David Trebacz Blog

I wanted to have a better experience than just using Zwift on my Android phone and casting to my TV. I'd been doing this for the past 2 years and it was okay. I like Zwift and ride 4 times a week. So I thought I’d share my 2024 Zwift Mini PC upgrade setup. I did quite a bit of research to come up with what I thought was a medium priced immersive experience, to keep me riding regularly. I loosely used this guide and posts from other to create my setup:  https://zwiftinsider.com/zwift-pc-guide-2/  and  https://support.zwift.com/en_us/supported-devices-to-run-zwift-H1Cj9QbeB My 2024 upgrades: Mini Intel I7 gaming PC w/ Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics card - https://amzn.to/3OkSbnl Amazon Fires tablet for running Zwift companion - https://amzn.to/4ePzBOO Mini wireless keyboard and touch pad -  https://amzn.to/3V7SLZf Mounting stalk -  https://amzn.to/3AWw43m My goal was to have a riding setup that didn’t look like a computer closet in our master bedroom, but when I was rid...

My friend Bill and I were looking for a good companion to our UTV trips in the Arizona desert. Arizona has an awesome amount of UTV trails into the backcountry (several hundred miles of trails). That said it is quite easy to get on a trail more difficult than we expected. Cell service get's sketchy quickly when heading into the mountains, so I started looking for a better companion than the trail maps in the parking areas. this is my first attempt at looking what was out there. I'll update as we get more information and try out a few solutions. Android App Try (Pro version and one map ~$25) BackCountry Navigator TOPO GPS - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crittermap.backcountrynavigator.license&hl=en Positives: ATV maps extra purchase (http://backcountrynavigator.com/android-gps-atv-maps/) - Needs pro version Real time navigation for ATV trails? - Needs pro version 4.5 rating on android store Preview maps - http://www.mobiletopomaps.com/ A...

I was very pleased when Dreamhost built in free security certificates from the Let's Encrypt service. Here's a the Dreamhost and Let's Encrypt integration announcement . Unfortunately, utilizing this meant you couldn't use the cloudflare service without upgrading. I decided to roll my own CDN to speed up my brother's stain glass shop's website . The page load speed dropped by almost 200% and site site feels speedy when browsing now. After researching many solutions and option I settled on this solution. I didn't want using a CDN to exclude or confuse anyone (or any search engines) looking for our content. The CDN I created is all under our primary domain with canonicals pointing back to the original content to avoid any accidental duplicate content penalties by search engines. I created  3 secure CDN sub-domains and choose the free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate in Dreamhost hosting console to serve up our images, fonts, css and js. https://cdn.gl...

I moved to Phoenix/Scottsdale Arizona area a couple years ago from the midwest and found a whole new group of creatures. The one that bothered my wife the most was scorpions. The day we moved into our house we found one lonely scorpion limping alone the baseboard in our living room. She freaked out a bit and I went to the internet to find a Do It Yourself (DIY) way to kill scorpions. Online I also found out that Arizona is home to the pretty nasty bark scorpions. First we bought a LED UV flashlight so we could easily see them. We used it to find scorpions at night and figure out where they may hide or nest nearby. It also was a fun "hunting" exercise for our nephews. Thankfully we only found a few scorpions on our property and weren't infested. LED UV Flashlight   Ultraviolet Black Light Flashlight  - Inexpensive aluminum LED UV flashlight from Amazon. Just remember to by the 3AAA batteries for it. Backpack Sprayer   Chapin 61800 4-Gallon ProSeries Backpack Sprayer ...

It seems Honeywell added some new features with a recent update to the RTH9580WF WiFi thermostat firmware. One new feature is called Utility Schedule Options. I looked on their website and found no information on it, so I decided to put together this blog post and a Utility Schedule tutorial video . The feature allows people to take advantage of special time of day pricing programs offered by Electric utility companies. I did this in the past by setting up my schedule, but essentially lost 2 programs steps setting it up. The new menu item is under "preferences" under main "menu" (Menu>Preferences>Utility Schedule Options>On). Video tutorial of Utility Schedule option setup The video walk though of RTH9580WF Utility Schedule options setup , I shot walks through the setup. It also gives an idea of the different options you can set (up to 4 different breaks and active on different days). The thermostats then uses the temperature limits you set on ...

