Thermostat

Sometimes I wonder why the temperature control in our lives isn't better.  For years I've wondered about the hot water in the shower.  It doesn't make sense to me why we can't set a temperature so that you turn on the tap and then nothing comes out until the water is at the temperature you want.  This seems to be well inside the capabilities of our technology.  Mostly it just seems like this doesn't happen because it doesn't happen.

But it could happen, yes?  If it did happen it would seem like many houses would waste a lot less water.  Right now you turn on the tap and then the cold water in the line has to run out the faucet and down the drain until you gauge the warmth - by touching the water - and then you get in the shower.  Alternately I imagine that sometimes people crank up the temp to try to make this happen faster and then wind up getting scalded when they check the temp on their hand.  That's an unfortunate result.

To fix this there would need to be a doubled set of pipes.  You'd need a return from behind the tap that ran back to the hot water heater.  Then there would need to be a thermostatic sensor and a diverter valve right at the tap.  The temp would be set on the sensor and until the water reached the desired temp the water would flow through the diverter and back to the tank.  Once the proper temperature is reached the valve opens and the water comes out the tap, with the first drop being the temp you are looking for.  The system could also have an envelope such that if the temperature got too high the valve would swap again and the overtemp water would recirculate to the tank.

So obviously there's more dollars here in the initial installation.  There's an extra sensor and a valve, and there's an extra run of tubing for every length of hot water tubing.  That's like a 50%+ increase in initial outlay.  With the price of water being where it is right now that is probably a fairly long ROI before you get to a break even.  But you get the convenience, and you waste less water.  It seems like something worth offering as an option anyway.  I don't think I have ever been in a home that works this way.

Lately I've been wondering the same kind of thing about my HVAC system.  The sensor package and the air sources don't seem to be the most efficient here either.  Often, because of the way our house is built we wind up running the air conditioning even though the outside temperature is lower than the inside.  Why does the system have to create cold air when there is available cold air outside?

Couldn't a system be built with inside and outside theremostats?  Something that combines traditional air conditioning with exhaust fans and exterior air inputs.  So if the desired temp inside is below the actual temp inside and it is also below the outside temp the traditional air conditioning runs.  If the desired temp inside is lower than the actual temp inside but it is higher than the outside air, then instead of running the traditional system the unit would draw in outside air and exhaust the warmer air from inside.

This seems like it ought to be less electricity.  You don't have to run the exterior chiller unit in some of the cases.  There is probably a humidity benefit from running the air conditioning that you wouldn't get just using exhaust fans.  The existing system would have a way to dry the air that the other wouldn't.  And there are probably extra mechanical dampers to facilitate bringing in outside air that would be vulnerable to maintenance problems, that's a downside.  But again, this seems to be well inside the capability of our technology - and in this case, doesn't feel a whole lot more expensive at the installation stage - and yet I can't recall ever being in a home that had such technology available.

It would seem like there are environmental reasons to develop both of these systems.  I wonder why it hasn't happened.

BTW, PIPA not much better than SOPA

Dear Senator Casey:

Hello.

I just happened across your name on a list of supporters for PIPA today.  I wanted to drop you a note to let you know that although I believe some kind of remedy is necessary for online pirating, I believe (like many others, especially those with a working knowledge of the technology) that the legislation as written is too heavy a regulatory hand.  The processes laid out in PIPA are too likely to be abused to the detriment of free speech and open networks.  The US should not be following behind such regimes as China and Syria for our network policy - that's just embarrassing.

Please work with the other members of the Congress to come up with a better bill.

Expensive

Apple cables are expensive. We've been setting up our A/V here at the new Chez TANBI and the tablets are a new dimension. We have fairly new TVs in two rooms, one's that will take VGA directly or HDMI input, and another older TV that does S, Composite, or Component video. What with Netflix and HBOGO on the tablets it seemed like a good idea to get the cables needed to make things talk to each other.

We already had a VGA adaptor cable. We'd been using it on the bedroom tv in the old place. I wasn't 100% happy with that though, so for the new instance I got an HDMI adapter. Good thing I already had some HDMI cables around (and that I'd spent considerable time sorting cables over the weekend). Wouldn't want to have to buy a cable on top of the near $40 for the adapter. It's a nice compact thing though and does have a USB split off of it so that you can plug in the power while you're using it. That's something I was thinking would be a good idea with the VGA adapter I already had (which doesn't have that capability).

For the old set I got a composite cable/adapter. It was also on near $40. I'm telling myself that there's some electronics in the thing and not just pin switching. Otherwise the Apple folks have been taking lessons from the Monster Cable folk. This cable also has the power split, although if I leave it set up like I think I will I might wind up needing another wall wart for it.

Here's the kicker though. Both arrangements work swell. I even managed to get one of the sets to resize the thing to the screen in a way I hadn't been able to before (in the original setup the picture was sort of narrow and off center and I could never find the right control). The rub? HBOGO disables the external viewing option. So if you want to watch that library you have to do it on the screen on the tablet.

