Another trip, another lesson (or more) learned

While I don't travel all that often, I do travel between 6 and 12 times a year. I have my routines down pat and usually get through the airport unscathed. On my most recent trip to Portland, disaster almost ensued. I arrived at the airport very early as there are limited flights to San Diego and had nothing left to do downtown; this turned out to be a great thing. Security line was long and I made it to the porno scanner. As I always do, I opted out of the scan. I was doing my best to watch my bags as I waited for a screener to come over, but it is pretty hard to do so. After 10-15 minutes, they finally found a screener for me to do my rub down, I mean pat down. This kind of delay is pretty routine when I go through Portland; I find this unacceptable. Also, I find it interesting that every family that was traveling with a child, the TSA officer let all members of the family go through the metal detector and not one of them had to go to the millimeter wave detector.

When asked what items were mine, I pointed to a bin and my backpack and told the screener that my suitcase was missing. Depending on the day, I shove my phone, watch and wallet in my backpack or my suitcase. This trip, I put my phone and watch in my backpack and my wallet in the bin with my shoes. I did, however, but my belt in my suitcase. This must have been an "oh sh*t" moment for them as they didn't seem to know what to do. The head person said that they'd review the video footage and try to locate the person that took my bag. I had my screening with a very nice officer who skipped over some of the baloney speech as he knew I'd been through it before. After the screening, they saw that a bag was left behind and searched it as I indicated it is likely that someone took the wrong bag. One officer found a pill bottle with a name on it, which allowed them to page the person and hope that the person would come back to the screening area.

I asked if they could use the passenger manifests and find out what flight the person was on and get the airline to grab the bag before the person boarded. I was told that they didn't have access to that information. This, of course, is completely false as the TSA can't do its job with the no fly list without knowing who is on what flight. A passenger search is a simple task as there are many a few thousand people in the airport and searching a database of that size takes maybe a few seconds at most. This is what really annoyed me (besides waiting for my screening) as they have enough information to locate my bag (unless the person left the sterile area).

Luckily they found my bag as it appears that the passenger heard the message over the intercom. The passenger was very apologetic and it was an honest mistake (OK, his bag really didn't look like mine, except that it was black).

I've learned a few things about this experience. First, I need a big piece of brightly colored duct tape on my bag. Second, I need to grab a Bluetooth LE beacon such as StickNFind or Tile and shove it in my bag. Even though the range isn't great, it could give me half a chance of finding my bag running up and down the terminal or setting up an alert when the bag leaves the area of my phone (this assumes that my phone isn't in the bag and isn't taken at the same time). Third, I really need to get into the TSA PreCheck program. I have no problems spending the $85 and submitting my fingerprints, but there isn't a facility close to me right now to process my application. Portland, however, has one so I'll try to set that up for my next trip up there if it works out. And the last thing is to speak up and get one of the officers to pull my bags off the conveyer belt right after it goes through the scanner.

Replacement for Google Reader

Google Reader has been dead for awhile and I've been trying out different options as a replacement. I had been using http://netnewswireapp.com on my Mac and found it to be a decent app. However, it didn't sync with anything and I didn't have a reader on my iPad or iPhone. While there are several paid sync services, I didn't want to go that route as who knows when they'll pull the plug and I'll be stuck again; also, I just didn't want a subscription.

I stumbled upon [http://tt-rss.org](Tiny Tiny RSS) and installed it on my virtual server. The web interface was good enough for me to get by and the iOS clients worked (not pretty, but worked). I made due, but just got an iPad mini and missed http://reederapp.com on my devices.

Today I again investigated what to do and found that Reeder and a Mac App called http://readkitapp.com supported a system called http://feedafever.com/. Fever looks interesting and is a $30 one time fee (I'd rather pay one time fees than subscriptions; it is a mental thing and really doesn't always make financial sense). However, after a bit of digging, it appears that Fever may not be actively developed, so I kept searching. As luck would have it, I found [https://github.com/dasmurphy/tinytinyrss-fever-plugin](a plugin) to Tiny Tiny RSS that mimicked the Fever API. I quickly installed the plugin, purchased Reeder and ReadKit, and was back in business syncing my RSS feeds.

Reading RSS on my iPad is great and while this solution isn't for the faint of heart (that seems to be my mantra...come up with solutions that work for me, but likely won't work for others...must be the reason I don't have any of my own products any more!), I'm hopefully this is going to work for me.

