NEST Thermostat E23 or E73 Error code additional troubleshooting

I'm doing this little write up as a suggestion to help with Nest support troubleshooting. I ran into a situation that resulted in an incorrect diagnosis of a faulty thermostat by NEST support. If I'd returned the thermostat, it would have been a waste of a perfectly good thermostat.

I was getting either an E23 or E73 error code from the NEST. This is a complaint about no voltage coming from the 24vac red wire, but when I tested with a multi-meter, it was showing 24vac. There's an additional thing you can try to narrow down what's wrong:

1) Disconnect the cooling wires (on my system Yellow) but make sure the Fan Wire (Green,) Heat Wire (White,) and 24vac wire (Red,) remain connected.
2) This will cause the NEST to switch to heat only mode
3) Now that the NEST  has bypassed the circuit for cooling, it might then detect voltage on the 24vac wire, and the NEST will no longer be in error mode
4) This is an indication that the NEST is receiving power and is NOT FAULTY
5) This means the problem lies in the AC unit itself.
6) Locate the issue on the cooling call side in the AC unit. In my case, it was a tripped float switch due to a clogged drain line. Once the drain line was cleared, the circuit was remade and NEST happily worked in cooling mode again.

How to get a passport in Austin, a complete newbie's guide

So I recently caught a travel bug, and it was very disturbing to know that there was something holding me back from traveling wherever I wanted. I couldn't leave the country due to lack of passport.

Unfortunately, getting one isn't all that intuitive. Let me break down easy for you. This will be focused on Austin, TX.

1) Get your birth certificate. If you don't have it, you can easily get a copy mailed by filling out a request and paying online

2) Make a copy of your drivers license, front and back. The post office will probably do this for you if you forget, for 25 cents

3) Some post offices will take your picture for you, but it'll be easier to just go to Walgreens. They'll take care of everything for you and it'll cost about 13 bucks. You'll get 2 photos. Don't smile in the photos, as no one is ever smiling when having their ID checked at the airport or customs.

4) Fill out the "online application" at https://pptform.state.gov/ This won't actually do anything but fill in the form for you and present you with a PDF. 

5) Print the PDF (doesn't matter if its color or black and white) Make very sure your information matches your birth certificate, as this will be checked upon application. Do not sign it right now

Up to this point, the process is fairly well documented, but after this there's not as much info online.

6) You have all your stuff, but now you need to turn it in. You need to find a post office that accepts passport applications, Use https://www.usps.com/international/passports.htm to find a list.

Most of them will say they accept by appointment only. I called a few of these places and they all told me they were booked for at least a month.

There are a few that will list hours. These accept walk-ins. I had horrible luck with Bluebonnet station, and the google reviews seem to indicate everyone else did as well. I went to the Northeast Austin branch (on Blackson Ave) and there was no line on a Monday morning.

7) Go to the post office of your choice, go into the main area, and look for a signpost guiding you where to stand. At the Northeast Austin branch, it was furthest away from the entrance in a separate line from all the other business. Your application will be handled by one of the normal postal workers, so don't worry about trying to find someone "special" for passports.

8) One of the nice post office people will call you forward. They will take your birth certificate, the copy of your drivers license, one of your passport photos, and your application. They will also need to see your drivers license, so have that out. They will return your drivers license but keep everything else. 

9) They will ask you to raise your right hand and affirm you're telling the truth about your application. Do so and answer the questions.

10) They will collect payment. This bit is tricky. Part of the fee is for the post office, and they can take any form of payment, but the passport part of the fee requires a check or money order to be sent along with your application. You can use a debit card or cash to create a money order, but NO CREDIT CARDS WILL WORK FOR THIS PART. 

11) They will tell you when to sign your application

11) You're done  Now you wait. 

So... Taco Bell breakfast, a review:

So...
Taco bell breakfast
A review:

I sort of accidentally stumbled on Taco Bell's new breakfast menu on my way to work. I was getting some gas and was also hungry, when what should my eyes behold but a lone and wayward Taco Bell across the vast desert (parking lot) proclaiming BREAKFAST. I didn't know at the time that this was the very first day of Taco Bell's new plan to dominate the AM the way it dominates late night self-hating food runs, by mixing 4 or 5 different ingredients about 600 different ways. Read on for my thoughts!