I think this is a little odd as you can use an external monitor for a laptop when doing HBOGO from the web. Its just the apps on the mobile device that has the restriction. We surmise it's because they don't want you taking your 3G mobile device to someone else's home, where there is no HBO, and watching their content on a real screen.

But then there is 3G internet for laptops too, so that's not a great reason.

So a little bit this renders the cable on the old TV moot because we had the capability to stream Netflix through the Wii already. The interface is a little better on the tablet, so we get that, and there's anything else we might want to get on a big screen: photo slideshows and the like.

But no HBOGO.

Makes an already expensive cable seem even more expensive.

In Which I Fail

to update my phone.

Ages ago I stopped updating the OS on my iPhone. I have an older one and everyone that did it had a crappy experience. It was even in the news at the time that the OS really wasn't working correctly with the older models. So although I had diligently updated from purchase until then I gave up.

Not so long ago I stopped really syncing my iPhone to my computer because it started to crash out saying I was missing a .dll file. I know this is probably one of the many downsides to inter-operating windows and apple products but up until then it had worked ok. Eventually I discovered if I told it not to sync the address book that the process would complete. Although I'm not so much certain what I am syncing if I'm not syncing the address book. I manually sync music, I don't view videos on my phone, I manually sync photos. I guess it is syncing apps, but I really don't know why.

Pretty recently I even stopped the no-contact syncing. The process was taking literally hours. For what little benefit I could discern it seemed like a very long process with very little payout.

Recently I've started to notice my phone crashing a lot. I mean it's old and the apps coming out recently aren't really optimized for this phone, and certainly not this OS so it's understandable that there might be problems. I've lived with it a while but the loginess and the crashing have started to get to "irk" on the irritation scale. I think it is time to bite the bullet and upgrade the OS.

I've been thinking about how long it takes to sync and wonder if the cable or the port might have something to do with it. I did a bunch of plugging and replugging and cable swapping to no improvement. I remember a co-worker telling me once he couldn't get his device to work because his iTunes was out of date, so I upgraded that.

When I went to upgrade the OS it told me there are unsynced purchases on my phone and that I should sync first. So I did. That took that whole evening. When I came back a second time to sync the thing it said there were unsynced purchases on my phone and I should sync first. Deja vu. It's at this juncture that I remember that I have only once actually paid for an iPhone app. So I guess there might be unsynced apps, but none that actually cost money - and frankly a few I wouldn't actually mind losing. I've never purchased music with my phone. In light of that realization I just clicked through and started the upgrade process.

Of course the first thing that happens in this process is backing up the phone. That took the better part of an hour and at the end it announced that there were 500+ sync discrepancies. I could go through them now or later. I picked later. I'm guessing this has something to do with the non-syncing of the addressbook. But truthfully in hindsite I don't think I have that many contacts, certainly not that many that have changed much. Maybe there's an iPhone, Outlook, Thunderbird, Plaxo problem here. One more thing for the list.

After clicking through the upgrade started, but after 30 minutes there was only one little nub in the progress bar, so I aborted. So that's two attempts, North of five hours, and no dice.

Any ideas?

Stop Everything

Here's an iPhone App I would like someone to get on. It would be called "Stop Everything" and it would do that.

For reasons beyond understanding the battery life on my phone is really very unpredictable. When I ask all the other iPhone toting people around me they all seem to think that "it's probably doing something in the background." That's after they ask if it is pushing email (which it isn't) or if Bluetooth is enabled (which it isn't either).

I have this suspicion that the culprit is actually the wifi at work. I think the phone is acquiring and dropping and acquiring and dropping all day long and that each time it does that it looks for the 3G and then authenticates with the wifi and then looks for the 3G and then authenticates with the wifi. And that all that churning uses juice.

If I am right then the answer might just be to disable the wifi. But what's the point of having wifi if you can't turn it on?

Now I had been under the impression that the iPhone build I have actually doesn't do anything in the background. Isn't that one of the touted features of the next release? But maybe it does, or maybe when you start something and then click away, perhaps it finishes what you started. More than once I have unlocked the phone to find the iTunes player going - which I can only imagine is a result of my randomly pushing an intricate series of fingerstrokes in my pocket, without putting my hand in my pocket. But I digress.

So if it is possible that the thing is running apps in the background, keeping track of my location on a map, or playing tunes, or searing for movies or whatever it's doing, I would really like a button that just says "STOP EVERYTHING!" Becuase as it is you have to go from app to app hoping to find something that looks like it is being the Dracula to your battery. I don't know about you, but I never really think I find anything.

Or, maybe the case is always pressing a button. Hmm.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple iPhone OS Update Includes Copy/Paste and MMS (textually.org)
• iPhone 3.0 feature predictions: TUAW report card (tuaw.com)
• iBluetooth Lets iPhone Users Send and Receive Files Over Bluetooth [IPhone Apps] (i.gizmodo.com)
• Fastmac iV iPhone Charger and Backup Battery Lightning Review [Review] (i.gizmodo.com)