Fun with automation

Just over 6 months ago, I wrote that we started making our house a home. I haven't blogged in awhile as I've been consumed with the remodel project. While our project is not yet complete, we have finally moved into our castle (OK, it isn't a castle and isn't all that large, but it is our home). One of the things that I've been planning for is automating many things in the house. I've always had a fascination with home automation, but retrofitting a house wasn't all that attractive to me and I didn't budget for it. I've budgeted for it and made sure all the pieces were in place while the house was being remodeled. My use of automation is 3 fold:

• Security - turn on lights at night when motion is detected
• Forgetfulness - turn off lights after leaving a room
• Convenience or laziness - have 1 button to turn on the heat from any room in the house or 1 button to turn off all the lights in the house

There are several different systems on the market for doing automation and I chose a Z-Wave based system called VeraLite. I went with Z-Wave over Zigbee because there is more variety in types of devices and liked that there were more manufacturers of devices than with Insteon. VeraLite is kind of a hacker's box for automation. It runs Linux, has an active community, and allows people to create plugins in Lua.

I selected Leviton Vizia RF+ components for my switches, controllers, and outlets. I liked the styling of them and they go with the rest of the normal switches in the house. I have a bunch of them and getting everything to work has been a bit of a challenge. The controllers are kind of wacky and I'm still working out the kinks; apparently Z-Wave allows proprietary extensions in the protocol and the Leviton devices do this; VeraLite doesn't understand all of it. In addition, the mesh network that Z-Wave creates for everything to talk to each other seems to get confused a bit. I've gone through the "heal" process more times than I care to count and now everything seems stable. My house is just over 1600 square feet on 3 levels (it is a tri-level), so I'd expect the mesh network to work fine. Each level has a number of devices that act as repeaters and the main controller is located on the bottom level pretty much in the center of the house.

So now that I have it setup, what next? That's a good question. I've setup a few "scenes" that are pretty simple. For instance, I have the front outside lights come on when motion is detected at night (the motion sensors are not Z-Wave sensors, but hooked into a security system as I thought it would be more reliable and didn't require batteries for every sensor) and then they turn off after a few minutes. I have another scene setup that turns off the bathroom lights after 15 minutes if there is no motion; my wife has a bad habit of leaving the lights on which drives me crazy. I have a couple of other scenes for turning equipment off at night to reduce power consumption. I know I've only scratched the surface, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

Since I'm not content to leave well enough alone, today I worked on a plugin for Vera (I based it on someone else's work, but stripped a lot of it as my needs were different) that talks to my audio control units. So now, I can turn music on in any room of the house from Vera's web interface without having to get up and push the button on the wall. Some may think I'm quite lazy (OK, maybe I am), but this is going to be useful when we want to turn on music outside as my (somewhat) poor planning put the audio controls in awkward places for the outside.

I know that many companies are trying to bring home automation to the masses. I'll be watching to see how they do in the market. The concept is great, but it is really hard to make a one size fits all system that is extremely flexible. Without the flexibility, I think automation systems will be hampered. If I wasn't a geek and a developer, I don't think I'd touch automation at all; it just isn't ready for the average consumer.

Money hungry cable company

As most tech people have heard, Time Warner Cable has raised its modem lease fees from $4 per month to $6 per month. While I think that is steep, I don't really have a problem with it as it doesn't affect me. When they started charging the modem lease, I spent $25 for a used cable modem (I have a standard Internet package, so a DOCIS 2.0 modem works fine). My father has been paying the lease fee and asked me about it now that it is going up. The difference with him is that he has telephone service through Time Warner as well. Instead of a standard cable modem, he has an MTA which handles both phone and Internet in one box.

Time Warner doesn't charge a lease fee for the phone part of the box, but charges a fee for the Internet part of the box. Yes, you read that correctly; my dad is only leasing part of the box and the other part is free. If he doesn't want to pay the lease fee for the Internet part, he has to buy a separate cable modem (currently around $17 used on eBay), put in a splitter and hook it up. He does NOT return any equipment to Time Warner Cable. So if he does that, he would own his own Internet cable modem, and have a free telephone cable modem, but only use half of it.

This is absolutely insane; someone in corporate said that they must charge a lease fee for all Internet customers that use Time Warner Cable equipment. This makes sense except for telephone customers that don't have a choice, but to use the TWC supplied MTA. It is quite unfortunate that there is such a monopoly on high speed Internet; AT&T U-verse is an option, but their speeds and prices don't compare well to cable. We don't have FIOS in our area, so we're pretty stuck.