I'm still having issues with the Honeywell wifi thermostat (RTH9580WF) displaying "waiting for update" on when the wifi is routed through my proxy server, so I decided to do a deep dive into what the thermostat is doing when it's getting the weather updates. I also wanted to better understand how to trace traffic on my network. Here's what I learned about the thermostats weather updates system by tracing the communication between the thermostat and servers. Currently: Thermostat requests the current weather and 12 hour forecast from a server:  http://104.209.185.251 . This server appears to run code managed by Honeywell in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Every 15 minutes it makes two port 80 GET requests to the IP address: http://104.209.185.251/WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/current?appKey=b9db7a3d469892e8&language=en-us&locationKey=36691_PC  (return current weather for location) http://104.209.185.251//WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/forecasts/hourly/12hou...

I was noticing that many of the Arpwatch notification messages coming back were marked "unknown" for the manufacturer name in the MAC address lookup. I looked at the date of the file in my Ubuntu file system and it was last updated in 2012. Arpwatch uses this file to determine the manufacturer name for a given MAC address prefix. I found a script at this blog post which looked quite promising. A few simple transformations of the file downloaded direct from IEEE, updates from the comments on the blogpost and it was ready to go. I added in the lines to copy the files to the correct locations in Ubuntu's implementation of Arpwatch. Here is the updated script: Here are the basic steps and commands to do it on a terminal session. 1.Create the script using nano (copy and paste the script above) into a file called update_mac_addresses and then run it. nano ~/update_mac_addresses.sh 2. Make it executable chmod +x ~/update_mac_addresses.sh 3. Execute the script. S...

I found a quick and easy way to setup a way to test network speed on my internal network using the linux command line tool netcat (or nc), I used this for node to node testing of my wireless network under a variety of conditions. It required no extra tools or software to be installed on my Ubuntu linux machines. It gives me transmit speeds I can understand and easily allows me to size the payload to the type of network I'm testing. Put the first machine in listening mode (this example machine 192.168.0.188): nc -lk 2112 >/dev/null Put the second machine in transmit mode to send packets to first machine 192.168.0.188: dd if=/dev/zero bs=16000 count=6250 | nc -v 192.168.0.188 2112 The first part of the command tells the machine to copy 100 MB of data from /dev/zero in 16 KB blocks. The part after the pipe tells it to send that to the first machine (192.168.0.188) over port 2112. The output for this test on the second machine returns: Connection to 192.168.0.188 2112...

I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my Dell Optiplex 755 USFF music PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The idea of a free upgrade with smaller disk footprint and better security was just too good too pass up. The upgrade went pretty smoothly until about two weeks later. At first everything seemed to work wonderfully. Then I started to be unable to wake the Dell Optiplex without a reboot. There were also some weird chimes coming from the speakers when the computer was unable to be wakened. The hard drive was working, so it appeared the computer never actually made it to sleep mode. Especially annoying, since this PC provided our streaming music on our patio. I even went through a complete Windows 10 OS reinstall , to see if that would help. No avail. I tried turning hybrid sleep mode on or off. I applied a BIOS upgrade from Dell. I looked though the event logging and found nothing out of the ordinary. Currently, I have disable sleep altogether and resorted to mapping my sleep b...

We bought a new house in Fountain Hills, AZ. With the hot weather in the summer it just seemed to make sense. Being the science guy I really wanted to understand why all this pool chemistry stuff seemed so complicated. I'm a DIY guy and a scientist, so how hard can this stuff really be. The 4 main DIY tools to maintain my swimming pool chemistry and water clarity are: My friend Bill He's had pools in Arizona for many year, but not sure how to franchise his knowledge, so most of you can skip this one. Trouble Free Pools website http://www.troublefreepool.com  - great website with real information on pool chemistry and how simple it really is. I now effectively maintain my pool myself with Walmart bleach  (sidum hypochlorite and water), Muratic acid. When filling the pool I added  Cyanuric acid  as a Chlorine stabilizer and Borax as a buffer/mild anti algaecide. Now "knowing" my pool, It's a couple cups of bleach every morning and some acid on t...

Just bought my wife a new thermostat for our house. We missed the HAI home automation thermostats in our previous house and their ability to display outdoor temperature. The NEST removed too much of our ability to control our thermostat and didn't show outdoor weather conditions. We choose the Honeywell RTH9580WF  (from Amazon) for a few reasons: RTH9580WF Outdoor Temperature - shows waiting for update Pros: Ability to control from a remotely Easy WiFi connectivity Reliable thermostat company Good 4 star plus reviews from Amazon Ability to show outdoor temperature and humidity Easy to use touchscreen and nice design Cons: C wire required No external temperature sensor Replacing  our existing heat pump thermostat was uneventful. I just carefully followed the instructions from Honeywell on how to install it. Our system was new enough to have a C-wire run but not connected to the existing thermostat. Honeywell's online tools and video helped me through this ...

