Inside another DVR

Our older top-set box/DVR unit was replaced actually long time ago now and this old unit has been sitting on my desk for a while now. Although I expected it to be as boring insides as previous one I opened, I decided to see what's inside it too.

And surprise surprise, it is as boring as I expected.

On top are rear connectors, from left to right power (black one), ethernet/USB, scart, HDMI, audio out, SPDIF and TV antenna in/out.

Under the heat sink is processor. I didn't feel like taking heat sink out; underneath there's very likely another MediaTek all-in-one media processor. And supporting chips around the board.

Curiously board has been divided to squared in silk screen print; from this view it's bit difficult to see but it's there, labeled A-D on vertical and 1-6 on horizontal. At least A and B can be seen at the right edge of the board. My guess is that this is for rework for (machine) visual inspection; "component 6042 missing at B2" or some such. Not something you see often.

Power button, led, front USB and IR reception are on smaller daughter board at the bottom, sitting above main board in a slight angle. I just wonder why they decided to use two cables to connect it to main board, instead of just one a bit wider flex, as other cable adds a bit to BOM price.

But on that daughter board is the most interesting part of this device; CC2533, which is Zigbee RF one-chip remove control solution. Not used, unfortunately, the remote that came with this is usual IR based one.

And nothing much more. Ah well, to trash - well, recycling - this goes.

Sold my bike

Herein you will find nothing but some personal nostalgia.

I got my motorbike driving license early 2000s, and since then I've always had a bike. First Suzuki gs500, but it was a bit light for longer two-person trips so I upgraded to Kawasaki ZR-7s in 2005 (2003 model). That bike was great. Simple, nimble and generally fun to drive. And it also looked nice. I've had it ever since.

During few last 5 years or so I really haven't had time to drive it though. I managed to drive only handful of times, for some 200km per year total, which, considering insurances and everything makes it pretty expensive fun. But fun nevertheless. When not riding I look at it and though how useless that bike was and how I should get rid of it. And when riding, I again remembered how much I like to ride, how much fun it is, pushing that uselessness feeling back. I wanted to keep it.

And now I sold it. I wasn't planning to, but I put it in internet sales forum - mostly as an experiment really - and eventually one guy came and bought it straight away.

When he drove away with it, I took a deep breath and swallowed the feeling of loss. I've always had a motorbike (for certain definitions of "always")

Now I suddenly don't have one. And I'm not planning to get one, either; I really can't justify the expense with the extremely low mileage I've put in it lately.

It's weird feeling. Hollow, like a part of me is missing.

       Norway, 2006. Side bag removed as camera was in there.

At the moment I'm moving on to electrified traffic; I've got a full EV and a PHEV cars. If (when) I get a bike, it will be electric too. It may take a few years. But I've got a feeling I will get a new one. Sooner or later. They just are too fun.

At the moment there really isn't many electric bikes available (for practical and safety reasons moped class vehicles limited to 45km/h are out), so that might be later.

I'll wait.

Work to die.

Tech sector has been for ages had an obsession for long work days, at least from 80s when personal computing started to take off - it was passion for the tech. Love the job you do and you'll never work a day in your life, right? And that has been a thing ever since. Love the work and work long hours. But it's not just that, not anymore. Passion argument has been taken over and now everyone should - must - have it. And everyone must work long days. Not too long ago Jack Ma praised his underlings' for working very hard, with so called 996 schedule - 12 hours a day (9 to 9), 6 days a week - but bringing on some hard criticism towards the practice.

Long time ago I found out that even typical 8 hours a day for 5 days a week isn't fully productive on creative side of things, and I do believe this applies to repetitive work (like assembly and other such production) as well. On a good day I can do maybe six hours (minus breaks) of creative work, after which my mind seriously needs some recharging time. Sometimes productive time is even less. After that all that happens is just sitting there, staring the screen without getting anything worthwhile done. Fortunately I at least can just get out and go home, instead of being forced to waste both my and company time by pretending to actually do something.

Really, anyone who has done this kind of work who is also not lying to themselves (and others) knows this perfectly well, yet for some reason so many are still willing to "work" insane hours for oftentimes no rewards at all (no overtime pay). These days corporate doesn't even reward this - people are just replaceable cogs in machine that are to be thrown out when they inevitable burn out and break. Only thing this does is to make long work hours without pay a norm and thus not playing the long work hour game becomes a punishable offense. And a new, fresh (and cheaper) cog is brought in to replace that now worthless (to them) cog.

