Capacitive Touch Button Failure on Looking Glass Portrait can be solved with a better USB-C PD power supply

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I’ve had re-occuring issues with Looking Glass Portrait displays where the touch sensitive capacitive buttons (Forward, Back and Play/Pause) would not work. (Either straight out of the box, or intermittently.)

After a lot of back and forth with Looking Glass (and them shipping me 4! replacement units) I was finally able to determine that the issue is the provided CHOETECH USB-C 20W PD power supplies. (Which apparently don’t work well on the 110-113 volts AC at my house, even though they are rated at 100-240 volts AC….)

I’m not sure if it is a power issue, or some type of noise/frequency that the power supply generates when running on voltages close to the bottom end of its range, but I can reliably fix the issue by changing over to using my Google Pixel 4A USB-C PD power adapter to power the Looking Glass Portrait.

 

 

EcoQube C+ acrylic lid

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I bought an EcoQube C+   (3 gallon aquarium/aquaponics system with a built in spot for a few small plants) from a discount deal of the day website (after their Kickstarter imploded…and somebody offloaded the product).   The model I got was the EcoQube C+ UV, which has a small box containing UV LEDS just after the pump, that supposedly keep algae and other bad stuff from growing in the water.

Of course, it didn’t come with the plant growth medium that you are supposed to use in the four little baskets, so I bought some coco hanging basket liner and used a small strip of that in a loop to hold some perlite in the basket to support the roots of some sweet mint.

I noticed that the water was evaporating relatively quickly, possibly due to the large opening at the top. You used to be able to buy a glass cover for the 2 gallon EcoQube C, but it was out of stock, and probably wouldn’t fit the C+ anyways, so I decided to make my own out of 1/8″ clear acrylic.


This view with the protective paper still on the acrylic lets you see how it fits over the tank, and the following photo shows what it looks like when the protective paper is removed.

If you have access to a laser cutter, you can download my .SVG file to make your own: ecoCubeC+cover.svg

Or find it on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4924825

 

It’s August 1st, 2021, how is Orange County doing with COVID-19?

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For the week ending July 29th 2021, Orange County Florida had an average of 1,130 new cases per day. The test positivity rate over the last week was 18.2%.
This is worse than the highest previous peak in January.   The exponential growth can be blamed on the Delta Variant and the relaxing of masking and social distancing.

Historically, Orange County has had a case fatality rate of near 1%, so that would indicate we are due to see about 11 deaths per day in the near future, but as death numbers are no longer part of the FDOH weekly reports for counties I have no way of knowing if the case fatality rate has started to drop due to vaccinations of high-risk groups or has increased due to the Delta variant.

We have vaccinated (at least a first dose) 780,452 people (out of a population of 1,457,445, or 54% of the total. If you discount children 12 and under who are not yet eligible for vaccination, Orange County has vaccinated 63% of the eligible population.   We vaccinated 62,349 people in July (Compared to 65,206 in June, 88,482 in May and 151,176 in April.)

Hospitalizations

Although the FDOH is not reporting county level hospitalization numbers, we can assume that the admissions curves for Orange County are similar to the entire state of Florida.

AdventHealth has entered ‘black’ status and postponed all non-emergency surgeries confirming that they have more hospitalizations than in January, which matches the state level graph.

Nursing Homes

We are seeing a small uptick in covid-19 cases in nursing homes. According to the AARP, in Florida’s nursing homes “Roughly 3 in 10 nursing home residents and 3 in 5 health care staffers are not fully vaccinated. The state’s nursing home vaccination rates are well below national averages”.

End in sight?

In the United Kingdom, which was hit by the Delta variant earlier than the US, daily case numbers are starting to drop.   It may be possible that through vaccinations and “naturally obtained immunity” that the UK is reaching the herd immunity threshold. As the delta variant tears through the remaining unvaccinated population in the US we may see a corresponding drop in infections next month.

The Delta Variant, and why case numbers in Florida will continue to go up in July

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The Delta variant of the SARS-COV-2 virus is a version/mutation of the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans that happens to be significantly more transmissible than previous variants. This means that when the delta variant is introduced to a region, it will “take over” and become the predominant variety of SARS-COV-2 that is circulating. Because it is easier to transmit/catch, the number of cases also tends to go up in that region.

All of the following graphs are from the great covariants.org website. I encourage you to check it out and look at all of the country and state graphs.

For example, in the country of India, Delta (dark green in the graphs) was at 7% of all sequences in the March 8-22nd timeframe, and grew to 91% in the May 3-17th timeframe.

This pattern of Delta out-performing all other variants repeats in other countries and US states where it is introduced.
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How to access your Ubuntu partition if Windows BitLocker has overwritten your GRUB boot loader

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If you dual boot a Linux install alongside Windows 10, you may run into an issue where the Windows 10 BitLocker (full disk encryption) panics and refuses to boot your computer. (For example, if you make a change to the BIOS setting, and BitLocker thinks the hard drive has been moved to a different computer.)

The downside to this is that when BitLocker Panics, it may do so before loading the GRUB 2 bootloader, instead popping up a screen asking for your bitlocker “key”. [You DID save that key file in a safe place, right?]

