Hard to imagine anything going wrong with this.
Category Archives: Weird
The Aztec Gods
Thoughts on California’s deranged revival of them.
UFOs
Some thoughts from Bryan Preston.
Another Weird Car Problem
My adventures in diagnosing the BMW made me decide to get another bluetooth OBD plug for the Toyota, and use an Android tablet as an extended dashboard. But I can’t get it to pair. My phone can’t even see it. It can see the one in the BMW next to the car in the driveway, but it can’t see the one that’s two feet away in the 2013 RAV4. The light is on, so it has power, and I turned the ignition on to make sure that it was transmitting, but no dice.
Another weirdness of the car (which may or may not be related) is that one of the keys doesn’t unlock the car electronically, and I’ve never been able to get it to go into programming mode to reset the key, despite following all the incantations of opening and closing doors and turning the ignition on and off that they say to do online.
[Update a few minutes later after a quick search]
Looks like it’s not just me.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Mystery partially solved. I plugged in a stand-alone OBD reader, and there’s no output. Maybe I need to look for a blown fuse?
[Monday-afternoon update]
OK, I pulled the fuse, clearly marked “OBD,” and it’s good. Now what?
[Bumped]
[Update]
I put the fuse back in, and now it works. Go figure.
Bill Gates
At what point do we realize that he is dangerously insane?
He does seem to have too much money. I think it was stupid of Buffett to farm out his philanthropy to him.
Deranged Space Barons Like Elon Musk
Jacobin mag wants to regulate him.
Sprinkler Update
So I got two free timers from Orbit after I called them.
I hooked up one of the new ones, and it still doesn’t work. There is supposed to be 24VAC at the terminal when it’s running, and the voltage is zero. Just to be sure, I checked the resistance on a couple of the solenoids, and it’s about 70 ohms (the reactance is no doubt quite a bit higher on AC). But clearly, if there is no voltage at the terminal, the solenoid isn’t going to open. I went to the Orbit site for troubleshooting, and it says that if there is no voltage at the terminals, the timer has to be replaced…
At this point, I’m wondering if the system is haunted.
[Update Saturday evening]
People commenting, go back and read the original thread. I’m not clueless. I’m pretty sure that if there was a short to ground, I’d see it when I measured the resistance on the solenoids.
[Noon update]
OK, it finally occurred to me to check that it was getting 24VAC input. It wasn’t. The upstream GFCI had tripped and the transformer wasn’t outputting…
One of the ones I took off had an indicator saying “No AC,” but I swear I didn’t see that when I was working on it. I now have five of them, four of them (AFAIK) functional. I’ll return at least three to Home Depot (since that’s how many I bought there).
[Update a while later]
And yes, I was a dumbass.
First The FAA
…now this: “The Department of Justice filed a request for a court order to enforce an administrative subpoena in an investigation into Space X on a charge of discrimination in hiring. According to the filing, the DOJ’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) said it received a complaint from a non-citizen in May, and Space X had not fully complied with information requests…”
I don’t know if this is hostility to SpaceX from the new administration, zealousness in “protecting” immigrants, or both.
Buffalo Man
“Prosecutors also said that Angeli ‘demonstrates scattered and fanciful thoughts, and is unable to appreciate reality.’”
Yeah, that guy will be totally unimpeachable as a witness in an impeachment trial.
Weird Technical Issue
So we put in a new irrigation system in the backyard a few months ago. I installed this timer, and it was working fine. But a few days ago, we realized that the sprinklers were no longer coming on.
Instead of waiting for the anointed time, I started them manually (that is, I pushed the “Manual” button that starts the sprinkler sequence). It started up, and started flashing the thirty-minute notification, then twenty nine, for the first station. But the valve didn’t open.
So I put a voltmeter on the timer terminals for it, and it read zero. Which of course explained why the solenoid wasn’t engaging. I finally concluded that the timer was no longer functioning properly, and since it cost less than thirty bucks, I just went to Home Depot to get a replacement.
After installing and programming the new one, I tried it again. Exactly the same result. It acts like its running the zone, but there is no voltage at the corresponding terminal. I sent an email to Orbit to see if they had any ideas, but haven’t gotten a response. I’ve followed the instructions to the letter. Does anyone have any ideas that I’m missing somehow?
[Afternoon update]
After being on hold for half an hour, I finally talked to someone at Orbit. I explained the problem, and all that I’d done, and she said, “Wow, that’s weird.”
They’re going to ship me two more in case one of them is bad. So it’s good customer service, at least. So I could set up a store to sell timers that don’t work.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that I didn’t tell the whole story. When I went to Home Depot to get the replacement, it turned out to be open box when I got it home, and it was dead. So I had to go back to get another one that hadn’t been opened, and that’s the one that acted like the first one, with no voltage output. So if I get the next two I’ll have five of the things, but I plan to return them. If the ones I get work, I might even return the second one they send, for store credit.