I have just spent hours unfucking my FSA.
My dentist overcharged the FSA debit card by $2.10 due to some mix up between expected and actual insurance payment. Which would have sorted itself out on the next visit, but apparently it's an FSA emergency which needs paperwork now!
There are at least 28 million of these types of FSA/HSA accounts in the US.
Life expectancy at birth has fallen to 681,995 hours. So assuming that on average each account generates two hours of needless admin per year this is the equivalent of killing 68 people.
FSA administrators who won't chill and let the $2.10 go are killing us at a comparable rate to serial killers.
Serial killers are pretty terrifying and justifiably get a lot of TV shows and FBI task forces aimed at them. But we'd save as many lives by giving FSA administrators 25 years to life every time they decide to reconcile to the last cent. And we should be watching Law & Order: FSA where the detectives drink to conceal the pain of uploading a PDF and explaining your situation in 500 characters or less.
Or we could save the time and money and lives and implement single payer healthcare.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Lock up the Flexible Spending Account Administrators #etc #hsa #fsa Flexible spending account administrators probably kill more Americans than serial killers and should probably suffer similar consequences. )
For no good reason I downloaded my gas and electricity consumption data by day for the last couple of years.
The electricity trend is unsurprising. At the start of the pandemic it jumps up and stays up. With work and school from home we're running four computers non-stop, burning lights and (the horror) printing things. Overall we used 24% more electricity in 2020.
Gas on the other hand is pretty flat. There are some different peaks at the start and end of the year, but our total gas consumption increased by 0.08%. This doesn't make any sense to me. Being at home doesn't make much of a difference to laundry but it should have had a big impact on everything else. The heating has been on way more, we're cooking breakfasts and lunches that would have occurred out of the house in 2019 and we must be using more hot water as well.
There is one strange difference between how electricity and gas are metered. Fractional kWh are distributed randomly between .00 and .99 as you'd expect. Fractional therms are totally different - we're apparently likely to use 1.02 or 2.03 therms but never 1.50. This feels like it must be some sort of rounding or other billing oddness but I can't find any reasonable explanation despite asking Google three different ways.
In a move that I might come to bitterly regret I have emailed PG&E to see if they can explain it. I'll update this post if I hear back. Or if you're a therm metering expert please leave a comment!
Updated 2021-02-20 13:51:
PG&E say:
"Thank you for contacting our Customer Service Center. Gas usage is registered by recording therms usage. If you view your daily usage online, you will see that therms are only registered in whole units. The only pace that you will see therms not as whole units is when you review the average daily usage. The pandemic started in March 2020 and since then your gas usage is up slightly versus previous years. Most customers will see a larger increase in electric usage versus gas usage when staying home more than normal. The majority of customers set the tempatures of the their heaters to very similar temperatures year over year and your heater will work to keep your house at the temperature whether you are home or not at home."
So the fractional therms are some sort of odd rounding on the downloaded data. Fair enough.
The majority of customers use the same temperature setting? Really? So that might be a good explanation if you constantly heat your house to the same temperature, but I know for sure that isn't us. We have a Nest Learning Thermostat and as I've previously reported this doesn't so much learn as just constantly turn the heating off. So staying warm is a constant battle with the thing.
Maybe the difference is that the pandemic started around Spring when San Francisco is warm enough to not need much heating. I'll look again when I can just compare winter vs winter in a couple of months.
Updated 2023-08-06 18:11:
Took a while to update, but here is some more data. Electricity stayed high until Spring 2021 and then dropped to roughly pre-pandemic levels. This is because I spent a lot of time in 2021 upgrading lighting. My house has a different type of fixture/bulb in every room making this a painful process but I'm almost 100% LED at this point which has made a difference. Gas on the other hand has got higher and stayed there and I should really replace some more windows and add some more insulation...
