Month: July 2022

Radar on the Bike

When I first started to ride my road bike, it was just my ears that was primarily the oncoming car detector from the rear. As drivers begin to pass more fiercely, I started to ride with these inexpensive USB charged rear lights.

I got the this pair for like less than $20 CAD on Amazon. They last for about five hours and they typically don’t need to be charged on every ride, more like every other ride. Since I got two of them, I have one as a reserve and swap the other when the active one runs out of batteries. They also do not take long to charge, typically less than an hour or so.

When I upgraded my bike computer from the Garmin Edge 500 to the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, I was wondering whether I should get the Garmin Varia. At the time, I personally did not think it was worth it. These $300 CAD gadgets has a rear facing radar that detect passing cars, and relay their relative distances on your bike computer. The concept is seemingly, very cool, and it gives you about a 5 to 10 seconds warning before the oncoming vehicle actually pass you. The Varia also can detect and show multiple vehicles coming and it is pretty good in determining whether it is a vehicle or a bike that is passing you.

With the advent of the pandemic, it just seems there are more dangerous drivers out there when passing cyclists. I do not know whether this is a result of lower driving test standards, or simply people are out of practice because they are doing less driving. Regardless the reason, the result is more dangerous.

This week I spotted the Varia RTL515 on sale on Amazon, so I picked one up for $250.99 CAD. Also my wife was heckling me to get one. I guess safety is priceless afterall.

On my inaugural 50km ride with the Varia today, here are my thoughts on using the Varia. First the device and its vehicle detection worked extremely well. Throughout the entire ride, there was only one instance when the display showed no cars, while a car passed me in a split second. My ears still serve as backup. There was also an instance of a false detection, when a group of three cyclists were behind me.

Each detection comes with two beeping notifications. The first when it first detects one or more vehicles. The second when the way is clear. I am debating whether I should turn off these audible notifications. They were starting to get annoying after an hour, especially on busy roads during rush hours.

One area that does help a lot is when making a left turn, the device is a great early warning system whether there are any vehicles behind you. This is an excellent added assurance.

I think it is extremely easy for someone to take the detection results for granted, but I would say that this investment does not relegate the practice of checking your blind spot or cycling in a straight line into the whelm of extinction. In the end, it is just more information for you as the rider to process, but you will still have to judge your own situation (in the moment) and act safely and accordingly.

First Hydro Bill with Solar

I cannot believe that I am actually excited to receive a bill! Our first bill from Alectra Utilities covering the consumption period since our net meter was installed on May 4th has arrived.

Our July Alectra Utilities Bill Extract (click to enlarge)

This bill covered almost two and half months. As you can see from the above extract, we have given back a total of 2,763 kWh and used 1,621 kWh yielding a net of 1,142 kWh, which Alectra credited back to us at $0.115 / kWh.

The surprise is that this credit can be used to offset both the delivery and other added surcharges. It looks like we still benefit from any other regulatory and provincial rebates and they are incremental to our credit.

The net result of all of this is that not only did we not have to pay any electricity from May 4th until July 14th, a period which definitely covered some heavy air conditioner usage, we also generated $61.80 worth of credit on our account.

So, how much did we save? I looked back at our bills for the same period from last year (2021), and found:

From	To	Amount
2021-04-15	2021-05-13	$132.18
2021-05-13	2021-06-11	$196.41
2021-06-11	2021-07-14	$240.17

Amounts From Last Year’s Bills (from 2021)

Although we do not have perfect alignment for comparison since I cannot find a bill in 2021 that matches the May 04th starting period, I think it is clear that we have saved approximately $450.

Of course it is not only about the money, but this bill has confirmed that our solar system has the ability to not only to stay away from grid electricity (after netting everything out) but also to give some back even during the peak summer months. This is also a confirmation that our Toyota Prius Prime (a hybrid plugin vehicle) is now also indirectly funded by solar. We were not certain about this when we first design the system, so I am ecstatic to have this final confirmation!

Live Monitoring of Electricity Consumption in Ontario

Today I came across Gridwatch. This is an interesting web app that provides a live monitoring of Ontario’s current electrical production and consumption.

As the screen capture shows, we have a heat warning today. This situation is currently being shared by UK and Europe, where they are experiencing temperature in excess of 40ºC, clearly much worse than we have it here.

The hype of these high temperatures in the media caused me to wonder what is our current electrical consumption?

Which lead me to do a quick search on Google, and resulted in me finding the Gridwatch web app, and its home page:

Gridwatch Home Screen (click to enlarge)

Aside from how much electricity we are using, the most interesting part is the CO2e number which is currently at 81g/kWh. Since my solar installation, I have generated 6,450 kWh of electricity through the use of my solar panels from April 12 to today. Do some simple math, this means I have prevented 522 kg (~1/2 tonne) of CO2 emissions.

In a previous post, I mentioned that an average person in Canada uses around 14.2 tons of CO2 per year. From this perspective, we are just placing a dent on our overall CO2 footprint. However in this Reuters article, it claims that we have to remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2. If we do some rough math, the average per capita onus is (1 billion tonnes / 7 billion people) = 143 kg. Given our household is 4 people, we have an obligation to remove 572 kg of CO2 to meet the goal of 1 billion tonnes of CO2 worldwide removal.

I say we are pretty close! Okay, we can obviously do more and we will.

