Update (9/24/14): Piwik had a new release today (ver 2.7.0) and that release introduced a new field the CSV file being pulled down from the API. That new field wound up being a breaking change to this profile, but it’s an easy fix. I’ve updated the two XML files (Profile_Piwik.xml and Profile_AN_LaunchPiwik.xml) with those updates. However, I did not update the screenshots I took for this blog originally. The %Piwik2, %Piwik3, %Piwik9 and %Piwik10 Tasker variables all had to be incremented by one to account for the new field. Same with the %PiwikYest Tasker variables. It seems to be working well for me after these changes.

Also, somewhere since originally publishing this blog, I also tinkered with DashClock and added a lockscreen widget that shows the Piwik stats captured by tasker. That’s included in the updated XML files.

Shortly after standing up my blog, Pat and I started to become curious about web metrics. We were really motivated to capture and analyze the data of the dozens (on a good day) of people who were visiting our blogs on a daily basis. We used Google Analytics for quite some time, but noticed that page-generation times had trended up since enabling Google Analytics, and we thought we could improve that if our web metrics were hosted locally. Enter Piwik, a growing open-source web analytics platform. Pat dove right in, using Piwik from the start, and I lagged behind, first only using Google Analytics, then trying both before finally cutting over to Piwik full-time quite awhile ago.

At the time, our significant others were participating in some classes at the local recreation center. While they were out working hard, Pat and I would go out to eat, sporadically checking our Piwik statistics on the first smart phones over slow data networks. Back then, we wished for a mobile app (one exists now), and we wanted some sort of easy notification that we could see easily from our phones. To this day, a notification feature does not exist.

Ultimately, Pat took matters into his own hands. He used the Android app Tasker to create a custom Piwik Notification that did the trick. Essentially, what it did was use the Piwik API to pull down stats into a comma-separated values file on the phone. Tasker parsed those values into variables and then used some of those variables to create a persistent notification. When the latest versions of Piwik and Piwik Mobile came out, I wound up tweeting at Piwik, hoping to inspire them to build some notification features into the latest versions of Piwik Mobile:

Hey @piwik , I'd love to see this kind of notification ability in your mobile app! http://t.co/hJcgAR5I7o via @patsheadcom

— Brian Moses (@briancmoses) December 29, 2013

Shortly after seeing and re-tweeting me, Pat came up with an excellent brainstorm. He wanted to include yesterday’s statistics within his existing notification, mostly because we’d wind up checking the notification right around midnight, trying to see the prior day’s total visitors and we looked too late and it’d already rolled over into the next day. Pat thought it’d be nice if the prior day’s totals were also part of the notification in case you viewed it too late. Furthermore, I thought it’d also be helpful to see throughout the day how the current day’s traffic stacks up to the prior day.

However, the notification you can create in Tasker is pretty basic. Pat and I both had already ran into limitations where our text was getting cut off in the Tasker notification. We just couldn’t find a way to cram all the information we wanted into that single notification, which seemed unfortunate, considering that most post-Jellybean notifications in Android could be pretty large and are expandable. You can read an entire email, you can read or reply to an SMS, and even share a photo to your favorite Social Media site all within these larger notifications. It seemed unfair we could not do the same within Tasker’s notification ability.

I set out to enhancing Pat’s Piwik notification, and following his good example, I wanted to share it just like he did. I did some research and found a Tasker plug-in called AutoNotification which boasted more powerful notifications for use in your Tasker profiles and tasks.

Before you get started, you’ll need the following Android apps. One caveat about the AutoNotification app: It works, but it’s pretty crippled unless you pay the $1.69 to unlock its full capabilities.

• Tasker
• AutoNotification
• Piwik Mobile (optional)

Next, you’ll want to download the following Tasker profiles, revise, and import them. You can read on the Tasker FAQ exactly how you can import the XML:

• Profile_Piwik.xml
• Profile_AN_LaunchPiwik.xml

You’ll want to make changes to the XML in order to put your Piwik Server and authorization token into the HTTP get lines for both the Piwik Real-Time and Piwik Yesterday tasks (see below). You can do this from within Tasker itself, but I’d strongly recommend opening it up in a text editor and just editing the XML there. You’ll save yourself quite a bit of headache!

Piwik Yesterday

<Str sr="arg0" ve="3">YourPiwikServer.com</Str>
<Str sr="arg1" ve="3">/piwik/?module=API&amp;idSite=3&amp;date=yesterday&amp;period=day&amp;method=VisitsSummary.get&amp;format=csv&amp;token_auth=Your_Piwik_Token</Str>

Piwik Real-Time

<Str sr="arg0" ve="3">YourPiwikServer.com</Str>
<Str sr="arg1" ve="3">/piwik/?module=API&amp;idSite=3&amp;date=today&amp;period=day&amp;method=VisitsSummary.get&amp;format=csv&amp;token_auth=Your_Piwik_Token</Str>

You may also want to go through and do a find & replace on YourSite.com and replace it with whatever text you want. These are used in the notification title, ticker and other text fields. Again, you should do that within a text editor before you import it into Tasker.