However, even if you do not have access to your BitLocker key, it is usually possible to access (boot into) your Ubuntu partition (If you have a modern UFEI computer) . There are two possible ways to do this. The first is directly from the BitLocker key recovery screen. You can pick to “skip” this drive, and pick an alternate boot option, and one of the options will likely be your Linux/Ubuntu partition (because the UFEI system still knows about the Ubuntu boot system, even if the Windows Bit Locker has over written the Grub master boot record.

Alternatively, on my laptop at least, you could also interrupt the normal boot sequence and pick the “f12 – pick boot device” menu and the Ubuntu/Linux partition was one of the options (along with booting from a USB drive, etc…)

Once you have Ubuntu booted up, a simple:

sudo grub-install

in a terminal should get the GRUB MBR back where it belongs.

Failed Kickstarter projects

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Over the years I’ve backed sixty seven kickstarter projects. Seventeen were comics, graphic novels, audio books or magazines. Thirty-nine were hardware/physical product based projects. Five were software development efforts (open source libraries or software products, games….). And there were a few miscellaneous “support this group to do this thing” type of projects, or things where I only pledged $1 or $10 just to lend moral support.

My first failed KickStarter  (after 12 successful ones) was CST-01: The World’s Thinnest Watch
thin band e-ink wristwatch

The founders were very ambitions, and made great progress, but just didn’t have enough funding for this particular hardware project. I really wish that some company would pick up and run with this idea, because I still want one.
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It’s July 2nd 2021, how is Orange County Florida doing with Covid-19?

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Well, it’s hard to tell for sure, as the Florida Department of health has stopped issuing daily reports, and has switched to weekly reports. They have also stopped releasing per-county death numbers, among other omissions and simplifications.   You may notice that the graph I have to display is simplified this month.


What we do know is that the number of cases per week had been decreasing since mid-April, but in the last two weeks the number of cases per week has started to increase again. On June 1st the 7-day average was 145 cases per day, while as of July 2nd it is 171 cases per day, and the case positivity rate has raised to 5.3%.

Historically, Orange County had a case fatality rate of near 1%, so that would indicate about 1.7 deaths per day, but those numbers are no longer part of the FDOH weekly reports so I have no way of knowing if the case fatality rate has started to drop due to vaccinations of high-risk groups or has increased due to the Delta variant.

We have vaccinated (at least a first dose) 718,103 people (out of a population of 1,457,445, or 49% of the total). If you discount children 12 and under who are not yet eligible for vaccination, Orange County has vaccinated 58% of the eligible population.   We vaccinated   65,206 people in the month of June. (Compared to 88,482 in May and   154,176 in April.)

The rate of vaccination has slowed and I expect it to continue to slow, while the total number climbs upward slowly. I expect that fewer than 60 thousand people will be vaccinated in July.

I believe the uptick in case numbers is primarily among the un-vaccinated 51% of the population, due to a combination of the more infectious Delta variant and relaxation of mask usage and social distancing.

[Charts/Numbers used can be found in this open document spreadsheet: orange_county_florida.ods ]

Ring app on Android (3.40.0) suddenly became a background data hog

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In the month of May, the ring app cost me $40 (I pay $10 a GB for cellular data).

Having the ability to see what is going on around the house when I am away is worth spending some mobile data on…in March it cost me 54MB, and in April it cost me 318 MB (54 cents and $3.18 cents respectively). However, that is FOREGROUND data, that is actively used when I am streaming data in the app. Sometime after May 5th, the ring app started to download a LOT of background data. In fact, for the May5-June 4th month, I used 91 MB of foreground data, and the ring app used 3.95 GB of background data (that’s $39.50 it cost me).

[Soon after taking these screenshots, I disabled “Background data” for the ring app, which prevented it from using more excessive amounts of (cellular) data and costing me money.
Ring app using 4 GB of background data in a month

My current version of the ring app is 3.40.0, running on Android 11 on a Pixel 4A phone.
After I got the $40 larger than I was expecting bill in June, I quickly checked to see what was using all of that data, and found that the Ring app had used 1.27 GB of data in only a few days. To put that in perspective, it was using more data than Pokemon GO, which is usually my highest data using application.

 

The problem is not limited to cellular data, the ring app has become a massive data hog when on wifi as well (but at least since my wifi connection is not metered, it doesn’t cost me anything). Every so often when I am at home I will use the ring app to watch the video feed from a camera if I get a motion alert and don’t want to get up to look out the window. In March and April this usage amounted to around 1 GB and 1.7 GB of wifi data respectively.     But, in May, the ring app used 61 GB of wifi data!
I did not stream more video in May than in previous months, so this is primarily background data usage by the app.
Ring using 61 GB of wifi data

If I had to guess, I suspect that the ring app on android has started automatically downloading videos of motion that occur, EVEN IF THE USER DOES NOT WATCH IT! Perhaps this a feature designed to make the app more responsive if the user selects the notification to view the video stream, but when I talked with technical support, they could not offer any explanation for why this was happening or how to disable the high data usage.

Update – Ring app 3.41.0 appears to have fixed the issue

After the Ring app upgraded to version 3.41.0 on Android, I re-enabled background data and kept a close eye on it for a few days. Including a few times I was away from wifi on cellular data, the data usage was much more reasonable, so it appears that the ring developers have fixed whatever the issue was.

2.47 mb of data used over a few days