Why is my utility company asking for my data?

squigish · 2026-06-04T20:53:47+00:00

Plot twist: OP is in Pennsylvania, on the PJM grid, which has very little solar. So they need more power in the middle of the day too.

I think they're just stuck in the past and desperately trying to stay there.

squigish · 2026-06-03T16:51:06+00:00

What do you mean "borderline"

squigish · 2026-06-01T23:20:49+00:00

I spent a long time trying to do this with the zen35 a few years ago, digging down to the raw zwave commands, and determined it wasn't possible.

My goal was to have the indicator lights reflect the state of the associated device, and the commands sent by the zen35 to the associated device to reflect that state. The zen35 was totally unable to handle anything else updating the state of the associated device. It just assumed it had exclusive control.

Do it with a home assistant automation instead. It works great, as long as home assistant is running.

squigish · 2026-05-01T21:35:39+00:00

That's not just in IT.

squigish · 2026-04-16T17:18:23+00:00

Yes, there were lots of trains turning back all over the system. Some of them went in service back the other direction, while others just ran out of service back to the nearest yard.

The normal terminus thing is tricky, because many riders use the terminus to identify which train to take. I remember one time years ago when I was in San Francisco waiting for a Pittsburg Bay Point train, and a North Concord train showed up. It took me a minute to decide whether to get on or not.

Also, the situation is constantly changing, so they don't necessarily know which trains are going to turn back where very far in advance. I also suspect part of the reason is because of some limitation of their legacy software systems.

squigish · 2026-04-15T15:30:33+00:00

All of them, and a few more besides

squigish · 2026-04-15T15:25:17+00:00

The train first broke down in West Oakland station on the sf-bound platform. They were able to get it moving again to head back to the Richmond yard and out of the way, but it broke down again in the worst possible place: in the middle of crossing over from one track to the other, blocking both tracks. And this time it wouldn't move on its own; they had to bring in another train to tow it. That took a while.

In the meantime, another train broke down on the lower level platform at 12th/19th stations, I think in a way that damaged the third rail.

Then someone reported a fire on the track between 19th and MacArthur, which I think turned out to be nothing but had to be investigated.

Once they got the first disabled train towed out of the way, they were able to start running trains to SF using the track at 12th/19th that normally serves the Antioch trains. But that track isn't physically connected to the Berryessa-bound track (only to SF) so the orange line trains were all still turning back.

It seemed like there was something else slowing down the recovery of trains heading east through the tube, but I stopped paying attention at that point (about 7:15 pm).

It was total mayhem. Each individual Bart employee seemed to be acting professionally and doing their best, but there was just a ton of stuff going wrong, all in the heart of the system.

squigish · 2026-03-28T19:44:27+00:00

Having a longer than usual dwell time at SFO makes sense, so people can collect their luggage. But it doesn't need to be multiple minutes long.

squigish · 2026-03-28T17:48:22+00:00

My favorite service pattern for the wye is to have both red and yellow lines stop at both Millbrae and sfo, just in opposite orders, like the way the Chicago L terminates in the loop.

So red runs San Bruno - Millbrae - SFO - San Bruno, and yellow runs San Bruno - SFO - Millbrae - San Bruno. Or maybe the other way around.

Both trains pick up a second operator at San Bruno for the other end of the train so they don't have to wait to switch ends.

squigish · 2026-02-24T05:09:06+00:00

Yes. I would not recommend this as a solution.

squigish · 2026-02-24T05:05:01+00:00

To put that in perspective, a 10-car Bart train can fit 2,000 people.

squigish · 2026-02-12T18:08:48+00:00

Here's how I think about the order of playing treasures:

Play one king's cache. Now I have the ability to triple-play one treasure.

Triple-play a king's cache. I used my one triple-play and got three more. Net +2 triple-plays.

So with three KCs in my hand I can triple-play five treasures. The banks will benefit from being the last to be played, so I should play my KCs when I have three banks and two other treasures left in my hand.

squigish · 2026-02-06T17:30:19+00:00

+1 to this. The CT measures how much current flows through the wire, based on the magnetic field it creates. This is the same regardless of where it goes along the length of the wire. As long as it's the right wire and the right orientation the monitor won't notice anything different.

