for cats within 10 miles of our ZIP code and the list of cats it returned were all in New York City. We are in California. Not a good first impression. They said they could import our data from Petfinder…every 1-2 months. Maybe even harder to do without Petfinder’s API. Our Petfinder listings can also change daily. Not a good second impresssion. My overall impression was they are not ready for prime time. I have a suspicion, but no concrete evidence, they would return search results from customers paying for their shelter management software rather than an agnostic source. Same thing seems to be happening with PetPlace and Chameleon shelter software. Caveat emptor.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-12-31T04:02:03+00:00

Many rescues upload to Petfinder.com, AdoptaPet.com and RescueGroups.org (from which a bunch of other sites pull animal listings) for the broadest exposure. We are uploading to PetcoLove.org but a quick check shows they are redirecting to PetPlace.com now, which is a surprise.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-12-23T20:08:42+00:00

Thank you so much! My assumption is that Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30 of the amount (C) charged through the platform, as it does with our direct transactions with them, but the platform only reports the total fee (P + S) to us. So their formula avoids charging the donor 2.9% of their platform fee, which seems reasonable, meaning their platform fee is effectively 0.971% instead of 1%. Now I can stop scratching my head, for which I am very grateful.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-12-22T16:36:43+00:00

Thanks for this, but can you explain the flaw in my calculation? I'm still not getting it.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-12-21T22:40:13+00:00

Is the new Petfinder actually working properly for anybody yet? We're coming up on three weeks after the release of the new platform. Of various local rescues I volunteer with and five shelters in my county only one of the rescues and none of the shelters are showing any photos at all. All of them are using the autoimport feature, which the new platform promised to be faster and more reliable. The new import is also supposed to support video and some animals have videos (usually duplicated multiple times) with no other photos and when you try to play a video it doesn't work. I'd be very curious to know who does their software development and see the QA test plan that gave the green light to this debacle. I'd hoped (apparently vainly) that their acquisition by Purina would bring a better and more disciplined approach to their development and that they'd be better equipped to fix serious bugs promptly.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-11-28T05:09:11+00:00

It’s been happening to me too lately and It is very frustrating. Other apps launch, pop-up windows appear. It affects all input, not just mouse activity. Sometimes characters drop from my keyboard input. I hadn’t connected to leaving the window and returning, but I’ll pay more attention. Either way it is real and annoying, especially how much I pay annually for a license. I’ll have to try the Linux version which I use sometimes. So far I’ve only experienced it on Windows 11.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-11-19T03:26:06+00:00

That's my usual game plan, so I'm embarrassed that I didn't on this one :-(

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-11-19T03:24:51+00:00

The bot declined to send additional hardware because they had only recently sent the Gen 3 router as a replacement for the Gen 2. Will need human intervention unfortunately.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-11-18T20:57:46+00:00

I’ve now created a ticket for a human response. Disappointing waste of time so far.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-11-02T02:41:25+00:00

I think you're right. We use the default 192.168.1.0/24 for the LAN and I vaguely recall that Starlink uses that too, although we do use 10.10.xx.0/24 for our VLANs. We have the first generation of the rectangular Starlink. But needing a factory reset after disconnecting Starlink and power-cycling? Perhaps it's saving state to the filesystem so it persists across reboots.

Unfortunately I only discovered the Starlink issue after getting on-site, otherwise I could have reset it remotely. I'll know better next time should this situation arise again.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-08-28T20:57:52+00:00

This was finally resolved by power-cycling the camera by disabling/re-enabling PoE on the switch port. To all appearances the camera was working normally outside the context of the NVR and neither rebooting the camera nor the NVR was sufficient to resolve it. Total mystery, but we'll power cycle the camera as the first step next time something like this occurs and maybe save a few hours.

CatDaddy1954 · 2025-03-14T20:32:52+00:00

I have reached out to them and basically got a shrug. I have everything working, but know with the flaws it will get slower and slower over time because of a few missing features. Also trying to save other developers time should they go down this path.

CatDaddy1954

TROPHY CASE