I really wish the utility companies made this data available through some useful API instead of needing to download the occasional CSV. I'd build a dashboard and obsess over energy usage far more.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Pandemic Gas Mystery #etc #coronavirus #gas #electricity Why is my gas bill flat in 2020 when electricity usage has gone up 24%? A pandemic gas mystery based on PG&E data. )
Minutes spent so far this year waiting for Excel to talk to a printer: about 290.
Lifetime Excel print jobs: maybe 2?
How to fix Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel:
The only real disadvantage is you'll need to select a different printer when you actually need to print anything (which you probably don't).
(Published to the Fediverse as: Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel #etc #excel #microsoft How to fix the annoying Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel wait in Excel by setting a different default printer in Windows 10. )
Endorsements: Biden, California Propositions, San Francisco Ballot Measures.
What is up with Android 11?
Hikes: Coastal/Julian loop in the Marin Headlands, Richards Fire Loop in San Mateo (with Hyperlapse!), the end of coronavirus (hikes).
Previously:
I migrated from Nest to Google Home today to save a few bucks and while eventually inevitable it was a really dumb move.
The first thing is that it doesn't work with your Google Workspace / G Suite account because of course it doesn't. So you need an unpaid Google account to move to. Luckily I already have one from that time that G Suite didn't support Google Fi. Interestingly while Google Home won't work with your paid account it has no problem reaching over to grab credit card information from it.
The next thing is goodbye Works with Nest, hello Works with Hey Google. So there goes my IFTTT integration. Because I can't use my main Google account it's kind of useless to me that this might work with Google Assistant. There is still Alexa integration though so I can play my Nest stream on the Echo Show once a year or so as a connected home party trick.
Having not read the changed terms of service I downloaded the Google Home app which a few minutes in I've take to calling Google Nope.
Nest Protect is not supported! This is my favorite smart home device just because when the battery runs out it can tell you which one to change. It's worth almost any amount of money to not spend several hours figuring out where in the house the omnidirectional smoke detector chirp is coming from. But for some reason Google Home doesn't integrate with Google Nest Protect so you need to keep the Nest app as well. Understandable, they only have several tens of thousands of engineers.
So they nailed the camera experience at least, right? Nope. In Nest there are about a hundred settings to play with. In Google Home you can change the name of the camera. In Nest you can scroll through all of your recorded history. In Google Home, despite specifically paying for the plan with 10 days of history you can't. It has a pre-Alpha feel to it. Good for a 'hey, we got the skeleton of an app thrown together' kind of internal demo but it feels like they probably should have added the things you've paid for before shipping it to anyone, let alone bribing them to go through a feature shredding 'migration' process.
My smart home ambitions are not that great. I had a nice little setup that switched some lights on and off around dawn and dusk, but Philips end-of-lifed the bridge and I'm not about to buy a new one. I had some fun making dropcam timelapses but Google broke the public cam URL. And thank goodness I didn't get the alarm system.
Lesson (eventually) learned. The only new smart home devices I'll install are the ones that I build myself.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Leaving the Nest #etc #google #nest #philips The pain of migrating from Nest to Google Home which is not fully baked and does not support Workspace accounts. )
You have to make allowances for the fact that many people are working from home (where maybe it's harder to test code and you certainly can't do hallway usability testing). Things also improved somewhat with the October patch. But Android 11 was a Windows ME level disaster. Google says that they dropped the desserts to make Android 'more accessible to a global audience' but I think it's probably because they know that new updates are no longer sweet.
Multi-tasking is completely broken. In pandemic mode I'm on video calls all day, and dodging the 2-3 video calls that are usually going on elsewhere in my house. Being able to have Teams and notes running at the same time is pretty important right now and with 11 it's not possible.
Other than conference calls and Kindle the other main use I have for my phone is podcasts. Android 11 improved the media controls by moving them to the quick settings area of the notification shade, providing easy switching between playback devices and allowing you to swipe through recent playback apps. All good, except that none of it works. The controls are there but do nothing so I have to run the app to pause. Also, there is a weird ghost of a previous media playback that shows up and then disappears when pulling down the notification shade. And as for dismissing previous sessions that seems to require a reboot.
