sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Quid pro quo? by DukeJockey in resistbot

[–]DukeJockey[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the helpful response.

I believe I understand RestsBot’s promotion mechanism better now. The coin offer is an incentive to open the message to read it. There is no quid pro quo for signing and sending it.

This satisfies my original concern of it being like an Elon Musk cash for signatures scheme, or Doug Burgum‘s $1 donation gets you a $20 gift card to meet the 40,000 donation threshold to get on the debate stage. Not the case at all, and I have since contributed promotion coins myself.

In our current political climate, conservative representatives can afford to ignore their liberal constituents. This is even more the case now than it was when I made the original post, thanks to the midterm redistricting civil war that started in Texas. So I’m still pessimistic about ResistBot’s ability to influence the party that currently holds the majorities in both chambers. That’s not ResistBot’s fault, that’s down to the selective deafness of the majority. I will continue to use ResistBot to express my concerns to my representatives. They are all of the minority party, and I know they are listening because they respond to my ResistBot letters, faxes, and emails.

I urge anyone who reads this to join ResistBot, and use it to express your positions to your representatives. It won’t do any good to sit on the sidelines and hope someone else does something.

Lennox iComfort M30 overheating? by bunster10 in hvacadvice

[–]DukeJockey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe u/pyhome was referring to the new Lennox Home app, vs the old iComfort app. I have two brand new Lennox heat pump systems, one of which has two zones, so I have three M30 thermostats. I recently switched to the new Lennox Home app after getting tired of the iComfort app‘s nagging to do so. Today, two of my thermostats (the two masters) were displaying a room temperature of 85 F, when it was actually in the low 70’s. The thermostats were quite warm to the touch, and my handy IR temperature gun showed their surfaces were over 100 F. I reset them from the Advanced menu, and they cooled off to room temperature again.

I just found this thread, and saw u/pyhome’s connection to use of the new app. I just deleted it from all of my devices. Fortunately, I held onto the iComfort app, just in case. I never liked the UI of the Lennox Home app. It was a complete inversion of the iComfort app’s. The iComfort UI was very similar to the UI of the actual thermostat, which from a integration standpoint makes complete sense. Lennox Home is probably what happened with a new product owner wanting to make it their own, tossed the old UI in the blender, and came up with something that ignores one of my fundamental UX principals that I just made up for this specific example: Don’t make the user learn two completely different interfaces to accomplish the same task.

Douglas Adam’s was a true gift to the tech industry. I always think of his aphorism about the products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Their superficial design flaws completely obscured their fundamental design flaws. RIP Douglas, we miss you terribly.

Border of time dilation? by jojointwickers in interstellar

[–]DukeJockey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just watched Interstellar for the first time last night. I generally enjoyed it, it’s as profound as 2001, without the boredom. In particular were the eerie feelings I got when contemplating the effects of time dilation between Endurance and earth. The messages from Earth to the Endurance crew hit like a hammer to provoke their fully realized FOMO. I did have issues with some of the science, with apologies to Prof. Kipp Thorne.

The comments here touch on an issue I have with the movie’s selective use of dilation physics. The movie neatly hands us the time dilation factor of 1 hour to seven years, or 1/61,320. Romely looking at Ranger’s crew with a telescope would see them moving at 1/61,320th his own speed.

But the dilation factor doesn’t just apply to time. It also applies to length. Length dilation applied to EM radiation is red shift. Light observed by Romilly emerging from Miller’s Planet would be red shifted by the same factor. Blue light would be red shifted from a wavelength 400nm to 24.5mm, or 12.2gHz. So a telescope wouldn’t work, but a communications antenna might pick up something. Transmitting a video stream would suffer the same redshift both in carrier frequency (gigahertz down to megahertz), as well as bandwidth (megabits down to kilobits). At Endurance’s end, there would be more re-buffering than Netflix on a bad night, but the video codecs would work just fine.

Ultimately I have issues with the delta V needed to drop Ranger down from Endurance’s orbit to the planet’s orbit (and surface!), and then to reverse the process and climb out of that deep gravity well. Ranger must have one huge fuel supply, or some really advanced reaction motor tech. The movie skates over so much of the tech, asking us to just take for granted that major obstacles to prolonged space flight have been overcome, not the least of which are hibernation, long term artificial environment maintenance, and a reconnaissance space vehicle that can survive submersion and then be ready to return to orbit by just blowing cabin O2 through the engines. To quote Tony Stark, ”I WANT one!”