After many years as a loyal #Comcast customer I needed to cancel my account. Last 10 years have been fine. Took three calls to cancel. I was on the line with Brianna for 39 minutes. Brianna told me they could only cancel service 7 days out and that I could call back later in the week if I wanted. No way I was going through this again, so I had them cancel it on the November 17th. What kinda crap is that. I was placed on silent hold. She came back and thought I was a new caller. I gave her all my information a second time. This time she actually took all my disconnect information and gave me a credit value based on my connection date. I was also told that I was paying full rate and they could have given me a discount. I'm amazed at the horrible customer service that the cable monopolies can give and still stay in business. I did give Comcast my new address, so it will be interesting if the actually send my over $100 credit to my new address. Perhaps I should just stop the ne...

I decided to upgrade my XT912 to Kit Kat. My earlier rooting and upgrade to CM10.2 provided a much better experience on the aging hardware ( http://blog.trebacz.com/2014/05/eliminate-lockups-and-freezes-Motorola-XT912.html ). This was my first time upgrading major versions of Cyanaogenmod (10.2 to 11) on my phone, so I was prepared for some unplanned issues. The upgrade went flawlessly and I lost noting in the process. The procedure I followed was: 1. Download current cyanogenmod snapshot from here: http://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=spyder&type=snapshot 2. Download Gapps for CM11 http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Google_Apps I used the upgrade steps from Jack Stromberg's post here: http://jackstromberg.com/2013/12/tutorial-rooting-and-installing-cyanogenmod-11-android-4-4-kitkat-w-google-apps-on-the-droid-razr-maxx/ I found I needed to modify the steps slightly for doing and upgrade from 10.2 using safestrap. It was all in the instructions, but you do have to r...

I try and clean my dryer vent at the house once a year in the springtime. Our gas dryer vent is over 24 feet long and has several elbows in it. I have always been concerned about it's long length potentially creating a fire hazard, if the metal duct ever became clogged with lint from our gas clothes dryer. A few years ago I invested in a Linteater from Amazon  and a 12 foot extension to clean out the dryer vent. It works well. This year I shot a video of the cleaning process. It only took about fifteen minutes to clean the whole run of aluminum rigid duct. Just make sure you always keep the drill spinning in the same direction, so you don't unscrew the brush in the middle of the run. I hope the video helps you understand how you can easily clean your dryer duct with a shop-vac, cordless drill, and the Linteater kit. UPDATE 2016-04-09: Several people have asked about the Shop Vac that I used. It was a 5 HP 16 gallon model by craftsman. Here is a link to a similar Wet/D...

My Motorola XT912 after Cyanogen 10.2 Upgrade I loved my Motorola Droid Razr Maxx XT912. I bought it almost two years ago. The phone featured good performance, ability to use as a internet hotspot, and was part of my unlimited wireless plan with Verizon. I really wanted to keep those features, but performance and reliability started to suffer. Performance Was Horrible After a few recent updates in the fall the phone started to become unreliable and would freeze up when doing the most mundane tasks. It would sometimes take my favorite navigation app Waze (http://blog.trebacz.com/2012/08/android-apps-for-your-road-trip.html) 15 minutes to acquire a GPS lock. Foursquare checkins would also take 5 minutes.The battery would drain in a couple hours when traveling -or just out of the blue on some days at work. I tried rooting the phone. Eliminating Verizon bloat apps that I really didn't use and shutting off some location services. All of this would work for a week, but come ba...

Is your your Moen single handle kitchen faucet hard to use or leaking around the handle? If it is you can easily lubricate or replace the 1225 cartridge in the faucet. If you're the original owner owner of the faucet Moen warrants them to be leak-free for lifetime. I called the 800 number at 1-800-289-6636 and requested a replacement cartridge kit for the faucet (think ours is model 7730). They sent it out no charge in about 10 days. If your in a hurry you can also buy it from Amazon ( Moen 1225 One-Handle Replacement Cartridge ). Our Moen 7730 Single Handle Kitchen Faucet I shot a video of the dis-assembly and re-assembly of the kitchen faucet: The kit contained everything you need to replace the cartridge and get the faucet working like new again 1225 Cartridge Repair Kit 1225 Cartridge Kit Contents Here is a link to a pdf with the Moen 1225 cartridge installation instructions that came in the kit: Here are the components in the kit: Moen 122...