Fortunately I don't have to play that game. In Europe (generally speaking) situation is much, much better so not paying overtime is much harder for corporations to get away with (yet it still happens), and since I own my own business, I can set my own work hours. And I do.

I still do occasionally work for longer days too, of course, but only rarely and then it is to get one single critical thing done, and in general I have set myself a strict 8-16 schedule in office, and work is left in the office at the end of the day, allowing me to relax properly before the next day. Without this I very quickly find myself in highly strung, anxious and even angry state, with blood pressure being through the roof.

Even if I do directly benefit from the work I do over time, it still isn't reason to kill myself by overworking myself right now. Especially when I know I would not be productive working long hours anyway.

And you really should admit this to yourself too. Playing stupid games gets only stupid rewards, and risking ones health for essentially no benefit is one of the stupidest rewards I can think of.

What we leave behind

Warning: Although I have tried to avoid preaching tones here, some may be involved.


There is absolutely no doubt that humanity is the reason for massive carbon dioxide increase over last hundred years or so. There also is absolutely no doubt that if this process keeps going, co2 levels will keep going up fast, and the end results will be ugly. It has also come in to light that these issues were already well known by oil and coal companies in 80s; the internal memos from that period that have leaked have climate change predictions that closely match the scientific predictions of today.

Something needs to be done. 

Sometimes other issues we successfully managed are brought up as counterexamples to make this issue sound less severe. Ozone layer? We took action and solved it. Acid rains? Likewise.

Issues mentioned above were "fast". They appeared relatively quickly and when corrective actions were taken, situation was observed to improve (relatively) quickly and within decades, they are effectively gone. And worse, mostly forgotten.

Co2 is different as huge amounts of it are needed to have an effect, and equally huge amounts of it have to be removed from circulation again to undo said effects. Currently we're releasing around 36 gigatonnes - that is 36 billion tonnes - of co2 per year, a figure so huge that you really can't even grasp it - and even with that amount the change from year to year is nearly inobservable. Compound that over tens of years and the total amount grows even more incomprehensibly large, but compounding effects start to be visible for all.

Only now we're starting to feel its effects, but still in relatively insignificant way. Few more floods here, some unseasonal cat 5 storms there, drought elsewhere... All still almost normal, although now there's a bit more of them, a bit more often than before. Outside normal, but just barely.

If we stopped all co2 emissions right now, the effects of all co2 emissions so far would still accumulate over next decades, if not centuries, and disasters mentioned above will still get even worse for a while until nature finds new balance.

A paraphrased quote from Sahara (by Clive Cussler) somehow has branded itself in my memory:

"Let's say that this algae growth doubles in size every week. Let's also say that it will take a year - 52 weeks - until it has filled every ocean and killed everything in them.
"Governments will not take action until seas are already half full. How much time it leaves for us?
"One. Week."

This of course is gross simplification of the idea, but the general trend is still there, and not just among the governments - all humans share this behavior, more or less. We tend to not take action until issue gets really bad. I know I am guilty of this too. Climate change so far isn't even close of being bad enough to make us react. But the problem is that if we wait until it gets bad, we don't have even that "week" to fix the situation (quotes because I'm speaking proverbially here, referring to that quote above). By that point we are "months" past the one year marker.

We do absolutely have to react now. And fortunately many people are waking up, but there is huge amount of resistance to change. I know, and I can't fully blame most of those who are resisting as the things we need to, have to do are - and will be - painful and difficult.

And now we enter the next issue. Many people are effectively saying "why should I do anything, as those people are emitting more co2 than us?" Or even worse "why should I have to do anything, I will be dead by then!"  Especially the selfishness of the latter towards their own children and grandchildren is absolutely disgusting.

But all those are exactly wrong questions or arguments. The correct question is "why should I be able to do nothing to fix the situation?"  Everyone must start to do what they can.

There is also "we will adapt so this is no problem" argument. This is a more dangerous, as it sounds plausible and might even be true in the long run, but problem here is that this is the same "I will be dead by then" argument, just veiled better in good sounding argument. "Our children will clean up the mess we've made." Of course they will deal with it somehow, as they have been left with no other option. 36 billion tons of co2 a year. While it is possible that someone makes absolutely wonderful new invention that can remove massive amounts of co2 from air with low enough energy usage to make it actually feasible, it's irresponsible to count on that. And while nothing is done, the world will drown in wars and unrest caused by mass migrations caused by increasingly worse floods, droughts, famines and other catastrophes caused by slow and gradual climate change.

