Nagel Family Website

I’m a geek, and was quite proud of this set-up I’ve got going on. We’ve got a hot tub outside, and during the cold Buffalo winters, if there was a problem and the lines froze, I’d be S.O.L. So through the miracle of modern technology, I’ll know if a problem is coming.

First, you need a temperature sensor for the Hot Tub. I use the Wireless Temperature Sensor with Cabled Probe. The temperature sensor is secured inside my filter, and the transmitter is mounted to the outside of the tub. Now I did have the Waterproof Floating Remote Thermometer, but they’re not really waterproof. Soak it at 105° and turn the jets on, and water gets in there.

Now you need something to grab the signal from the wireless transmitter; I’m using the WMR968 Complete Wireless Weather Station. I also have all the other sensors hooked up, including the outdoor temperature sensor. This is important… I’ll show you why later.

OK, so the transmitter is sending data to the receiver, which then feeds it into your PC. We now need to make this data readily available, which is where VWSql comes in. This handy bit of software sends the data to a MySQL database. Oh yeah, almost forgot… you need MySQL and some sort of hosting.

NOW, write a quick PHP script… get the data “select * from weather order by RecDate desc limit 1″ and check the temperature:

if (
($rsWeather['CH2Temperature'] < 70) &&
($rsWeather['OutdoorTemperature'] < 50)
) {
echo("too cold!");
} // ends
else {
echo("OK");
} // ends else from


What this says is if the Hot Tub is under 70, and the outdoor temperature is under 50, it’s too cold! Otherwise, it’s OK. This is why the outdoor temperature sensor is important, because if its 80 outside and the water is 70, that’s OK… it’s not going to freeze.

Finally, set-up a check in pingdom. I have pingdom check my page every 30 minutes, and under “Optional Settings” I set “Check for string on page” “Should contain” “OK”. If it’s down just 1 time, I get a TXT message to my phone.

So if you’ve got some unused checks in pingdom, put them to use!

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve been using Google Chrome for a while now… probably 3 weeks. I like it, although I do go back to Firefox when I need to edit cookies, measure things on the screen, watch headers, or do other things that I have Firefox plugins for.

What bothers me about Chrome is that it’s not integrated with other Google products nicely. Two prime examples:

1. I can’t write an HTML email in Gmail because Gmail doesn’t recognize Chrome as a browser that supports their WYSIWYG editor. Didn’t the Gmail people know Chrome was being developed? Don’t you think at least ONE of the Chome developers uses Gmail and realizes this is going on?
2. Bookmarks are not integrated with Google bookmarks. So now I have Google Bookmarks, Chrome Bookmarks, and del.icio.us bookmarks. Right now I’m cleaning up my Chrome bookmarks, which are typically temporary things that I just don’t want to lose as I find them, and either moving them into del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks. This needs to be integrated better (user option).

Common, Google. At first, I was joking about being your Director of Common Sense, but maybe you really need one…

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Last Sunday, we were up at my in-laws cottage in Canada when Laura remembered that she hadn’t set the Tivo to record something that night. The challenge was set forth. I got out my Motorola Q and fired up Internet Explorer. Typically, I don’t get coverage up there, but the weather was just right that I was able to get a signal from across Lake Erie.

I logged into my DirecTV account and got to the DVR Scheduler and set it to record Disney from 8 to 9pm. Imagine my surprise when we got home and it actually worked!

Searching for the TV show didn’t work at all, so I just guessed at the time and got it. I don’t know if it was called something else, but I searched for lots of things & nothing gave me the result I wanted (I wanted to Tivo Studio DC but only found Hannah Montana in the guide).

The DVR Scheduler is a free add-on from DirecTV. If you have DirecTV with DVRs, do yourself a favor and set this up now, so when you need it, it’s ready.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

This weekend I added a cat-5 line from my office to Laura’s PC, but then realized I had nowhere to plug it in up here. So I had to add a switch to the network. This is pretty full for a home network, if you ask me:

What we have here, from left to right, is:

• SimpleTech USB drive - this is used as a backup to the…
• Buffalo Link Station NAS - which holds my MP3 collection & all photos.
• Next is the Linksys WRT54G3G Wireless Router (WRT54G3G-ST) which I use with my Sprint broadband card as a backup network connection, in the event Time Warner goes down.
• Next to that (blue, horizontal) is my new Linksys 8-Port Switch. I had to add this recently to accommodate Laura’s PC being added to the network via a wired connection (previously, she was wireless).
• Next to the switch is my cable modem. I lease this from Time Warner for my Roadrunner internet access.
• Moving along, the next thing that looks like it belongs on the International Spacestation is the Linksys WRT350N Wireless Router. This takes the connection from my cable modem and begins all that routing magic. It’s also a very powerful wireless station. This allows me to work from my livingroom or back deck.
• Finally, there’s 2 Vonage phone adapters. Why 2? I first had one for my business lines (2 lines - phone & fax). Then I decided to switch to Vonage for my home service, and had to add another.

So there it is - my messy home network. I’ll spare you photos of the hole in the wall that I created on Saturday. I was trying to drop a line inside the wall, but after hours of trying, I gave up & ran the line outside along with the cable / satellite lines.

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Remember I gave an idea a while ago on how to make driving directions better? Well now that idea has a name, IQ Routes, and TomTom is using it. Apparently this was announced back in March, while I suggested it in February of the previous year. No, I didn’t get any credit for this idea

The new TomTom IQ Routes technology is based on actual average speeds on roads, rather than the posted speed limits. This intelligent routing technology is based on anonymous historical speed profiles of over 6.2 billion miles of driven roads, gathered over the years by millions of TomTom users. It takes into account all the factors that may influence the time it takes drivers to get to their destination, including traffic lights, rotaries, steep slopes and speed bumps.

The TomTom IQ Routes speed profile database continues to grow at the rate of over half a billion measurements per day, so the time and spatial accuracy of TomTomIQ Routes technology will continually increase.

This pushes TomTom way up the ranks of GPS companies. Maybe even past Garmin. Although I am happy Garmin took back my 2-1/2 year old refurbished StreetPilot to put a new battery in it for me

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I had to install the Zend Optimizer on my server the other day; I have a Plesk dedicated server with GoDaddy, which uses IonCube (I think for Plesk itself). Anyway, I came across some problems which I imagine are pretty common, so here are the solutions.

Getting the IonCube error?

The Loader must appear as the first entry in the php.ini file in Unknown on line 0

The answer can be found here.

I created a “zend.ini” file with the Zend lines from php.ini in there and placed it in /etc/php.d.

zend_extension_manager.optimizer=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.0
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.0
zend_optimizer.version=3.3.0a
zend_extension=/usr/local/Zend/lib/ZendExtensionManager.so
zend_extension_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/ZendExtensionManager_TS.so

That fixed this error. Then I had a new error, “Fatal error: Unable to read X bytes in file.php on line 0″, which I found the answer to here.

So upload the files in binary. Now I have Plesk + ionCube + Zend Optimizer all installed together

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.