Food-Safe Filament

If planning to 3D-print items that would come in contact with food, it's wise to make sure it's food-safe.  The MakerGeeks store has a page listing a number of options.  t-glase filament I'd seen on Amazon as being food-safe.

VPN on Synology

Synology has a built-in VPN server, which is pretty nice.  Their knowledgebase details how to set it up.

Form 1 Forums

Once SD Tactical got their hand slapped by the ATF for selling solvent traps, their forum was gutted.  Someone else started a forum for Form 1 builds, which appears to have a lot of good info.  Well, I have stamps for at least three Form 1 cans that I haven't built yet....

One useful thread is the list of solvent trap manufacturers.  Another thread posted a link to B-tube-sized cones (not drilled).

HK91 Locking Piece for Sound Suppression

In order to use a can on a PTR-91 or other G3/91 clone, apparently it's necessary to use a different locking piece that slows down the bolt carrier with the increased back-pressure.  Rim Country Manufacturing sells a #17, 36° part that fits the bill.  $50 ain't so bad.  They also have US-made trunions, bolt carriers, and bolt heads for MP5- and 53-type actions.

Extending the Life of SD Card in Linux

Around the time I was looking at RPi power save, I was also checking into how to mitigate the effects of regular writes to the cheap SD card.  (Well, not so cheap, since I buy Samsung NAND.)  One link I found had references to several other sites.  The answer on the StackExchange page was pretty useful.

Amusingly enough, I left the HomeGenie event stream enabled for debug, which was generating output every 30 seconds...for at least a year.  I'd imagine the card is pretty well worn by now.

The Fake Internet

Apparently news isn’t the only thing that’s fake—much of the Internet is too!

LG TV

The 55UK6090PUA was on sale at Sam’s Club for $400. The picture was better than the comparable Sharp, and it was made in Mexico instead of China.  Another demerit to the Sharp was that the model in-store wasn’t listed on the manufacturer’s website, which gives me the heebie-jeebies.

What I didn’t care for in the LG is the lack of smartphone apps to control the onscreen display, like the Sony has, but if mainly using the Apple TV, the iPhone app can be used.  Overall, though, it was a good value and the picture is quite good.

HomeGenie

Well, I've had a motion sensor sitting around for at least a year, unused because I couldn't get it to work with HomeGenie.  Turns out I was just overlooking a comment in the settings to associate the device with group 1, as noted in an archived forum post.  (Yeah, I could use SmartThings instead of a roll-my-own system, but I figure it'll be harder for people to futz with an oddball config.  Plus, the homebrew system isn't open to the Net: I have to connect via VPN in order to get access, unlike SmartThings.)

Then there's linking the switch to the sensor with the built-in "Smart Lights" program.  That was disabled so I enabled it an it shut off the lights once, but the sensor appeared to have gone to sleep.  Getting closer, but not quite there yet.

Oh yeah, since the Pepper1 database of Z-Wave devices used by HomeGenie was shut down, as noted in the new forum, there's an alternate location to query.  I'll have to download the newer version of HomeGenie to see if they've picked up this newer site; otherwise, one can add one's own devices to a local archive.

One blog post I read when I was setting up my automation compared HomeSeer, HomeGenie, and Domoticz.  The author preferred Domoticz, but I don't like the idea of having a separate library for Z-Wave.