Additionally, within each Task you should edit the path to the Piwik.csv and PiwikYest.csv files. On my Nexus 5, I’ve got them stored in their own folder named Piwik on the user’s storage (/storage/emulated/0/) because different devices have different storage, your actual path may be different than my own. The file does not have to exist for the task to succeed, but any folder it is being created in must exist first.

Essentially, what I did was add a step to pull down the stats for the prior day and parse them into variables onto Pat’s existing Tasker profile. I then replaced the existing notification functionality with the AutoNotification plug-in to create the notification. Because I wanted to launch the Piwik Mobile app when I touched the notification, I had to create a new Tasker Profile, AN: Launch Piwik. If you chose to not install Piwik Mobile or if you just don’t want that app to get launched each time you touch the notification, you’ll need to go in and delete the AN: LaunchPiwik profile in Tasker and then modify the notification and delete everything under Action.

Back at the end of October I upgraded my insulin pump to the MiniMed 530G and started using the new Enlite Continuous Glucose Monitoring sensors and posted some of my initial thoughts on the new insulin pump and my experiences with CGM as a first-time user. I wanted to follow that blog up with a more in-depth description of what this pump has enabled me to do.

How about you? If you’re already a user of CGM, what things are you doing that I haven’t discovered? If you’re considering using a pump, what kinds of questions or ideas do you have that I didn’t touch on? Please feel free to use the comments to discuss, I’d love to know what you’re doing too!

Cost

One of the things I wanted to touch on was the cost for supplies, with and without insurance. One thing to keep in mind when reading this is that it takes many years of studying black magic to understand insurance discounts and pricing with regards to your out-of-pocket costs. I am fortunate to have what I consider to be pretty decent health insurance.

In looking at the pricing on the Medtronic store’s website and in deciphering my insurance explanation of benefits, I’ve tossed together the following costs.

Insulin Infusion Sets (changed every 3 days, roughly 10 per month):

• Quick-set 9mm Cannula / 43” Tubing (10/box): $136.70 / $23.00 (after insurance)
• Paradigm Reservoir 3.0ml (10/box): $38.00 / $8.00 (after insurance)

CGM Sensor (changed every 6 days, roughly 5 per month):

• Enlite Sensor: (5 pack) $473.00/ $62.00 (after insurance)

Altogether, the maximum cost per month is around $647.70, and assuming I’ve decrypted my insurance’s explanation of benefits correctly, the cost to me is roughly $93.00 each month. The majority of that cost is the Enlite sensors, which I hope, as they get more widely used, we’ll see the prices come down a little bit.

Thoughts and Observations

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the pump. Initially, I had some pretty consistent issues overnight with hypoglycemia, which was unusual, because I didn’t make any changes at all to any of my basal or bolus rates, but for some reason with the new pump I was waking up each night feeling pretty miserable. However, I was able to tweak and fix that pretty simply by reducing my basal rate during the night.

I do have a bit of negative feedback, and I’m not even sure it should be considered negative, but at the very least it’s a complaint that I have about the new pump. The pump is very chatty and noisy when using the CGM. You can set up alerts for both high blood sugar and low blood sugar, both of which make the pump beep. The pump also nags you when you need to take a blood sugar reading and help calibrate the sensor. Add this on top of the other normal beeps you get and the pump can generate a ton of beeps throughout the day.

I’m not sure about you guys, but I feel pretty awful when my blood sugar is low, and I get really cranky. The entire time that your blood sugar is low, the pump is periodically beeping at you and spazzing out. You can acknowledge the alert, but it’ll come right back a few minutes later. On a few occasions I found it infuriating to be sitting there feeling poorly waiting for your snack to kick in only to have your pump beeping at you.

Please keep in mind, these alerts can be incredibly useful. If I’m sleeping and my blood sugar gets low, I appreciate that it beeps and wakes myself or my wife up. I’m sure if it ever happened, I’d be thankful if someone came upon me unconscious and my pump alerted to them to what might be going wrong. But this fact doesn’t really stop me from being annoyed when some sort of alert is going off about something that I’m already painfully aware of.

CareLink

One of the more exciting features of using the 530G and CGM is the amount of data that’s being collected by the pump and can be uploaded to Carelink for some analysis. I’d still rather prefer that I didn’t have to upload this data somewhere and that it could remain private and I get to decide who uses it. Aside from a minor gripe with which browsers are supported by the Carelink website, I don’t have any other points of feedback.