• Waffle Taco: A waffle/bread type thing with sausage, egg, and melted cheese. Actually pretty good seasoning and flavor on the sausage and the "waffle," cheese was nice, eggs were a tad uninspired and flavorless. This would be a win were it not for the WAVES UPON WAVES OF FINGER STAINING GREASE. THINK OF THE GREASIEST THING YOU'VE EVER EATEN AND THEN DIP THAT IN A BATHTUB FULL OF CORN OIL. F**k napkins, this should come with a very absorbent bath towel!

• Bacon Breakfast Burrito: You know how boring normal taco bell tortillas are? Well imagine that but with some flavorless eggs, bits of bacon, and cheese in it. Not bad, but not at all great. Whataburger does it so much better, and has an actual bacon strips in it instead of chopped up sadness.

• AM Crunchwrap with sausage: Surprise, this one is actually kinda good. It's a stuffed tortilla with sausage, hashbrows, eggs, cheese and some sort of spicy sauce. It actually balances well, and the sause is pretty delicious. Kinda convenient for car eating as well.

In appreciation of the CD changer

You probably spend a lot of time consuming music, but how much do you consider HOW you consume music? Smartphones are cool and they let you carry around a ton of music at a time. Or maybe you're a streaming music user, with your Pandoras and Spotifies? But loading music on an iPhone is kind of a rigmarole, and I usually just end up hitting shuffle on the last 200 hundred added tracks anyway. I've remarked before that my musical ADD tends toward singles, but what if there were another way, to go a little deeper?

There is, and it's an old way: The CD Changer. Some of you may not have ever even used one of these things. Most of you, unless you owned an car with a fancy stereo system, or just had to have a tape deck up front for your existing (and I'm sure awesome) tape collection, realized it was much easier to keep a big binder full of CDs and switch them out up front. For those who've never had the dubious pleasure, this thing was usually mounted in the trunk, and you loaded 6 to 10 CDs in that little cartridge, and you could select any disc by number from the head unit up front. However, since changing CDs was a bit of a pain and you usually don't spend much time in your trunk, you tended to get stuck with your 10 CDs for longer than you'd've liked.  

But there was one thing it was good for, and that was letting you get deep into your CDs. You listened to them over and over and really got the complete sound an album was going for...call it a forced appreciation. So, in my quest for sonic bliss, I decided maybe it was time to try it a little old school. But, since for some odd reason no one sells a CD changer or anything that you can plug one into, I went with a USB stick full of 10...just 10, albums. It works exactly the same. You choose a folder, you get the tracks, and only the tracks. There's no 2000 song mega-mix playlist. There's no shuffle all, nor a 5 star rating system. It's just music, one album at a time.

So far, it's been pretty fun, and I swear I can almost hear that mechanical whir-click of the discs switching...almost.

Dear Tech industry, stop treating "niche" like it's a dirty word

Dear Tech Companies,

I've noticed a rather disturbing tread in the modern technology ecosystem. This new attitude of discontinuing products and support for anything that's not wildly popular with a hand wave and an explanation of "it was a niche product, used by a handful of users." It happened with Windows Media Center, it happened with damn near everything Google has ever released, including Google Reader. Yes, us weirdos doing weird things with your products may not be legion (although I often suspect the number of users are often downplayed when they announce cancellations) but we're important.

When you release some untested and untried new idea, wobbling on its baby-deer-standing-up-for-the first-time unsteady legs, who do you think are the first people to try it, embrace it, and evangelize it? We ohh filthy early adopters. We pave the way for these products to become polished and easy to use. We provide feedback and most of the time free testing. We are arguably responsible for some of the success of your biggest money-makers.

I realize everyone needs to make a profit, but please try to consider us in the whole technology ecosystem. Throw us a bone. We don't expect experiments that never took off to get months of developer hours and support love. Most of the time, we just want the products and services that we've been using for years to stay working. We'd probably pay to keep half the products around that you burned to the ground.

We may be doing strange, geeky things, but we were your biggest fans and customers first, and geeks built this industry from the ground up.

Fixing HDHomeRun ClearQAM channel tuning on Time Warner in Austin: A guide

There are quite a few compelling reasons to roll your own DVR. For one, if you've already got a Home Theatre PC, a tuner can be had for relatively cheap. For another, if you're running Windows, you've probably already got the software, and despite Microsoft working their hardest to kill it, Media Center is still a very good DVR.

Since I wasn't even going to entertain the thought of trying to setup a cable card, I picked up a SiliconDust HDHomeRun DUAL. I have lifeline cable through Time Warner, and so I thought I'd screw it into the wall, set it up and get a nice broadcast network DVR. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite so easy.

