Switching Switches

Some of our light switches are in an inconvenient locations. So, at night when we turn these inconveniently located switches off or on, we spend some time in the dark as we stumble our way across the room.

Turns out, they now make motion sensing light switches. They look like this.


I installed two and we love what they do for us. When we walk into these rooms, the lights turn on. After we leave, they turn off automatically after a delay. In the process of getting these installed, I have become unusually knowledgeable about motion sensing switches.

First off, they sell both vacancy sensing and occupancy sensing switches. Occupancy sensing switches activate when you enter and turn off, after a delay, when you leave. Vacancy sensing switches turn on only when you push a button and then turn off, after a delay, when you leave. Product packages clearly state the type, except some may say "manually activated occupancy sensor" which apparently means vacancy sensor or perhaps some scientifically created breed derived from these two switch types.

But wait, there's more. Some work with compact florescence lights (cfl's) and some do not! The product packaging does NOT make this clear. IF the package says "fluorescent magnetic ballast lighting" THEN it will not work with cfl's. I like cfl's. I like them so much I will throw away a perfectly good incandescent bulb and replace it with a cfl. Almost all occupancy sensors sold at retail locations are of this type and they do not work with clf's.

There is a technical reason for this situation and it has to do with how houses get wired. In summary, some wall switch boxes have a neutral wire present and some do not, so stores sell the type that do not need a neutral wire to work.

Occupancy sensors are available that work with cfl's and they always require a neutral wire to operate. It took me some extra steps to find them, so I ordered 5.

Bonus outcome, we are using a little less electricity since we tended to leave these lights on more when we had to turn them on and off the old fashioned way.

Rick

Monitor Monitoring

My spouse does a lot of computing and usually has many applications and many windows open at once. Being the household IT person, I set her up with two monitors a couple of years ago using a dual output video card. She did not actually ask for the solution but ended up loving it and using both monitors commonly.

I continued to monitor her use of the dual monitors and found that even two monitors posed a limitation on many occasions. In her work she tends to cut and paste from several applications while also monitoring and replying to email.

Technology marches on and I figured that three monitors should now be possible. My first attempt to plug in a second video card for the third monitor did not work. Some computers can handle two cards, but not this particular computer. After some on-line research, I marched over to my favorite giant electronics store and bought a Diamond USB Disply adapter model BVU195. This small device connects to the computer USB port and a monitor. After installing the device software, it shows up as a third monitor on the computer.


It works great. I note with interest that this device can also be used to add up to six display devices so I will continue to monitor the situation.

Purse Problem Prevented

My daughter read my blog about repairing the zippers on a tent and asked me to use the same trick on her purse. The purse had two brass zippers and the trick with pliers worked on both.


I tightened up one zipper too much and had to pry it open a bit.

Reflecting on the Past

A while back when I had more hair, my son was creating a report on Helen Keller and for that he wanted to trace a picture from the front of a library book. In the past, we had traced pictures by first taping them to a window, but this was a book cover so that would not work. We did not have any tracing paper either.

But I did have a piece of glass in the garage, so using the glass and cereal boxes on our kitchen table, I set up this arrangement.

This second photo helps to show how it works.

I don't recall how the overall report turned out but I thought the picture was great.

Old School Tent with Old School Zipper

On the service project last week (See Water Level posting), we slept in tents and some of the youth used an old school canvas tent that we brought along. After the week was over, the youth shared that the neither zipper on the door worked. A problem but apparently it was not a big issue to them and they they lived through it.

So, when packing it away after our return, I checked out the problem. It had the classic failure that we have all see when the zipper slider did not knit together the zipper teeth.

Well, it is an old school tent and perhaps I could get rid of it, but not today. Since this is and old school tent, it had an old school brass zipper. Brass is bendable, so using pliers I tightened up the back part of the sliders. (By the way, you really must to do this trick only when the zipper is moved to the "start" position.)


The back of zipper sliders have a small box-like area where the zipper teeth mesh and exit. If the box is too big, the teeth do not knit together. I applied the same process to both zippers and they now both work. The old school tent lives on to go on another trip someday.

Bonus trick: If you have a zipper with brass teeth that seem to take a lot of pull force to close, sometime candle wax can solve the problem. Lightly rub the wax on the teeth then test by operating the zipper. Don't use birthday candles since the wax is too soft to work well for this purpose.

Fixed a Computer by Removing Software

On several occasions, I have fixed something by taking out parts. This can work with hardware sometimes, and in many cases, I have fixed computers by deleting software.

Two days ago I received a non-functioning computer that a friend asked me to fix. This particular computer has been prone to occasional file corruption anyway, but recently it stopped booting up and got hung partway through the XP start up process.

Since I usually have photos with my blog, here is a boring photo of the computer.


First, I used the free "Avira AntiVir Rescue System" bootable CD to check for viruses and it found some which it then renamed to deactivate them. (http://www.avira.com/en/support/support_downloads.html)

Since the master boot record was trashed, I used an XP install disk in rescue mode to fix the master boot record. Both the fixmbr & fixboot commands were needed in this case. Still in rescue mode, I repaired problem sectors on the disk using the "chkdsk /r" command.

Now it was boot-able but not really fixed since it had crash problems when defragging the hard drive. It turns out that it has some accelerator drivers from Intel that are not really compatible with Windows XP and this was causing read/write issues on the hard drive. Why these were there I don't know.

Solution: Use Add/Remove programs in the control panel to remove the bad software! Now if works great and my friend is happy. I like happy friends.

More Laptops to El Salvador

I finished rebuilding 5 more laptops and they left for El Salvador last weekend.


That make 15 so far.