This time, I wanted to upload some of my personal data to demonstrate some of the reports available on the Carelink website and the other kinds of things that I was excited about doing on my own. I’m a bit weirded out with publishing some of my information on the Internet, but because these are the questions that I had and wanted answered, I thought it was worth being a bit uncomfortable if it helps someone make up their mind. Please don’t misunderstand me posting this stuff as a request for advice or analysis on the management of my Diabetes.

Here are a few screenshots of the different reports available on the Carelink using my personal data:

I grabbed screenshots of the reports that I found the most helpful. However, I’d like to point out that I believe that both the modal reports (Modal Day Periods and Modal Day Hourly) appear not to be using the sensor values from the CGM, and only use the blood glucose values measured with your glucometer and stored in the pump. I think this diminishes the values of those reports a bit.

I wanted to point out a couple other things about the other reports. In the Daily Summary, you can see a couple events. Firstly, on the X-axis on the bottom, each time you see the little speaker icon that’s an alert that sounded. Earlier in the blog I mentioned that it could be a bit noisy and this displays it.

Aside from that, my two favorite reports on Carelink are the Sensor Daily Overlay and Sensor Overlay by Meal reports. I think these give you a great view of what your CGM is reading at a high enough level that you can start looking for trends. Each of these reports can only be run for a duration of one week, which I don’t personally think is long enough to make decisions on all by itself, but you can generate a few of these reports for over a longer period to try and look for those trends.

Lastly, I spoke about being excited to get access to an export of the data captured in Carelink. This is by far my favorite feature on Carelink. I opened that export (a comma-separated-values file) up in Excel and tinkered around with it. I used only the rows which had values in the field named Sensor Glucose (mg/dL) or BG Reading (mg/dL) and then used the Time column to make my own chart of what my average blood glucose was on across the average day. This is much like what the Sensor Overlay reports was giving me, but in my case I used both the blood sugar values from my glucometer as well as the values captured by the CGM. My point in this was to try and discover some trends during the day and respond by tinkering with my basal rate during those times of day to see if there was some improvement. Here’s what I was able to put together:

Conclusion

One of the things I find most exciting about CGM and the Carelink software is the ability to have this kind of data at your fingertips for exactly this kind of analysis.

My immediate plan is to bump the basal rate on my pump up a notch between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. to see if I can bring those numbers down a bit. I’d like to do something for 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., but I think the best bet in that range is to be a bit more aggressive in my boluses to see if that helps.

I’d like to keep this going in a series of blogs somehow; the past two articles have been very pump-specific. But now I’m thinking I’d like to start grabbing some of this data, making adjustments to my pump and keeping track of it. Hopefully sharing it on my blog might demonstrate to other Diabetics the tremendous potential benefit there is in insulin pump therapy and continuous glucose monitoring.

Almost three years ago, we made a decision that I consistently rank in my top three of “Best Decisions I’ve Ever Made”. We added a dog to our family. It’s something that I had wanted to do for many, many years but I couldn’t justify. I had tiny little apartments and I was spending the majority of my days away from my house at work or school. Considering dogs’ social nature, it just wasn’t fair for me to get a dog. But, I always viewed this as a temporary setback. When the timing was right, I would get a dog it was on my bucket list.

I can attribute this to my extended family and my childhood. My aunt and uncle had two dogs growing up, Ashes and Smokey. When you google for “perfect dog,” it’s criminal that pictures and biographical information on those two dogs aren’t the top search result. They were exceptional dogs, well-tempered, even better behaved and an absolute hoot to take to the park and throw the tennis ball with, even after the tennis ball was soaked with doggy drool and your arm was sore from throwing so many times.

Shortly after buying our home, my wife and I began seriously discussing getting a dog. On one vacation, I loaded down my tablet with e-books on breeds, raising dogs and whatever else I could get my hands on. On that vacation, I must’ve gone through more than six hundred pages of material doing research. We wound up deciding on a Brittany (formerly known as Brittany Spaniel) and began searching for a breeder. I was conflicted with this, because I’d previously adopted a stray cat and a kitten who was about to get taken to the pound. As a society I believe that we’ve done a disservice to dogs and cats and all too often these animals wind up in pounds or worse. Ultimately, we felt that as inexperienced dog owners, that a puppy was the best choice for us.

We emailed a few people who had listed puppies in various places and wound up finding a family about an hour away who’d had a litter of Brittany puppies that were born on May 9th, one day before my birthday. We found this coincidence fortuitous and arranged to meet the puppies. We wound up leaving that day with a liver and white Brittany, who we named Crockett. No, not after Davy Crockett, but a Americanized version of “Krokette,” a German potato side dish that I’d found delicious in travelling to Germany to be with my wife. She picked Crockett out because I had named one of my cats Tater and because I have a bit of an odd potato fascination. If you fast forward three years I’ve found this to be an infinitely rewarding and wonderful decision only surpassed by the decision to get married and the decision to buy our first house.

