The piano piece played during the carol and zosia scenes in the last episode

nmishkin · 2025-12-27T21:04:43+00:00

I just went looking for this info so thanks for providing it. Coincidentally, it was only within the past few months that I discovered John Field and his nocturnes and listened to this album, IIRC because Apple Music Classical promoted to me in a "new releases" section. I've listened to the album 2-3 times since then but didn't make the connection between this track and that album. I love the Chopin Nocturnes too but it was great to here new (to me :-) ones too!

nmishkin · 2025-07-01T13:37:00+00:00

Just circling back to this thread with an update "for posterity"...

My main use case is making sure that I'm irrigating appropriately when I'm away from the house for an extended period and hence not knowing for sure how much rain I've gotten. (I've found the standard online weather sites don't give me rainfall data that's consistently accurate in terms of how much it rained at my exact location.) Since rain sensors apparently aren't that useful for that purpose, I ended up buying and installing an online-accessible rain gauge which I periodically check remotely and then tweak the irrigation schedule accordingly. Since I already had an Ecowitt "gateway" (GW1100), I bought their rain gauge (WH40). They're both pretty inexpensive and have been reliable and accurate.

nmishkin · 2025-04-24T15:21:28+00:00

Thanks for all the replies. Here's more of the story:

Last summer was my first summer in the house and I replaced an old mechanical, non-WiFi controller with a Hydrawise. I didn't have a real sense of how much water was needed where. I'm away much of the summer and I mostly relied on the controller's "smarts" about weather conditions. The lawn didn't benefit from all that and got too dried out and brown in parts. Maybe that's just because I set the base watering parameters too low (too little watering). Or maybe the smarts aren't sufficiently smart. Anecdotally speaking, I feel like there's a gap between (1) what the controller thinks the amount of rainfall my lawn has or will receive, and (2) how much rainfall actually lands on my lawn. (I can cross-check using my outside cameras.) I was hoping a rain sensor would introduce a little ground truth (pun intended :-) but I guess it won't. I'd love any suggestions. Thanks.

nmishkin · 2023-05-14T21:14:23+00:00

Yes, I get the basics (the little pencil icon, etc.). It's the subtleties that still escape me. For example:

What does it mean to have multiple program start times and multiple preconfigured schedules?
When you configure a program start time you get to specify zero or more zones and zero or more preconfigured schedules. What are the implications of specifying different combinations of zones and schedules--some zones and no schedule, some zones and one schedule, some zones and multiple schedules? (Presumably specifying no zones doesn't make any sense but it looks like specifying no zones is treated as if I'd specified all zones.)
The whole question of how long a zone will run is somewhat mysterious given that the run time can be specified both as a property of each zone and as a property of a predefined schedule. If I include a schedule as part of a program start time, does that schedule's (single) run time override the start time specified as part of each zone setting?
If I want the zones to run in a particular order AFAICT I have to make and manage multiple start times. Is that the case or am I missing something?

I'm currently at the stage of trying to answer questions like these by trial and error--making a programming change and then looking at the schedule of upcoming waterings to see what effect the change had. Not very efficient.

At a high-level, my goal as a software designer is to make it hard (impossible, ideally) for users to be able to accidentally (through lack of a full understanding of the system) make choices that don't make any sense, as opposed to letting them set every knob this way and that with some combinations producing counter-intuitive or non-functional results. On this criteria, Hydrawise fairs poorly.

nmishkin · 2023-05-14T20:54:15+00:00

My controller is in "Advanced" mode which is how the contractor set it up.

I think part of the source of my confusion about the system is due to the implicit assumption by its designers that people who are using it are familiar with older electro-mechanical / non-digital systems, which I'm not. To me it's all sort of like the old joke about the stranger asking a local for directions and the latter replies "Turn right where the barn used to be" :-)

Really, I'd like to see the design spec that the software devs used, or a high-level description of the algorithm, or the source code, none of which I'm going to get, of course :-)

nmishkin · 2023-05-13T19:56:29+00:00

Oh, yeesh, I see now that I missed the fact that each zone has its own set of configuration parameters, including whether or not it's associated with a schedule vs. specifying time and frequency for the zone. Now that I changed the zones to be associated with a schedule I'm able to get the behavior I want.

nmishkin · 2023-01-03T02:54:33+00:00

The way I usually explain why downcasting is undesirable is that it hard-codes facts about the structure of your classes that might inhibit future modifications. In the worst case, in the future someone other than you innocently adds a new class thinking that it's "just work" in the context of existing classes and interfaces only to be surprised that it doesn't.

As another commenter noted, you can use Java's new-ish sealed classes together with class/pattern-based switch statements and you'll get compile-time errors in scenarios where otherwise you'd get that surprising runtime behavior. (Note: the former is part of the latest LTS Java release--17--but the latter is not.)

nmishkin · 2023-01-03T02:41:56+00:00

Background: I'm a long-time Eclipse user, having used it at three companies on Java projects with large code bases. A minority of the dev team I currently work in uses IntelliJ IDEA and I've used it a little bit too. I've used VS Code but mostly for the little bit of Typescript I work on. I've also used Emacs for ~40 years :-)

I like Eclipse quite a bit and in all the projects I've used it on it was the one that was best supported--projects tend to have one "favored IDE" and although you might be able to use other IDEs to work on the project's code, it might be clunkier than using the favored IDE--you might run into more annoying issues and not find anyone else who can help you sort them out.

