Technology

This weekend I finally broke down and installed a 2nd generation Nest thermostat in my house. They have a nice compatibility wizard which does a pretty good job of showing you how to wire up your Nest based on the wires you can see in your existing thermostat. There were two gotchas that their wiring diagram didn’t cover. Here is a picture of the old thermostat (a Rodgers-White):

Notice that there were two W wires. I’m not to sure what is up with that, I suspect that that one wire leads up to the humidifier. I ended up splicing the two wires together with a marette, and then connecting the spliced wire to the W connection on the Nest. This was not documented anywhere on the Nest website.

After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card.  A bit of google, and here is what I did:

1. Download the Android SDK.  In my case, I unzipped it to C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1.
2. Connection the phone via the USB cable to my computer.  When the phone asks for a device.
3. You’ll get the new hardware dialog, when prompted for the drivers, you’ll need to specify the location.  The Android SDK has the drivers, in my case they were at C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\usb_driver\x86.
4. Once you have the drivers installed cd to c:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\tools.
5. Type adb devices.  This should list all the Android devices that you have connected.  If you don’t see any devices listed, then you have a problem.
6. Type adb shell.  This will direct your commands to your ADP1
7. Now while at the adb shell, su to root, then : 
8. cd /data/data/com.android/providers.settings/databases/
9. sqlite3 settings.db
10. INSERT INTO system (name, value) VALUES (‘device_provisioned’, 1);
11. .quit
12. Reboot the phone
13. adb shell
14. am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings

Once all that is done, you should be enable to use your ADP1 as if you had a SIM card in it (we’ll except for the phoning part).

Today I got a new hard drive for my web server, to replace the one that died back in February.  Hopefully the new 750GB drive will serve me as well as (or better) the old 200GB WD Cavair.  I must admit, I was a bit suprised at how cheap it was to get such a big HD.

The first order of business was to move my web site off it’s current home and onto it’s new, more permanent one.  I went about installing Ubunutu 7.10 64 bit, and them VMware server 1.0.4 on the new computer.  If you Google it, are a lot of articles on installing VMware on Ubunutu.  However, I did run into one stumbling block:  with 64bit Ubunutu you need one more dependency: ia32-libs