That is not the future I want my children and grandchildren to live through.

Drive less. Fly less. Eat less meat, and instead of beef, have pork or chicken more often. Buy less stuff and use older things longer.

Note that at no point I am saying to stop doing these things, as that will be difficult or even impossibly for many. Just do less of them. And while at it, start requiring for industries to do their part too. Voting with your wallet is always an option there. Single individual's effect is small, but it is still there. With enough individuals change will happen.

Also, do support replacing all coal and as much as oil/gas (or fossil fuels in general) energy production with nuclear. While renewables, especially wind and solar are great, they're horribly intermittent (no sun at night) or variable (wind can drop from 100% to 5% over few hours), so without sufficiently massive energy storage options (and again, numbers involved are so massive that you can't even comprehend them) they are quite simple useless. We do not have time to wait that technology to mature, we need action now.

Nuclear has bad reputation, but even if you count two worst accidents there have been, Chernobyl and Fukushima, we're still talking about thousands of deaths. If we let climate change progress much further, thousands of deaths are something we can only dream of. That death toll will be measured in millions if we let the situation escalate.
Currently nuclear is slow and expensive to build, but if we could, say, standardize for example two to four standard designs, all fully and thoroughly inspected and reviewed, with power output of, say, 100-500MW per plant, it suddenly would get much easier and quicker to build nuclear power plants (with obvious requirement of very strict periodic inspections of every factor of operations of every single plant). This would be exactly what we need to get rid of carbon power with accelerated schedule.

Changing individual habits is always hard, so start easy. About two years ago I decided to reduce the amount of meat I eat, primarily for health reasons but climate was a (smalller) factor in that decision too. I started easy, replace a meal once in a while with plant-based one. It was difficult at first, but got easier, and not long ago now I suddenly realized that we hadn't eaten any meat for several weeks and I hadn't even noticed. Difficult things start that way but they also get easier as time passes.

Every gram of co2 not released counts towards better future, and many people doing small things have significant effect in the long run.

"World grows better when men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit."

Maybe ancient proverb, maybe not. Does not matter; either way, it is still very true. Especially now. Also, do plant non-proverbial trees. More than one. It will also help.

Bad air

At some point I noticed that my office air was getting bad, especially in late afternoon. As this building is somewhat old, and doesn't have good air exchange now that old fireplace isn't used anymore this wasn't very surprising. How bad it was though was a bit more unknown.

I managed to get my hands on a carbon dioxide sensor for some time and was surprised to see co2 levels reaching nearly 2000 ppm during afternoons. No wonder I was getting really tired towards end of days. So I got some improvements made (added intake vents, and wind-powered vacuum at top of old chimney) to improve situation. After this I did notice improvement, but at that time didn't have tools to find out how much the situation really improved.

This was close to a year ago. Out of curiosity I now got a few sensors that should be able to determine this. Specifically, Sensiron SCD30 carbon dioxide sensor and SGX Sensortech MiCS-VZ-89TE air quality sensor.

MiCS measures VOC levels (Volatile Organic Compounds, measured in ppb or parts per billion) by using semiconductor sensor. Datasheet doesn't exactly tell how that is done, but in many similar sensors (as far as I know) this involves hot plate (very tiny one, but nevertheless) on which chemicals and compounds react and change the resistance of this plate which in turn can be measured. This technology isn't very specific, but to put it bluntly, is is still useful to detect many kinds of, well, volatile compounds (most, if not all of which can be considered to be less than healthy to breath in.)  Although datasheet mentions co2, it doesn't really directly measure it and instead gives "co2 equivalent" reading mostly based on VOC reading. Many times these correlate, but not always. But even then, the good side is that these sensors give out a relative reading of air quality and are relatively cheap to be embedded in many consumer-level goods. Think of your phone signalling you that "yeah, you might want to get out of here" when you enter area with less than great air. That at least is target for many of these sensors.

SCD30 on the other hand uses nondispersive infrared sensor (NDIR) to measure actual carbon dioxide level in air, and pretty much nothing else (although I guess some gases/chemicals with similar absorption characteristics as co2 might somewhat affect the reading.)  So this doesn't detect nasty solvents, cigarette smoke or other such things that might be in air. These sensors tend to be a bit more expensive too so they're not that often seen in consumer equipment.

I left these sensors running for some time, below being graph from one day period (noon-ish to noon-ish next day). Sensors actually had been running much longer at this point but I managed to screw up logging (several times, actually) so previous data was lost. Ah well.