Basically, Time Warner has some really screwy channel encoding on their ClearQAM transmissions, and Media Center wasn't picking up half the channels at all, and the other half were being tuned to the wrong network. Here's how to fix it:

1. Follow the HDHomeRun setup instructions. Get it onto your network and plugged into Time Warner
2. Follow the directions on this page, under the heading software installation
3. In the HDHomeRun setup utility, uncheck invalid channels. I actually disabled everything that wasn't a broadcast network, since that was all I wanted to record. I also disabled the Spanish speaking channels. I ended up with about 11 networks enabled. 
4. Follow the directions on the HDHomeRun page under Windows Media Center - Configuration
5. You'll now notice that media center is completely messed up. Channels will be tuning to the wrong networks, and half the networks won't show up. 
6. Exit Media Center
7. Download Guide Tool, run it, and allow it to populate your channel list. I had several hundred channels that were all garbage.  Compare these to the list in the HDHomeRun setup utility. Delete every channel that isn't a legit channel.
8. Get Guide Editor from this page. WARNING: This tool has no documentation and is not at all intuitive 
9. If you look at the merged lineup tab, you'll notice your networks. Pay special attention to Source Channels. The first you'll see is a channel number and WMI. As far as I can tell, this is an internal "channel" used to sync and update guide data.
   
   The important bit is what's after. You'll see channel number followed by [2 devices] This SHOULD match the QAM tune value in your HDHomeRun setup utility, for example: Channel 7.1 should say "7.1 [WMI], 6.6[2 devices]" It will however, probably have some other value, probably another channels QAM tune value. 
10. Now, delete every channel with an incorrect value
11. Now it's time to add your channels back correctly. Click over to the Scanned/Wmis Lineups tab
12. Select "Scanned (Digital Cable (ClearQAM))" in the Select a lineup dropdown
13. At the bottom half of the utility, you'll see a section to add a channel.
    * Go back to your HDHomeRun utility and locate the first network.
    * Copy the Guide Name (KTBC-HD) in HDHR to the Callsign box in Guide Editor
    * Copy the Guide Number (7.1) in HDHR to Guide Channel# in Guide Editor
    * Make note of the Tune value in HDHR, then change the Channel # field (under Tuners to use for this channel) to match. For example, if HDHR says CH6 - 61) set the first box in Guide Editor to 6, and the second to 61
    * Verify "Create a new channel in the guide using this source channel" is checked
    * Locate the dropdown under Listing for new channel. Click it, and find the channel number associated with the network, for example: 7.1 - KTBCDT - KTBCDT (KTBC-DT)
    * Click create channel
14. Click back over to the Merged Lineup(s) tab. You should now see your channel with the correct Source channels values. For example, 7.1 will now say 6.61 [2 devices]
15. Go back into Media Center, locate the channel you added and verify its guide data is correct, and that the correct channel is tuned. 
16. Repeat steps 11 through 15 for each channel, matching them to all the channels listed in HDHR
17. Open Guide Tool again. You'll notice some or all of your Channels don't have a Subscribed Guide Service. Click each channel, locate its corresponding channel in the Guide Services pane, click on it, then right click the channel and select "Subscribe"
18. Go back to Media Center and verify all of your channels still have correct guide data and still tune to the correct channels

Honestly, this process was so tedious that if I owned an antenna, I wouldn't even have bothered and just hooked that up instead. The cable companies have worked pretty hard to make sure the only thing that can easily interface with their system is the cable box you have to rent for 10 bucks a month. Windows Media Center is no longer getting any attention from Microsoft, and there's literally NOTHING else that works with their DRM. When Microsoft finally phases it out, the cable companies will smile smugly and point it it and say "See, we told you, customers would MUCH rather pay us lots of money for sub-par boxes with tiny hard drives." They'll be so busy congratulating themselves that when streaming finally destroys them, it will come as a rather nasty shock. I cannot wait. 

Mainstream

Someone asked me the other day what I blog about, and I indicated that I blog, rarely, about whatever I happen to think needs writing about. It then occurred to me that I've never blogged about media. I've got several friends who have lots to write about movies and music, but that's never been me. I think mostly because media is such a personal and subjective thing. It might also be because my tastes are pretty mainstream.