Puppy vs. Rescue

Originally, we were hoping to find a dog roughly Crockett’s age or maybe a bit younger. It’s my impression that shelters are full of adolescent dogs due to people realizing how much work owning a dog is. Crockett was a knucklehead roughly until age 2, and then a light bulb came on and he turned into a pretty decent dog in what seemed like overnight. We were looking for a companion for Crockett nearly as much as we were looking for us.

Julia began exploring listings on the web pages of rescue groups in the area. When we began discussing it and decided that we were open to adding another dog to the family, I reached out to a number of rescue groups about dogs they had listed for adoption and found that the groups weren’t responsive and seemed to be overwhelmed by the number of applicants that they had. I checked out their websites, filled out applications, and even spoke to a couple volunteers from the groups but for some reason things didn’t materialize past the original contact. I got the impression that the rescue groups were overwhelmed by adoption applications and I assumed that for one reason or another, they didn’t feel like they had a dog that matched up well with our family although I can’t imagine why, which was disappointing, I felt that the ideal dog for us was going to be a rescue based on what we wanted, but for some reason it wasn’t in the cards.

Considering the hand that had been dealt to us, our winning play was to start poking around looking for the perfect puppy for us.

Here’s Zoe!

We wound up finding a breeder about an hour away who had a litter of puppies, 7 boys and 2 girls, who were ready to go home. We headed out this weekend into the aftermath of a historic ice storm to go check out the puppies. Specifically, we were looking for a female dog to reduce the likelihood of any kind of dominance conflicts with Crockett. However, as we slipped and slid across North Texas, both Julia and I agreed that we were most interested in picking a dog that made immediate imprint on us regardless of the puppy’s gender.

The breeders are a very nice family living on a nice-sized parcel of land. They have several dogs, including a few Brittanys, in addition to chickens and horses that they also rescued. We took Crockett with us, and he was mesmerized and wanted to check everything out. He was incredibly excited and would later embarrass his parents by having an accident indoors.

The breeders first let us check out the two females one of which they had already informed us had displayed some excellent hunting traits and that they preferred if they found someone looking for a hunting dog. Julia’s coloring preference on Brittanys is for the liver and white ones, just like Crockett. I like both, but I probably lean a bit to the amber-and-white colored Brittanys. The appearance of the dog wasn’t really on our mind at all, but the Mom was liver and white and so were the majority of the litter.

Zoe was handed to me, and after sniffing and licking my fingers she immediately wormed her way up my chest burrowed into my hoodie and snuggled for nearly the entire time we were there. We checked out the parents, met their other Brittanys and the rest of the litter, but this little girl had already won me over. We finalized some paperwork and started to head home much to the dismay of the breeder’s young son. I promised him that I’d blog about the puppy and told his mother that any time they wanted to see a current picture or anything all they had to do was ask.

The first few nights were a bit rough, full of whining, crying, pooping and peeing. None of this was terribly unexpected and as the week has progressed the accidents inside the house and the crate training are going very well. On Wednesday night, Zoe didn’t whimper or fuss at all at night when being put in her kennel. Julia and I have been waking up every 2-3 hours and taking the puppy outside for bathroom breaks, and we intend to employ some sort of neighbor/friend/pet sitter to help us out during the day the first couple months to try and help make sure she doesn’t make any messes in her kennel.

Crockett has been pretty incredible. He’s an energetic and playful guy, so I was a bit concerned he’d play too rough or worse, that he’d sulk and be envious of the attention his new sibling is getting. But he’s been insanely gentle and patient with the puppy. He really seems to appreciate having an animal in the house who wants to play with him, since his other two house mates don’t do anything but hiss and punch him in the nose.

So far, Zoe’s been a joy to have around the house. Julia and I are each trying to work from home as often as we can. I had a great work-from-home day early in this week. The puppy would eat, we’d go outside, we’d play and then she’d pass out and sleep on me for a couple hours and then we’d repeat that process. Aside from a little bit of extra messes around the house to clean up and the fact we’ve partitioned the house using baby gates, we don’t really have any complaints, and we feel like we brought home the pick of the litter!

Do you have a multi-category geek on your Christmas list this year who you’re shopping for? If so, hopefully this is the blog just for you. I’ve gone through a number of my purchases, gifts, and other kinds of discoveries the past couple years and recommending the best ones as great gifts for geeks similar to me.

This article was inspired greatly by Pat’s similar blog on the same topic as we were discussing the cool gadgets that we’d recommend as gifts this holiday season. What sort of great gift ideas have we overlooked? I’m sure the people shopping for me would love to hear some of your ideas down in the comments below!