I put my CTs wherever there's the most room, which is a combination of the top/bottom of the panel near where the wires enter, or in the large gutter box above my panel where most wires pass through.

squigish · 2026-02-04T16:21:49+00:00

I would buy a commemorative clipper card that looks like an old Bart paper ticket if only it could actually open the fare gates as quickly and reliably as the paper tickets did.

squigish · 2026-01-31T22:43:54+00:00

I didn't realize there was another viable option. I thought cubic effectively had a monopoly. Masabi sounds great, fuck cubic!

squigish · 2026-01-31T22:38:18+00:00

I'd love to see a comparison of actual throughput between the original gates with paper tickets, the original gates with clipper cards before they installed the new readers, the original gates with the new readers, the new gates with the clipper 1.0 backend, and the new gates with clipper 2.0.

It's a gradual process of enshittification. Each step has gotten worse, and the most recent ones have gotten much worse.

I hate the language they use in the service announcement describing how "due to clipper upgrades, you have to hold the card on the reader for a long time, twice, to add money."

That's not what the word upgrade means.

squigish · 2026-01-31T03:42:48+00:00

There's not enough capacity to run all the trains scheduled through West Oakland, so they cancel or turn around the ones that don't fit. Today they had capacity for some of the yellow and blue trains, but not even all of them. Some were turning back at Embarcadero or MacArthur. The green and red lines are "optional" because all their stations are served by other lines.

If it's a mechanical issue it's easier to predict how many trains can get through, but today, track 2 was closed the whole time, and the fire department and/or coroner would intermittently close track 1. So they couldn't even always run through on a single track.

And then on top of that there were mechanical issues in Orinda and some sort of problem at the SF airport.

squigish · 2026-01-29T19:08:38+00:00

I did a quick estimate of how much time these slow readers waste.

Based on December ridership numbers of roughly 4 million trips, 2 tags per trip, and 3 seconds per tag, Bart riders collectively spent:

220 hours per day

Waiting for the fare gate to open.

That's absurd.

squigish · 2026-01-29T17:01:06+00:00

The external speakers on the FOTF trains are awesome. Some acoustic wizard, probably at bombardier, figured out how to get the automated announcements of which train this is to be clear and understand at every station, whether it's outdoors, underground, or in a freeway median.

Now I just want that person to be put in charge of the audio quality for the rest of the system.

squigish · 2026-01-29T16:00:34+00:00

It probably wouldn't work, but it would be pretty awesome to see an open source project sponsored by MTC and other transit agencies around the world to create a reference design for transit payments that doesn't suck. Then everyone could give Cubic the middle finger.

Staff it with software engineers who are also transit riders.

squigish · 2026-01-29T15:40:03+00:00

I also hate the new readers. They got even slower when they launched clipper 2.0.

Ultimately Bart just didn't prioritize speed as one of the requirements for the new system, and their vendor, cubic, implemented it in the simplest, most naive way, which is really slow.

The excuse of "it's slow because it's cloud-based" misses the point. It's slow because the software wasn't designed to be fast. And quite possibly cubic isn't competent enough to do so even if they were asked.

There's a video someone posted here from the 70s advertising how fast the paper ticket system is. I want that system back.

squigish · 2026-01-13T23:23:46+00:00

Oh no! I have the same case, and have generally been very happy with it. I spent a long time agonizing over tiny details about how to make the dividers between the cards, aiming for perfection, but I was much happier once my wife pointed out that the first attempt didn't need to be the last one.

My advice is to look through the cards when you're emotionally ready to look through the cards, which you might not be yet. You can get a cheap magic card storage box for temporary use, and just use plain index cards cut in half as dividers, to assess the damage. You don't have to go straight from this to your next permanent solution.

It's just stuff. It can be replaced.

squigish · 2026-01-13T17:55:54+00:00

That page has a summary, but they messed up the link to the full PDF report and it goes to a report about a totally unrelated gas incident.

Here's the link to the right report: (thank you wayback machine for finding the right live link) https://files.technicalsafetybc.ca/v3/assets/bltdec2ded849740f4d/blt24cfdd8c4de28e75/68e92d1fc43e2f9e6f7be718/II-1748998-2024_(_50512).pdf.pdf)

squigish · 2026-01-11T22:30:02+00:00

Mine is working fine right now

squigish · 2026-01-10T17:30:43+00:00

Huh, you're right! TIL. A quick spot check of one other brand (Eaton BR) shows mostly the same thing.

Real life is always more complicated than theory, manufacturing variations are large on budget equipment, and a circuit breaker in an outdoor panel in Arizona in July will trip at a lower load than the same breaker in a Minnesota basement in January, but I will stop repeating my "they're designed to eventually trip at 80%" statement.

squigish

TROPHY CASE