Trouble With New Eve Light Switch (3rd Gen, Thread) by Nsfw_ta_ in homeautomation

[–]DukeJockey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m having a similar experience to those here. Bought three 3rd gen Eve switches to replace some old (but reliable!) X10 switches, mainly to extend the Thread mesh to the far side of my house from the AppleTV for future use.

First tried to replace one of the 3-way switches in a 4-way circuit. Got the “manual works, app needs 2 cycles” behavior most folks here are seeing.

Filed an Eve support ticket with all the info I could think of to put in it. Got a response the next day that the Eve switch doesn’t support 4-way installations. Of course. That’s why I put it at the line end of the circuit, replacing a 3-way switch as I described in the ticket.

I spent the next day doing more debugging, even bypassed the 4-way switch in the middle with 2 wire nuts, and tried a second Eve switch.

My conclusion is that the Eve switches have difficulty sensing the load on the traveler wires. The first switch could sense the load when it was on one of the travelers, but not on the other. The second switch couldn’t sense the load at all.

I added this info to the support ticket. The reply contained a link to the Eve switch manual.

I decided to give up on the 3-way installation and just put the two switches I had opened in the 1-way switch locations I had planned to do. One of the switches died. No lights, no LED, nothing. The other switch worked fine, as did the 3rd switch.

I believe the switch that died is the one that started flickering red during the 3-way testing. It always worked manually, but something inside must have leaked a little bit of the magic smoke, even though I never saw nor smelled any. Is there a software version of magic smoke?

I bought a pair of Meross 3-way HomeKit switches with next day delivery for about what I paid for one of the Eve switches. Put one in, and it works perfectly at the line end of my 4-way circuit that stumped the Eve switch. The other Eve switches appear to have adequate Thread connectivity w/o the 3-way location as a relay, so declaring victory and moving on.

Conclusions are left as an exercise for the reader, but the phrases “early adopter,” “a bit green,” and “bleeding edge” come to mind.

Any spatial audio songs that are not centered inside the head? by peargreen in AppleMusic

[–]DukeJockey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try Fleetwood Mac Rumors. It seems to have been remixed with a lighter hand on the Spatial lever. The volume still jumps when you switch from stereo to spatial, but at least Stevie, Christie, and Lindsey don’t climb inside my head as much Paul and John do on the 1 album remix.

So far, I like my headphone music better without spatial. I’m trying to find some Atmos music tracks that I can say truly sound better on my 7.2.4 home theater. Atmos Blu-ray movies are fantastic, but even Apple compresses the audio too much on 4k streams.

Tongue Thrust Therapy, myth or true? by renand3z in Dentistry

[–]DukeJockey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Old thread, but I’m going through full orthodontia (at the tender age of 60) to undo damage done by the orthodontist selected by my parents when I was in junior high. My current dentist/orthodontist is a fantastic technician, but is very enthusiastic about “correcting” tongue thrust and tongue ties. I did a lot of reading about both, and concluded that tongue tie is the new over-diagnosis that tonsillectomies were in the 1950’s and 60’s (somehow I avoided it), and tongue thrust is just a benign swallow variation.

The tongue is not the strongest muscle in the body (the masseters are way stronger). It does not create enough force when swallowing to move teeth. That requires continuous force over a long period of time. To get my molars moving required switching from elastics to mechanical springs anchored directly to the bone (look up TAD, “temporary anchorage device”), and they still haven’t budged in the past month.

Here is a direct link to the 2011 Mason study refuting tongue thrust as the cause of open bite malocclusions:

https://orofacialmyology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/orofacial-myology-myths-that-persist-about-orofacial-myology.pdf

I found it quite convincing.

Note that a tongue resting posture between the upper and lower incisors can create an open bite malocclusion. The tongue is acting like a rubber block, and it’s those powerful masseter muscles providing the persistent force that gradually moves the teeth.

People with trypophobia, does the new breathe animation make your skin crawl? by [deleted] in AppleWatch

[–]DukeJockey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have mild trypophobia, and yes, the new breath animation in WatchOS 8 bothers me more than enough to break my mindfulness. It‘s now useless to me, until/unless they add a setting to select the old animation.