Almost Under Fifty Bucks

By far, this year’s best Christmas bargain is the Chromecast from Google. Chromecast is an HDMI WiFi Device which makes it quite easy to stream video to your television, and it’s priced extremely inexpensively at $35.00. I personally bought two the minute they were announced, and have enjoyed being able to stream Nextfilx, Hulu Plus and YouTube directly to my television. Even more exciting, Google has recently sent out invites to discuss the Chromecast SDK, which means you’re going to see more applications and uses for the Chromecast in the upcoming months. Hopefully we’ll start to see some really interesting uses for the Chromecast. Personally, I’m interested to see what game developers can do with the Chromecast to supplement the gaming experience on Android phones and tablets.

Coming in a hair over $50 is Grand Theft Auto: V, for the Microsoft XBOX 360 and Sony Playstation 3. I’ve been a casual player of the series, but I haven’t extensively played any Grand Theft Auto games since Vice City. I really liked Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar Games, and my wife surprised me on one recent visit to the electronics store by picking up a copy of Grand Theft Auto: V the week it was released. Since then, I’ve completed the story mode and have played for hundreds of hours online with my friends, having a particularly good time. Grand Theft Auto: V is not without warts, however. The online mode has been a bit buggy and unstable early on, causing a bit of frustration. However, all things considered it’s been tremendously fun so far.

Almost Under a Hundred Bucks

I’ve yet to meet a fellow geek who doesn’t like caffeinated beverages of some sort or another. My caffeine of choice comes from coffee and sodas. Historically, my problem with coffee was that I never wanted to drink a whole pot of coffee and I couldn’t be bothered to brew less than a whole pot. For a long time, I just used the microwave to heat up the remaining coffee after it got cold but then my wife talked me into buying a Keurig single-cup brewing machine. Naturally, you pay an extraordinary premium for the single-cup brewing system, but I think that it’s worth it. The Keurig B130 DeskPro Brewing System is a great example of one of these machines. Being able to make just one cup at a time and to easily buy many different types of coffee leads to some pretty interesting discoveries of things you like without having to buy and potentially waste a coffee just to find out if you like it or not. As an added bonus, it’s not uncommon for the manufacturers of k-cups to offer free samples via their various social media sites. It’s a great way to try something new without being stuck with a bunch of leftovers that you won’t use.

Also on my list at this price point is the PLX Devices Kiwi Bluetooth Wireless Trip Computer and OBDII Scanner for the car geeks out there. This is a device which hooks up into the ODB2 port on your car (just about every car built since 1996 has one), and is bluetooth enabled. Using another bluetooth device, like a smartphone using the Torque app, you can pull all sorts of information off of your car’s computer. I have written quite a bit about using this device to create the ultimate Android-based Car Dock before and, I’ve loved being able to see what’s going on inside my 2002 Corvette Z06 beyond what the dashboard is telling me.

Coming in at just over $100, the Logitech 915-000194 Harmony Smart Control with Smartphone App and Simple Remote is a really exciting universal remote. I have owned a couple different Harmony remotes from Logitech and I have loved each one. They’re really well thought-out devices at a reasonable price. Plus, I’ve hated every single “universal” remote I have ever come in contact with prior to the Logitech Harmony. The Harmony allows you to use your PC to set up and program the remote in an almost infinite number of different ways and then control all of the devices hooked up in your entertainment system. I’ve been recommending these remotes for quite a long time and have even given a couple as gifts over the years.

More, but worth it!

On occasion, I’ve been known to buy and give gifts that I’d consider expensive. If you’re looking for a really special gift for the geek(s) in your life, look no further than the Nexus 7 tablet (starting at $229.00) and the Nexus 5 smartphone (starting at $349.00). In my opinion, these are very extravagant gifts but completely worth it. Hands down, they’re the best bang-for-buck in the tablet and smartphone universes available. Despite being expensive, you get way more than what you pay for. Google does a great job at designing the devices with their hardware partners and they also go to great lengths making sure that the software on the devices is kept current as long as it’s feasible. At the same time, they keep the price on the devices very competitive. The Nexus 5 is easily hundreds of dollars cheaper than similar smart phones at $349. The tablet market is more price-competitive, but the Nexus 7 still remains cheaper than equivalent products at $229.

Conclusion

Buying gifts for geeks can be really difficult. As they say, “birds of a feather flock together,” which has a number of relatively geeky people on my shopping list throughout the year. It’s really a feast-or-famine-type scenario—either it’s really hard to find something for that person’s particular flavor of geekiness, or there’s so much out there that it’s really difficult to pick out the right gift. What kinds of gifts did you buy for your geeks this year? Please feel free to make suggestions in the comments!

Roughly about a year ago, I was car shopping to replace my ‘04 Mazda RX-8 and decided that I’d buy one of my all-time favorite cars, the Chevrolet Corvette. Because I couldn’t quite justify the expense of a new Corvette (or for that matter, just about any new car), I wound up buying a 2002 Chevrolet Corvette Z06. It’s been a tremendously impractical purchase that I’ve loved just about every minute of.