Yes, I'm coming out and saying it, my musical tastes tend toward what's popular, and even though I listen to alt-rock, it tends to be mainstream alt-rock. I like singles, because they honestly tend to be the most approachable tracks on any given album. I like catchy. I like top countdowns. There, I finally got that off my chest.

Still, what about albums? Some albums I've deeply listened to happened by accident (back when it was a pain to swap CDs out of trunk mounted cartridges.) Some albums are just so filled with track after track of goodness that you can't help but listen to the entire thing. I thought about albums, and then I decided I'd write about my favorite ones.

Anywhere, here are all my favorites (difficulty: no soundtracks, compilations, or greatest hits) of all time.


Honorable Mentions:
Moby - Play

Eminem said of Moby "It's over, nobody listens to techno" Sadly, he was kinda right. While electronica fans are still on an endless quest to figure out their sub-genres and who goes in them, the rest of the world sorta moved on, and I doubt you'll ever see anything the likes of the success of Play. Which is ridiculous, because it's an amazing, downtempo album that perfect for cruising around and doing nothing. If you've never jammed with your friends to South Side on a 1000 dollar stereo system in a 500 dollar car, you missed out on something amazing. Sadly, I'm not sure it quite held up to the test of time for me, but that's more about my personal taste than the skill of the artist.


Motion City Soundtrack - Commit This To Memory

This album caught me at a very, hell, I'll say it, emo point in my life, and boy does it show. A masterfully constructed medley of pop-punk upbeat melodies and some of the most depressing lyrics you'll ever hear. I guess I eventually outgrew it, because I never really fell in love with another MCS album, and eventually found myself skipping this more often than not, due to just being too darn happy for it.



8) Massive Attack - Mezzanine

The perfect trip-hip construct, this is good from beginning to end. The lush female vocals sampled on Teardrop mashed up with dark, heavy, but slow beats make a standout track on an amazing album. Its a shame trip-hop didn't really have anywhere to go, because it was something special.


7) Cake - Fashion Nugget

Ohh man, I love Cake. The vocals are some of the most unique I've ever heard, and the simple chords and arrangements on their big single reflect the style of the entire album.  It's all so very catchy and likable.


6) Blink 182 - Enema Of The State

Yes, this is as juvenile as it gets, but so what? Part of it's probably nostalgia, which is why this gets picked over Blink-182's more mature self-titled album. I don't know why I'm apologizing, maybe a bit too much music hipster got into me. This is good pop-punk, full stop.


5) The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free

I love cohesive concept albums, and boy is this one a doozy. A white British rapper opens with a story about losing a stack of money, and then spins a tale of anger, dependence, betrayal, and resolve. Listening to one song just won't do, and it sorta takes a while to get used to the casual sort-of-garage-rock lyrical style, but it's worth it.


4) The Postal Service - Give Up

Ohh Lord, was I determined to hate The Postal Service. I'm not a fan of Death Cab for Cutie, for reasons I've never understood. But somehow Ben Gibbard's so-indie-it-hurts lyrics work so incredibly well here, and the whole thing gets deep inside your heart. I'd like to make special mention of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, which always manages to rip me to shreds every time I hear it. If anyone were foolish enough to put it on a breakup playlist, it would probably cause your heart to have a Chernobyl style meltdown, leaving a big radioactive lump on the floor. And, like all good things, it was too good to last.


3) Florence + the Machine - Ceremonials

I think I might be a little bit in love with Florence Welch. As much flak as I'm likely to get, I consider Ceremonials to be many times better than Lungs. I love ethereal female vocals, and her vocal style mixes so well with the dreamy synthy sounds that make this album so sultry it can only be played past twilight.


2) Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American

The fact that I had such a hard time picking an example track for this album that I just gave up and picked the release single is a testament to how much I love this album. It's got no overall theme, and I can't think of any particular gimmick that I can point to. It doesn't need it. There's no dead or even weak tracks to be found, and the upbeat pop-punk mixes perfectly with the pseudo-slow emotional rock that treads incredibly familiar ground without feeling cheesy or stale.


1) The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

The Decemberists are my favorite band, and picking a favorite album was almost impossible. Ha, I'm kidding, HoL wins hands down, because uhh, concept album, duh. Featuring all of the unapologetically arcane hipster lyrics you'd expect from a band that. were it a person, would have a pretty severe Victorian Era fetish, mixed with the crunchy guitar riffs of 70's prog rock. Its like someone shoved an English major into my dad's CD changer. Glorious!