Multi-tasking and media were fixed in the most recent patch, but there is also some new notification system to separate out conversations. In practice this seems to mean I get multiple groups of Gmail and Teams notifications instead of a single cluster per app. This isn't what I want, gives me more work to do and so far I haven't found a way to turn it off. Notifications have steadily improved over the last few major Android releases so it's upsetting to see them becoming worse.
This is all on a Pixel 4XL which you would assume would get some level of testing love. It used to be that the main advantage of a Pixel was getting new versions of Android quickly. With 11 I'm for the first time wishing I was waiting a few months while the kinks were worked out.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Android 11 Gripes #etc #google #android I'm not a fan of Android 11 notifications, media controls or multi-tasking. )
This doesn't work any more as Purple is charging for their API. Sorry.
This post is updated hourly with a PM2.5 (2.5 micrometer or smaller particulate matter) map of San Francisco.
The video below shows the past 48 hours at six frames per second.
The PM2.5 data comes from the Purple Air API. The map uses one hour average readings from outdoor sensors and interpolates each point in San Francisco based on the inverse of the distance to the four closest sensors. The color scale is green to yellow (0-50), yellow to orange (50-100), orange to red (100-150) and red to purple (150-200+). San Francisco is plotted using elevation contours from DataSF.
Updated 2022-06-11 12:28:
The map is currently broken. The URL I use to download sensor data started returning a 500 error code at the end of may (Error: Server Error / The server encountered an error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.). This seemed like something Purple would need to fix. On closer inspection the error occurs after a redirect to https://purpleair-over-quota-2.appspot.com/ which sounds like too many requests (a 4xx error surely). With even more digging it turns out the download link is no longer supported (410 maybe then?) and so I'll need to migrate to the REST API to get this working again. I'm currently trying to get an API key and will get this fixed as soon as I can.
Updated 2022-06-13 17:28:
Purple Air were kind enough to issue me with an API key so the map is back to updating hourly.
Updated 2023-11-08 00:26:
And it's broken again. Purple have decided to start charging for their API. This is a shame, and I don't think I can pay for this just to keep this post running. I'm going to try moving to the AirNow system for some use cases, but it's not going to work for a detailed map of San Francisco as there is only one official sensor here.
July has been very nature focused for me: rattlesnake, whale, ospreys, bald eagle and comet NEOWISE. Hikes include Bumpass Hell and the Devils Kitchen at Lassen Volcanic National Park.
I did fit in a whinge about Android usability.
Previously:
The screen shot above is from Google Fit. Which icon is active? I can't tell any more. Is it the blue one or the underlined one which is a much stronger cue?
Of course none of the icons are underlined. This is a bottom navigation bar on top of the Android navigation bar on Android 10 with gesture navigation enabled. My brain knows this but my finger still tries to click on Home. Journal just looks so much more active I can't help it. This friction is also in Google Photos and Google Maps and presumably Google everything before too long.
Maybe the Google app developers don't have access to recent Pixels, or maybe the Material Design team all have iPhones?
(Previously: Material Design 3)
(Published to the Fediverse as: Did anyone tell Material Design about Gesture Navigation? #etc #google #design I can no longer tell which tab of most Google Android apps is active due to confusion between gesture navigation and the bottom navigation bars. )
Coronavirus by country and US state/county - this post updates two videos daily that show increases in cases and deaths by day. Also more very local hikes.
I can't tell if Microsoft wants me to use Edge.
More ISS.
Previously:
Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
Is it safe to open securedoc.html (Cisco Registered Envelope)?
International Date Line Longitude, Latitude Coordinates
Animation of US PM2.5 Air Pollution in 2023
3D Printing a 72-58mm step down Camera Filter Adapter
3D Printing a Window Mount for a Google Nest Indoor Wired Gen 2 Camera
3D Printing a discreet wall mount shelf for the Aura Carver Mat