As a boy, one of my favorite features of the Corvette was the pop-up headlights. To this day I still think that pop-up headlights are quite cool even though they haven’t been included on the last two generations of Corvettes. Pop-up headlights are one of the reasons I decided to buy a 5th generation (C5) Corvette instead of a 6th generation Corvette (C6). One of the first nights of owning the car, I wanted to show my wife this nifty feature, so I pulled my car outside and asked her join me in the passenger seat. I twisted the headlight switch and pointed excitedly as they rose up out of the hood. My wife turned to me incredulously and remarked, “That’s neat, but are your headlights even on?”

Her observation was practically correct, and compelled me to get out of the car and check whether the lights were actually on or not. It’s virtually the only time that I can recall being disappointed in the car; the headlights were just awfully dim. Over the past year, I wound up doing a bit of research and learned that this wasn’t specific to my car it’s a very common complaint for the C5 Corvette. With the recent onset of daylight saving time, my hourly commute home from work is now done in the dark, and it sparked me to wonder how I could upgrade the headlights and make them brighter.

Headlight Lenses

Over the years, the plastic on headlight lenses gets pretty dingy. They accumulate grime, get nicked up and can yellow pretty significantly. Understandably, this film can soak up a good chunk of the light emitted by your bulbs, and dim the headlights. That’s why at your local auto parts store there’s almost an entire shelf of different lens-restoration products and kits out there. I was pretty surprised at the cost of these products and kits, considering my experience about a decade ago before these products were so common. I had purchased a 1992 Eclipse GSX, and its headlight lenses were absolutely yellowed and in pretty atrocious shape. A good friend suggested that I buy some Turtle Wax Polishing Compound and to apply that by hand to clear up my yellow headlight lenses, and it worked like a charm. Considering that the polishing compound runs about $4, it’s a much better deal than the headlight-restoration products that start at $8 and go up to $30-40 for the full-on kits.

The headlight lenses on my Corvette aren’t really all that bad. The previous owner had taken pretty good care of the car, and the place I bought it from had it pretty much in showroom condition when I bought it. However, considering how bad the stock low-beam bulbs are on the Corvette, I thought the $4 and a bit of elbow-grease would pay off even if there was a tiny bit of improvement to the lighting. I was surprised at the before-and-after pictures at how much clearer the lenses wound up being.

Headlight Bulbs

I figured the best step would be to address the bulbs. In researching the bulbs, I felt like I had a few alternatives:

1. Convert my headlights to high-intensity discharge lamps (HID)
2. Modify high-beam bulbs to work in the low-beam socket
3. Replace the high and low beam bulbs with Halogen Infrared Reflective (HIR) bulbs

I decided against HID lights because I’m not the biggest fan of the temperature of the lights, the cost/effort in converting, and I frequently hate seeing them approaching me or in my rearview mirror. The low cost of modifying a standard high-beam bulb to fit into the low-beam socket was somewhat intriguing, but ultimately I wound up choosing to go the route of the Halogen Infrared Reflective bulbs. I chose HIR bulbs because of the numerous reviews I read of people in the same boat as me, wanting brighter lights without having to go nuts with some sort of HID conversion kit.

HIR bulbs are a bit magical; they’re coated in such a way that infrared radiation is reflected back at the bulb’s filament and allows the filament to be superheated without any additional increase in power consumption. They are similar to the 9005 and 9006 bulbs from the Corvette in every way except for one: the plastic tabs at the base of the bulb don’t quite align to fit right in. I’m still a bit confused as to why this is. If I were manufacturing these bulbs, I’d want any of the cars which use 9005 or 9006 bulbs to drop these bulbs right in. But, since that isn’t the case, it’s a simple task to grab a pair of fingernail clippers and trim the HIR bulb’s plastic tabs down to fit into the existing hole and to twist right into place.

To replace the old 9006 low-beam bulb, I picked up the Phillips 9012 HIR, and to replace the 9005 high-beam bulb, I picked up the Phillips 9011 HIR. Cutting the tab down to fit into the hole was pretty simple, but we were pretty conservative so it took a few different tries to get it right. It also didn’t help that someone before me had brute-forced one of the low-beam bulbs in, and we had quite a bit of problems getting it removed.

Had I really wanted to make the most difference in the lighting, I could’ve picked both options #2 and #3 by further modifying the 9011 bulb to fit into the 9006 socket. The difference between the two bulb types is that the low-beam socket has a single groove that the bulb has a matching stub for, and the high-beam socket has two of those grooves with two stubs on the bulb. Filing down both of those stubs on the bulb would allow the high-beam bulb to fit into the low-beam socket. The brighter high-beam bulb would still be pointed downwards and shouldn’t have caused much concern to other motorists. I strongly considered this option, but I was too impatient and didn’t want to order new bulbs and exchange the others.

