Happy New Year! Smoke Alarms again…
I don’t appear to have written about it, but at some point early in 2025 we replaced our smoke alarms, so I didn’t replace the batteries during the 2025 New Year. Looking at previous years, even when I did write an entry for the new year, I don’t appear to have written about it since 2022… which is not great. I pinky promise I did actually replace the batteries (you’re actually supposed to do them during daylight savings time, but whatever).
The new ones are Red Smoke Alarms, recommended by our electrician who has installed heaps of them. I specifically wanted a few things out of them, which they fulfill: I wanted mains-wired, interconnected alarms, in all the locations that would be required if I rented the house out (not because we have any intention of being landlords, but I figure it would be the bare minimum that made sense, and also if we went to sell the house while they were still not-EOL I figured it would not lower the value of the house if it did not need retrofitting to be a rental), and I wanted an alarm suitable for the garage.
The last point was the sticking point, our sparky spent a night or two researching it and speaking with Red about it. It’s a finished garage, but not super well insulated, so it gets rather toasty in there, and of course the car starting and the dust probably aren’t great for them either. In fact, it killed the spare cheap-ass smoke alarm I put out there, which started chirping at about 11pm at night after only about a year, and it was not the battery that died.
So we ended up with three photoelectric smoke alarms - the back two bedrooms formerly shared one, but apparently it’s more effective for them to be within x mm of a bedroom door, and one between them would not suffice. Now I must stress, my compliance with these rules is possibly optional, as this house was built prior to 1997, but I think these rules are fairly good sense anyway, and a third smoke alarm isn’t that expensive. I think they’re all the R240RCs.
The garage has a RHA240SL heat alarm. This is less great than a smoke alarm, but between the dust and the heat, a smoke alarm just won’t really work in a garage for very long. It’s mains wired too, and interconnected with the others, so we’ll actually hear it instead of the faint chirp the other one did through the fire door that goes to the garage. It’ll take longer to raise the alarm than a smoke alarm would, because by the time a fire makes the room reach 55C it’ll already be quite a problem, but it’s better than no alarm at all.
So far we’re pretty happy with them - it remains to be seen whether we get the quoted ten years out of them, but our sparky has been pretty happy with them apparently.
Time server goofing
It’s been some time since I built a stratum-1 NTP server, and it’s mostly been chugging away. Not included in that entry is that I went back to Linux + Chrony due to NanoBSD support going away. I replaced the SD card with a mini-PCIe SSD, but never got around to putting FreeBSD back on it.
Yesterday, I elected to build another serial cable (as I’m unable to find mine) and have another go at it. But try as I might, I simply could not get FreeBSD’s install media (14.3 or 15) to show anything other than the bootloader and kernel log on the serial port, leaving me unable to proceed. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong there, but anyway.
I figured as I had it all apart any way, I might as well try fix the location stuff (it was set to position hold mode on the other side of the garage, so my error rates would in theory be higher than they should be), and that made me realize that I hadn’t written down how to connect u-blox’s u-center to the card without removing it from the APU.
It’s actually really easy, all you need is socat on the machine with the GPS card in it. Stop gpsd or ntpd or whatever might be hogging the serial port, and then redirect it to a TCP port using socat:
socat FILE:/dev/ttyACM0,b115200,raw TCP-LISTEN:9600,fork,reuseaddr
On u-center, create a new connection using TCP to the IP of your timeserver and your chosen port (not sure why I’m using 9600 here). You may also need to pay attention to the baud rate, mine is set to 115200 but yours may be 9600 instead.
It should light right up and let you alter all the configuration and whatnot, so while I’m in there what the fuck else can I break?
A while back a friend mentioned that Australia’s (well, and New Zealand) SouthPAN came online a few years back and that it’s possible to tell some older u-blox stuff to use it. Apparently (I do not know near enough about any of this) the process is:
- You need to enable SBAS if it’s not already (there’s a section in the configuration view).
- You need to tell SBAS module that it can use message 0 (test mode), because SouthPAN is not properly online yet so they send test mode messages instead so that nothing important actually uses it without opting in.
- The PRN for SouthPAN is 122. You may have other PRNs set (I sure did, mine defaulted to
120, 122, 124, 126-127, 129, 131, 134-135, 137-138), but apparently this might cause the receiver to lock onto the wrong PRN so I just removed all those and left 122 and 124 in (124 is apparently reserved for future use). - Apparently the spheroid datum is wrong, the default is WGS84 which will be slightly incorrect and Australia has their own standard, GDA2020 which has slightly different measurements. My receiver does not include GDA2020, so I set it to
USERand plugged the numbers I could find in myself, but I’m not entirely convinced I’ve done it correctly because again I have to stress I have no fucken clue what I’m doing here.
Anyway, I did all this and… nothing. It doesn’t appear to have done anything. Looking at the constellation view, I see SB122 listed but 0 signal. I then looked up where it is in the sky, and apparently from my point of view it’s to the east and rather low in the sky - that would make sense as my antenna basically only has a view of the western sky.
Also in talking to Avi, my receiver probably wouldn’t know what to do with an SBAS that was made in 2020 when it was EOL in about 2013 anyway…
While in the process of trying to get the antenna to see it, I managed to break the SMA connector. A bit of solder and some heat shrink appears to have gotten me out of the woods, but it’s become clear I really need an external antenna at some point (which means an active antenna - not cheap - and a lightning arrester with someone competent to install it, which is probably also not cheap).
But it’s working, and even after I set much more pessimistic survey-in parameters (1 hour at 25M, instead of 30 minutes at 50M) this morning it was happily back in position hold mode and the error margin is comfortably in the nanoseconds range, more than precise enough for my needs.