AirPods Pro Replacement

I purchased my AirPods Pro as soon as they were launched back in 2019. During the pandemic, I had one earbud replaced due to crackling noises when I moved my head. This replacement was performed under warranty, so Apple provided great service.

About two weeks ago the same thing happened with the other original earbud. I called it in, and was advised to book a Genius Bar appointment, which I did yesterday.

Today I went to the Apple Store, waited for 15 minutes, and they replaced both my earbuds no questions asked. Apparently to Apple’s credit, they found out that not one but both earbuds were defective.

The breakdown of the earbud was fortuitous timing. About a month ago, my wife informed me of this AirPods Pro Service Program. I did not think much of it because both were working. Now I am glad such a program existed.

When I first started to use the brand new AirPods Pro, I found out how bad my previous pair really were. The noise cancellation on these new earbuds worked twice as good as my defective pair.

Once again Apple Services can be dependent upon. I am glad to be sporting brand new AirPods Pro earbuds as a result of their service quality. These new earbuds will have a 90 days warranty.

What more can I say? I will continue to purchase Apple products not only because of their quality but also because of their prompt service and retail presence, a competitive advantage or feature that is often overlooked.

Rogers All Day Outage

Today we experienced the longest residential Internet outage that I have personally experienced since I have been a Rogers customer for more than 20 years.

My firewall records show:

As per the records above, one can observe that initial instability started at around 2:15am and then at around 4:51am it failed for a very long time. There were attempts at around noon and in the evening to resurrect the system. These attempts proved to be unsuccessful. In each of these attempts, there were issues with domain name lookups, and possible routing problems.

Our Koodo LTE on our mobile devices were able to make phone calls, but data rates were very slow. Usability was intermittent at best. To get the latest news, we had to resort back to our emergency radio.

We found out that this radio’s dynamo generator no longer works, and we should probably replace it soon. We tried solar but finally settled for batteries to operate the radio.

It turns out the whole country is impacted with specific incidences of:

Point of Sales (POS) terminal issues with using and clearing debit cards;
Work at home businesses can no longer function;
Issues with ArriveCan applications for those entering the country;
Possible 911 reception issues in certain areas;
This Toronto Star article has more.

I am writing this post at around 10:15pm. At this point the Internet is backup now longer than any of the previous Rogers attempts in fixing the outage. I hope we are up for good.

My speculation is that Rogers’ provisioning database was hacked and got corrupted causing the disablement of Internet access by all of their customers. This is my GUESS. I have no proof. We will see what really happened if Rogers choose to divulge such information in the near future.

There has been precious little information at this point on what caused the outage. My curiosity is piqued to find out what happened, and how Rogers can prevent this in the future.

Another NAS Storage Upgrade

Our home Network Attached Storage (NAS) media server is going below 4 Terabytes of free space. The Seagate IronWolf 12TB hard drives were on sale with Amazon offering them below $300. I figure that I swap out two old 6TB drives with these new 12TB drives resulting in a net increase of a further 6TB of storage.

The last time this was done was around two years ago when I replaced 4TB and 6TB hard drives with 10TB hard drives.

So far the mdadm and LVM storage architecture has proven to be very flexible. I am able to mix drives of different sizes and able to grow our media storage volume over time.

Previously I had to make two swaps, each swap for each drive in the array. Effectively I am changing two 6TB drives for two 12TB drives because they are in a Raid 1 array. I cannot swap both at the same time, because I have to incrementally sync the data from the old drives to the new ones.

This has always been inconvenient because it means opening the physical server twice. However, this time I used my USB 3.0 HDD dock. I inserted one of two 12TB new drives into the dock, and then I temporarily created a three disks Raid 1 array. Once the sync is completed, which took 10+ hours, I remove one 6TB drive from the array configuration and I then physically replace both 6TB drives with both 12TB new drives in the server chassis, and place one old 6TB drive into the dock. The 6TB drive in the dock is the one that is still in the array configuration. I then add the second 12TB drive that is already in the server chassis to the three disk array. Once again, a sync is required to accommodate the second 12TB drive. This also took 10+ hours. Once the second sync is completed, I can finally remove the second 6TB drive in the dock from the array and have the array returned back to a two disk Raid 1 array.

The above description is probably quite confusing, but this technique allowed me to just have a single down time for the server instead of two when swapping hard drives in the server chassis.

There will be an additional downtime when I grow or resize the LVM volume and file system.

After this upgrade I should have the following Raid 1 (fully mirrored) arrays:

An array with 2 x 8TB
An array with 2 x 10TB
An array with 2 x 10TB
An array with 2 x 12TB

The above four arrays are combined into a logical volume using LVM that results in a total volume size of 40TB (fully mirrored) or a little over 36TiB of usable space (increasing from the old 31TiB).

% df -h
Filesystem                        Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                              7.7G     0  7.7G   0% /dev
tmpfs                             1.6G  3.4M  1.6G   1% /run
/dev/sdj1                         454G   64G  367G  15% /
tmpfs                             7.7G   37M  7.7G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                             5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                             7.7G     0  7.7G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/airvideovg2-airvideo   37T   26T  9.1T  74% /mnt/airvideo
tmpfs                             1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/997
tmpfs                             1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda1                         5.5T  548G  4.7T  11% /mnt/6tb

As you can see from above, the /mnt/airvideo now has 9.1TiB free!

The NAS motherboard and CPU is now over three years old. I may give it a couple of more years before considering another hardware upgrade.