Conclusion

Polishing the lenses certainly provided some benefit, but it wasn’t really all that noticeable with regards to the lighting. The improvement to the Corvette was mostly a minor cosmetic change. However, the new 9012 and 9011 headlight bulbs made a remarkable difference in my night driving. The Corvette is now at least on par with the other vehicle in the household and every other car I’ve driven in the past. Considering how dismal the low-beams were before, this is a pretty impressive improvement. The best part about this upgrade is that it’s not even Corvette-specific; any of the millions of vehicles using a 9006/9005 bulbs could be upgraded to use 9012/9011 bulbs.

Last year, I decided to grow a ‘moustache’ for Movember. I use the word ‘moustache’ in the loosest of possible definitions as I’ve long feared that my father’s fantastic moustache gene skipped his first-born. In the twenty or so days that I grew a moustache last November, it did not amount to all that much. Nevertheless, I think cancer awareness and research is important for all cancers, and I’m quite excited to embarrass myself again this month in the hopes of raising a few dollars

Last year, I had regrets about my fund raising for the cause, so this year I’m focusing more on that. I’ve created a page out on Movember.com to help share and track my progress. Additionally, you can make donations via my page. For every dollar donated, I will personally match up to $500. I’d love to hit that $500 mark, so get out there and make a contribution and share with your friends! The more you donate, the more you’re allowed to laugh with me at my moustache!

Here are the rules surrounding Movember know before you grow!

1. Once registered each Mo Bro must begin the 1st of Movember with a clean-shaven face.
2. For the entire month of Movember each Mo Bro must grow and groom a moustache.
3. There is to be no joining of the Mo to your side burns. (That’s considered a beard)
4. There is to be no joining of the handlebars to your chin. (That’s considered a goatee)
5. Each Mo Bro must conduct himself like a true country gentleman.

Without further ado, here’s my progress. For every day of Movember, I’ll be taking pictures of my progress and then regularly sharing them on my Movember page as well as on my blog:

Week One

As with last year, the first week has been promising. The stubble on my lip is enough that neither my wife, dog or cats appreciate any kind of contact with it. I’m encouraged by the first week’s worth of growth and hope it continues on strong throughout the month. And even better news, thanks to a donation from my mother, I’m already 10% of the way to my goal of $500!

Week Two

Last year, I wasn’t all that impressed with my second week of growth. This year, I’m a little jazzed with the second week. The moustache seems to be a bit fuller and coming in nicely. I didn’t get nearly the same amount of ribbing that I got last year during week two. It’s very interesting to see the amount of very, very, very blonde hairs. They’re so blonde that they’re nearly white it is quite peculiar, I was pretty blonde as a little boy but haven’t had those golden locks for quite some time. A few people have suggested that these hairs are grey and not blonde but I’m not sure that they’re seeing quite well. On the fund raising front, I netted a generous contribution from my blog’s editor, Claudette, which has brought the two-week total up to $60 and a total of $120 when I make my matching dollar-for-dollar donation.

Week Three

Last year, by the time week three came around I was pretty discouraged with the progress of my moustache. I wound up shaving it towards the end of the month when some job prospects heated up and the possibility of in person interviews was likely. However this year is the opposite, I am encouraged and regardless of any potential job interviews, I won’t be shaving it off. Even better yet, I am nearly halfway to my goal of $500 thanks to my friends John Luckett and Gene Monterastelli! There’s still more than a week of Movember left, so here’s hoping that my moustache and my fund raising both reach their goals. Perhaps my fund raising will even exceed my manly growth!

Week Four

This is pretty uncharted territory for me, typically in my previous moustache adventures I’d either found a reason to quit or just succumbed to shame. I continue to be pretty encouraged by the growth of the moustache. Looking back over the week’s pictures it’s still obvious to me that I’m making progress, however I will admit that it’s less noticeable than it was towards the beginning of the month. I swear, the pictures from the 25th and 26th were taken on different days, I just had a need this week for my lucky dress shirt twice. From a fund-raising standpoint, I’m still a bit shy of my ambitious $500 goal. Please remember I’m matching everything you donate dollar-for-dollar up to that goal, if you make a contribution you can feel good knowing that it’s been matched toward a very good cause. Movember is nearly over, I’ll post my final update here in a couple days with some of my moustache-related future plans.

Conclusion

After last year’s Movember, I entered with two goals; do some fund-raising activity and make it through Movember without shaving off my moustache in shame. After a month of this thing growing on my face, I’ve decided to keep it for awhile and try it on for size. Altogether, you guys contributed an amazing $210 and true to my word, I’ve matched every single dollar of that contribution. Considering I’m a bit neurotic about numbers, I went ahead and chipped in a few extra dollars to bring our group’s grand total to $500. Everybody who donated should break their arms patting themselves on the back for helping us make a significant contribution.