I’m fairly sure that basically all my error margin comes from a combination of the chipset of the aging APU1D4, and the fact that I only have a view of the western sky, but the satellites in the east are probably still being seen, weakly, by reflections off the colourbond fence on the western side of our yard.
That’s my guess anyway.
Update: 2026-01-01: Unable to leave well enough alone, I moved the APU as close to the window as I could, which let me put the antenna puck almost at the top of the ladder, stuck to a piece of metal on an alloy ladder. The result? It picked up the SouthPAN satellite, and claimed a DGNSS fix. Accuracy doesn’t appear to be any better, but apparently that’s because I did not wait long enough. I am thinking that I’ll buy an exterior antenna at some point in the near future though.
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Merry Xmas!
We had our big family get together lunch earlier in the month, so this Christmas was another in a long line of “let’s not make a big deal out of this”. We all agreed that we would try and buy things that were useful this year, as the previous years we bought a lot of “quantity over quality” crap that was good for a chuckle and then never touched.
I got a few neat things, including a Hutton Mug which was apparently bought back during the period earlier this year where I made that game (Elite: Dangerous) my entire personality for the second or third time (currently taking a break from it to play Arc Raiders instead). I decided not to drink from it, I will instead put it on the shelf in my office because it’s neat (so much for things I’ll use!).
They also got me the Lego Game Boy #72046, which I put together this morning. That set rules, 10/10, no notes.
For Christmas Eve dinner we once again had “Feliz Navidadas” (Enchiladas), and then today we just made up the usual grazing platter of oven-baked foods like Sausage Rolls, Spring Rolls, and we steamed some Bao buns. I ate entirely too much, and way too much garbage like cookies and such as well. Leftover enchiladas for dinner.
I took the entire week off work, but I have ducked in to chase up a few things here and there, but it’s been pretty great. This is the first time I’ve taken an extended time off around the new year and haven’t started some massive home improvement project, so I’m feeling rather rested!
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Pet Vet Woes
Earlier this month, right before our Christmas dinner with my family, we had to take Tiabeanie in to the vets because she had a spot of diarrhea that was persistent for a couple of days. I was expecting a partial blockage, but the vet after examining her concluded the most likely culprit was - and I keep telling everyone who will listen how much I love this term - “dietary indiscretion”.
That is, she probably ate something she shouldn’t have on a walk, and it upset her stomach. Knowing Beanie, that’s really quite likely. Anyway, they sent her home with some probiotic paste and some instructions, it cleared up, and she went back in for a check-up and they were pretty happy. Thus far, she’s not had any recurrences. That’s the third time this year she’s been into the vet!
But then immediately after the lunch, we noticed that Jemima was not herself. Because of the noise (my folks are loud, and there was a lot of them) it’s to be expected that the animals would be tired the next day, but Jemima was both very tired and not eating, nor pooping, all of which was concerning.
So we made an appointment for her, which involved actually setting her up at the vet, as she’s not been since we adopted her, and Horsham PAWS had her at a different vet. Whoops.
They checked her out and found a small lump that felt like an abscess on a tooth (a molar on the right lower jaw I think?), and she had a mild temperature. They sent her home with some antibiotics and meloxicam (which is terrifying stuff if you read the potential side-effects, I think it’s basically similar to Ibuprofen but animals handle it differently). Both of these can lead to soft stools, which they sure as fuck did, but at least she’s eating.
The course of these made her perk right up, and she was better on the follow-up (including temperature back to normal), but now we’re waiting for her stools to firm up…
She’ll likely go back in in January for a teeth clean and they can inspect things while they’re in there. I absolutely hate having one of our pets knocked out, but she’s done fairly well that she’s about 8 years old and hasn’t been to the vets since spaying.
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Oven: Fixed!
As noted last week, our oven died. I got a call this morning that the replacement element had come in, so we ducked over to pick it up, and then waited. By some Christmas miracle we managed to get it replaced (a rather quick job as I already had all the racks out and the old element removed), and while I was steeling myself to have wasted $110+ and for it to continue tripping the breaker, we were instead treated to the smell of the storage grease being burned off the element as it heated up for the first time.
Ours is a “Simpson 2001” - there’s apparently more specific model numbers but I can’t find them. Replacement didn’t seem too difficult, I am fairly sure I could have managed it myself:
With the breaker in the tripped position to isolate power, I removed the racks from inside the oven, and reached the back of the cavity. There are four screws holding the cover plate on, which should be carefully swung down as it holds the temperature probe on it as well. This will expose the fan and the element, which is ring-shaped surrounding the fan.
One screw on the left and two on the right will liberate the element, however it must be carefully maneuvered to get all three wires out the rectangular hole without breaking any of them (I’m not sure if this is actually a concern, I was sure worried about it). They are then simple spade terminals, be careful not to lose them down the rear wall as you might have trouble fishing them out. There’s a green wire that appears to be a ground connection going to the centre, and two white wires - I’m not sure if they need to go to specific terminals but I arranged them so that I would not confuse them when testing the element. I am fairly sure if you fucked up and put the green wire in the wrong place you’d immediately trip the breaker (if not damaging something else), but yeah.
Replacement appeared to be the exact reverse… connect the terminals, carefully get everything back in the hole, put three screws in. Put the cover back on, being sure to make sure the temperature probe goes back in correctly, and then hold your breath and turn it on. We had the extractor fan on the range next to it going full blast to evacuate any smoke from the grease, but it wasn’t really that bad, I don’t think we were in any danger of setting off the smoke alarm.
But it appears to have fixed it, so here’s hoping we don’t have to replace it just yet!
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