September 2004 Archives

If you have an original Eichler, this might be interesting to you.

There are two kinds of thermostats: 24 volts, a.k.a. "millivolt"; and baseboard, a.k.a. line voltage. The former is the sensible kind: the heater takes a low-voltage signal from the thermostat to determine whether to turn on. The latter is silly: the signal wires operate at the full voltage and current of the heating system, so when you adjust your thermostat, you're one insulating plate away from the trillion watts coursing through the heater.

The sensible kind has seen all sorts of great innovations with the advent of microelectronics, such as this:

Look at all those buttons. I wonder what they all do. Meanwhile, the line voltage thermostat industry's efforts in the 60 years since the last world war have brought us this gem:

Guess which kind is used in Eichlers.

Anyway, if you want the new gadget-type thermostat but don't want to spend thousands to put in a new central heating system to get it, then what you want is a neat contraption that acts as a relay between the high-voltage heater and any old millivolt thermostat. The neat part (since the relay needs a nontrivial amount of power to work the magnet) is it also has a little built-in transformer, so it's pretty much self-contained. Wow!

RSS feed of the form:

http://www.example.com/feed/tonight.xml?zip=94123

Every day there will be a new article with a suggestion about something interesting to do in your area, and maybe an online coupon for a local restaurant.

Certain concepts keep swimming around in my head lately. There must be some kind of wonderful union of them.

• RSS/Atom: subscribe to content so you don't have to keep checking websites for updates.
• RSS 2.0 enclosures: set up a daemon on your machine to download files linked in RSS feeds at night when you don't care about bandwidth usage.
• Bittorrent: swarm content quickly from peers.
• Peer to peer: if Bittorrent could be purely peer to peer, it would be easier to use it.
• Venti: file data (as opposed to metadata) is identified by SHA-1 hashes rather than locations.
• Zeroconf: easy discovery of people on your subnet.

The "wonderful union" is something where every morning you go to a local page on your browser that is like a newspaper containing all the channels you've subscribed to, and if the big files mentioned in the page (mp3, video) aren't downloaded yet to your local machine, they're swarmed to your machine from people close to you so you get them really quickly and without crushing some poor server that got mentioned on Boing Boing.