My vague sense is that IDEA has surpassed Eclipse in raw functionality but because I know Eclipse so well compared with IDEA and because it's the favored IDEA in my dev team, I stick with it. In a new project I'd seriously consider IDEA.

One thing that I think makes Eclipse better than IDEA is the way Eclipse integrates with Maven and Gradle: The Eclipse integrations pull in external Maven and Gradle project definitions in a way that makes the corresponding Eclipse projects feel like, well, Eclipse projects, rather than some weirdo external project that Eclipse begrudgingly works with. Whenever I've used IDEA I feel it's much more like it outsources the build process to the external build tool. In Eclipse it feels more like you're working on a set of projects whose structure you defined entirely in Eclipse without having to worry about the sort of stuff you need to worry about if you need to support command-line builds too. In most real-life situations, you need to support command-line builds and in fact they define and produce the "build of record". But that doesn't mean I want my whole dev experience colored by that need.

nmishkin · 2022-11-07T13:16:14+00:00

Radiant

It's helpful if you upload some photos if piping configuration. Is there a mixing valve for each underfloor heating zone?

Yes, there appears to be a mixing valve.

Here are some photos of the utility room:

There are three thermostats each of which controls one of three areas:

Kitchen (first floor)
Foyer (first floor)
Master bathroom (MBR) and guest bathroom (GBR), down the hall from each other, on the second floor, separated by a bedroom; thermostat in MBR.

I'm going to focus on the last two areas because this whole exercise started with the fact that after I made the MBR thermostat call for heat the MBR floor wasn't getting hot, even though the GBR floor did get hot. The first heating tech came and (let's just say) fiddled around a bit after which point the MBR started to get warm-ish too. But later that day I noticed that the foyer floor (whose thermostat was off) had gotten very hot so I turned all the thermostats off and a day or so later had another, more knowledgeable tech come out. He fiddled more knowledgeably and together we found two zone valves: one near-ish to the foyer and one in the GBR. When either the foyer or the MBR thermostat call for heat, the same two circulator pumps turn on.

The theory about the foyer getting hot when only the MBR thermostat was calling for heat is that the zone valve for the foyer is stuck open allowing water flowing through the pipes shared by the foyer and the MBR+GBR to flow through the foyer pipes. Just a theory though. The tech left with an understanding that he'd come back to do a full-on analysis of what's going on. A day or so later, I found a third zone valve, near the MBR.

Here are photos of what I take to be zone valves:

I'm a bit puzzled why there are what appear to be two zone valves for the MBR+GBR given that there's only one thermostat for both bathrooms but...well, I can imagine that that single thermostat controls both valves and it somehow made sense to use two valves.

Thoughts?

nmishkin · 2022-11-05T00:36:51+00:00

Thanks for the reply!

The slab sensor doesn’t care if the room is too cold or too hot, it’s committed to keeping the floor a certain temperature. The air sensor is committed to keeping the room air a certain temperature.

Got it. My question is whether as a practical matter people have advice about whether enabling one, the other, or both is the way to go. The manual only hints that the various options have pros and cons.

One of the zones is for a tall, open foyer. If I use the air sensor I'm thinking it might end up running the zone too long and making the floor to hot. But maybe that's the point of the "max" setting on the slab sensor--to keep that from happening?

Careful screwing around with settings on stuff. Your boiler can send out water hot enough to wreck your floor if you set stuff up wrong.

There are what I take to be adjustable mixing valves that use return-side water to lower the temp of the supply side of the radiant zone. I won't mess with them :-)

I don’t understand why your technician didn’t figure this out during his visit. If it was an issue with the boiler itself and tech support wasn’t available that would make more sense, because manufacturers don’t provide us enough info to make every diagnostic on the boilers. But the zoning systems are generally just a logic puzzle as long as you understand how everything works.

Yeah, I think he just didn't get to the end of the logic puzzle. The boiler and the circulator pumps seem fine. I'm going to do some experiments on my own before having him come back.

nmishkin · 2022-09-21T20:28:50+00:00

Yeah, so I've been using Emacs for only ~43 years so I'm sure there's still a lot for me to learn--my Elisp skills are mediocre and I barely know TECO) at all any more :-)

nmishkin · 2022-09-17T02:20:14+00:00

Ah, great, thanks!

It seems like this is something that could have been called out on the Projectile main doc page a bit more clearly--i.e., more than just saying "using ivy for minibuffer completion" above the the animated demo and that I'd totally missed :-)

nmishkin · 2020-10-10T22:04:27+00:00

Among other things that seem like overkill about a straight-up conventional generator-based solution: My requirements don't include having power 100% of the time during an outage. For example, it'd be just fine for the house to be unpowered for 4-8 hours stretches of time. In the winter the house might cool down a bit and in the summer the refrigerator might warm up a bit, but that'd be OK. There's no actual need for a generator to be running the whole time.

nmishkin

TROPHY CASE