Here the co2 level measured by SCD30  is on blue. The level drops when I leave office, eventually falling to current outside air levels (400ppm), and on next day starts to rise immediately when I come in, despite improved air circulation. At least it no longer gets anywhere close to previous 2000ppm levels, instead maxing out at 1200ppm. Not great, but much better than previously.

Red graph shows "equivalent co2" as measured by MiCS. At start of graph it follows SCD30 results relatively closely (not bad!), but veers wildly off at start of next day for some reason. Huge spike you can see in that and VOC reading are because I put small amount of denatured alcohol on tissue and left it near the sensor, to which it reacted immediately. Note that actual (blue) co2 levels weren't changed; only now there was volatile compounds in air that this sensor detected, resulting severe degradation in reported air quality.

I now hope I didn't damage the sensor by leaving alcohol too close to it. Hot plate sensors shouldn't be that sensitive (we're talking about table spoon's worth of alcohol total here) but who knows how this one reacts. Its behavior at end of graph doesn't look too good though. I need to follow its behavior some more to see how it behaves now.

A part of Finnish history

Recently a map where cities of more than 500 people were placed on world map. Terminology aside, I was of course first checking out how Finland looks on this map.

Entire map here

And here is cropped Finland where I very very quickly copy pasted rough current country borders on top of it. Borders are skewed, badly placed and very likely of incorrect size but they are close enough to illustrate my point:

I noticed that for some reason, there is interesting clear divide inside the country, southwestern part of having cities (towns, whatever term you prefer) quite densely, and northeastern part of being very sparse. Hmm. Curious, wonder if there is an historical reason..

Although I was almost certain already, I did quick googling found this article, listing historical borders of Finland. Historically (granted, part of following is my opinion) Finland has been either wild frontier, part of Sweden on west or Novgorod (later Russia) on east, often having been divided up by these two powers. Frontier part being areas, inside or outside these countries allocated borders where their respective governments couldn't or wouldn't reach. Although due to climate, this frontier never was anything like later western frontier of USA, more like wilderness where people could just vanish to live their own life without having to bother with tax collectors, army recruiters and other nuisances of foreign government.

But I digress here. As I remembered, the density border I imagined in above picture matches very closely border agreed by Sweden and Novgorod in 1323, 'Pähkinäsaaren rauha' (as it is known in Finland, Treaty of Nöteborg more internationally). This border stayed in place for next centuries, and changed next time only in 1595 and then 1617.

While I am not familiar on how Sweden and Russia treated this land over this time, I can, based on above map make a guess where Sweden encouraged people moving out and forming communities, while Novgorod .. didn't, and as a result of this one historical border, the entire northeastern part of Finland still remains mostly empty land.

Maybe pointless, but I found this interesting nevertheless.

Car charger (bigger one)

If you are planning on owning an PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle) or full EV (electric vehicle), you would be absolutely insane to even think of using public charger network, as they're very expensive compared to electricity price you're normally paying. This with some notable exceptions,like Teslas with free supercharger usage.

This is with mainly Finnish focus, but might apply elsewhere too. The electric grid is primarily 3-phase, nominal 230v. Typically normal single-family home receives all three phases, each phase with single "top-level" fuse, typically 25 amps, and within the home all three phases are distributed in a way that this current is not exceeded in any single phase. So for example washing machine and drier, each that can use 16 amps, are placed in different phases.

At home you wouldn't likely be using high-power charger, but instead 2.2 (10-amp) or 3.6kW (16-amp) charger. But there's a problem there: you don't want to overload the main fuses with new high load, so careful planning will be needed.

You can of course switch to larger main fuses (like 3x32A or even higher), but that will increase the electric bill even if you don't use the increased capacity so you don't typically want to go there.

In my case I wanted to install 3.6kW charger, so I had to calculate very carefully how the current wiring in the house goes and what is the expected maximum load of each phase. Fortunately fuse box is very well marked, so it was easy to calculate loads involved in each phase.

As it turned out, stove, sauna and washing/drying machines were the main loads. Phases 2 and 3 were essentially topped out (couldn't use drier when charging the car - not great), but with some care phase 1 could be utilized without too much worry of an overload - especially if charging is timed to happen mostly at nights when other usage is low, so when we got charger installed, I timed car to charge only between 22-07 hours.

Figuring these things out is a bit of an headache, but needs to be done to get things working. And at this point I'm just too fond of electric driving, I wouldn't want to go back to archaic combustion engines.