www.timschewe.ca

My dear wife bought a Passion Swim Spa with a Balboa spa pack. The LED lights worked for about two years and then when you pushed the button to turn them on they would light to full brightness and immediately fade to dark. Now nothing happens at all.

I called the vendor for the spa and asked. "Oh yes, it's the LED controller box. We have them for $55 each."

OK, so I pulled the plug for the LED controller on the spa pack main board. It's supposed to supply 10 VAC. I'm seeing about 0.6 VAC.

I'm running MotionEye on Home Assistant to play with security video. My Reolink RLC-410-5MP camera needs a DHCP reservation on my Hitron CGNM-2250-SHW cable router furnished by Shaw in order to stay connected.

So, the fine folks at SORBS DUHL decided to add a range of IP addresses to their e-mail blacklist, perhaps having something to do with Chinese misbehaviour, it's a bit difficult to tell. My wife's second e-mail address DNS server just happens to fall into that IP range so by default it gets onto the blacklist. It took a while to find out that people could no longer send her e-mail as some were slipping past the block and some that were blocked were not sending bounce messages.

I finally cobbled together a sensor using the DHT11 temperature/humidity module and a Wemos D1 mini. I had flashed the D1 with Tasmota firmware before assembling the circuit.

The D1 appeared as expected in my browser and showed the temperature and humidity.

This is a work in progress and I will be revisiting this article to update and organize it as time passes and I learn more....

I've been interested in digital radio, having some experience with P25 in the last few years. As I started to buy equipment, I kept this in mind. I bought both a Baofeng RD-5R and a TYT MD-9600 to use with DMR Tier II as the prices were reasonable as I learned about 2m and 70cm.

I bought one of these radios, both for the VHF / UHF dual band capability and the fact that it does DMR. I can hit the VE7RAG repeater in Vancouver from home so I am able to use the DMR capability and don't need to buy a hotspot and use my handheld.

The MD-9600 appears to be a twin of the Retevis RT90.

I have been unable to find a document that explains the settings in the customer programming software (CPS). If you are aware of a source I would appreciate hearing from you.

Plant just one zucchini plant and you are in for a bumper crop. Ignore them for a few days and you have a 10 pound monster the next time you look!

Here is my family's favourite way to use up zucchini:

Cream Cheese Zucchini Cake

• 3 eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups grated zucchini
• 8 ounces cream cheese

Mix these 4 ingredients together well.

Add:

We took a vacation with Holland America this past spring traveling from Vancouver, B.C. to Hawaii and return.

Being interested in amateur radio, I went to the company's web site and asked if I could bring my handheld with me. The response was unequivocal, if I brought it on board and it was discovered, the radio would be confiscated. Don't even think about bringing it with you much less using it. Too bad if you only intended to operate it ashore, it is still forbidden.

What do you do when you are served food in a restaurant that is cold and should be hot?

We seem to have trouble with the club sandwich and fries. I can understand the club sandwich being cold as the bacon and bread are the only items in it that are hot. The fries are different, they should be hot.

At an ABC restaurant we complained and they took the plates back to the kitchen. We received them back a short time later and everything was hot, The sandwich, the fries and the dill pickle! Obviously they jammed the whole thing into a microwave oven and zapped it.