For everyone to remember this Movember, I’ve gone ahead and created a tiny animation of my progress over the month. Again, I apologize for the poor photography, the proximity and scale of my face, and lastly for my photo-editing skills:

Selfies

Extreme Moustache Close-Up

For a long time, I’ve been using Google’s Car Home on my phone for use in my car. But for some reason, Google has not kept it up to date and compatible with newer versions of Android. This led me to writing up how you can manually install Google Car Home for your Anrdoid phones. But unfortunately, sometime recently when I pressed the Home button on my Galaxy S3 while in Car Mode, it stopped taking me back to Google Car Home and instead took me back to the default Android launcher app, which effectively neutered the Car Home mode for me. Based on some of my research, this seems to be happening as part of Android 4.2 and anything newer.

I set out and started reading about a few different car-themed apps for Android devices to replace Google Car Home to use in my car as part of my personal Car Mode for Android. I wound up looking very closely at a number of free and paid apps, focusing closest on the following apps: Car Home Ultra, Custom Car Home, and Car Dashboard (Free). What I was looking for was an app that would work well in my Ultimate Car Dock for Android Phones for use with Torque Pro, Tasker, Google Maps & Navigation, and Google Music. Ideally, the application would launch and replace the default launcher on the phone when pairing with one of the Bluetooth devices in my car (the head unit and PLX Devices Kiwi Bluetooth ODBII Scanner).

I wound up choosing Car Home Ultra because it fixes my biggest gripe with Google Car Home, although somewhat unconventionally. You have to install an additional app, 4.2 Car Mode Patch, and set that app to be your default launcher. When hitting the Home button, this app checks whether you’re in Car Mode or not and presents the correct launcher for your current mode. I liked that Car Home Ultra has some other capabilities, including displaying your current location, heading, temperature, and time as part of the app. There are a ton of automation features that might be handy to some users. But they’re redundant for me as these are features already present in my favorite Android app of all time, Tasker.

More or less, I found Car Home Ultra to be exactly what I would’ve expected Google’s Car Home to be had Google continued to maintain it and made it work with current versions of Android. However, I’m beginning to think Google just designed this app to fill a need in the infancy of Android and give other developers an idea of what could be done within Android. Car Home Ultra certainly picks up where Google left off, and in my opinion is well worth the $3.99 purchase price.

I’ve always considered myself as an early adopter of anything technological. However, that’s never been the case with the treatment and management of my Type I Diabetes, ages ago when my primary care physician and my endocrinologist both suggested that I start using an insulin pump, I resisted. I tend to be a creature of comfort and routine, and I’d grown comfortable with the routine of managing my Diabetes. I must also admit there was probably a vanity component, I was hesitant to be tethered to an insulin pump almost all of the time. To this day, it gets under my skin when someone unwittingly teases me for still using a pager in our age of smart phones. The conversation that follows is always uncomfortable both for myself and the poor person who thought they were just doing some good-natured ribbing.

All that being said, I’m glad that I switched to using the insulin pump all those years ago. It has given me a much finer control over dealing with the fluctuations of everyday life that I didn’t really have before. Since starting pump therapy, I have been hoping that additional advancements would be made to enhance the functionality of the pump. Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) would seem to be that next step in that process.

Again, I’m not an early adopter of continuous glucose monitoring. Primarily because of the same reason, I’m somewhat comfortable in my routine and I haven’t really seen the benefit in attaching another device to my body and wearing it around. I have also been a bit disappointed that CGM is not a replacement for your traditional blood-glucose testing. If anything, the CGM adds additional finger pricks to your daily routine and doesn’t eliminate them.

What I’m very interested in and like about the Continuous Glucose Monitoring is that it’s going to give me and my doctors quite a bit of data to look at. Even though you still need to use finger-pricks and your glucometer for any kind of treatment decision, I feel that the CGM will be valuable in helping me identify trends and adjust my insulin delivery to tighten control of my blood sugar over the long run.

Initial Impressions

Medtronic, the maker of my insulin pump, contacted me recently about my Paradigm 722 going out of warranty and asking if I wanted to try out their latest insulin pump. Naturally, I was pretty interested in the advances since my previous pump. I had been advised that prior iterations of CGM had required that you insert the device at a 45-degree angle, and I’d read that this could be problematic and a tad bit uncomfortable. The Paradigm 722 uses the CGM sensor that I had read about. Nonetheless I decided it was worth trying out regardless and only ordered 1 month’s of supplies in case I found it uncomfortable.

There was some confusion (at least on my part) in the ordering process. When Medtronic first contacted I ordered a new pump, the MiniMed Revel. Shortly, after I received my MiniMed Revel and before I even started using it Medtronic contacted me again about upgrading me to the latest pump, the MiniMed 530g. At the moment I’m writing this, there are three different insulin pumps in my house. It’s been a bit confusing, but I’m glad Medtronic went to the effort to make sure I had the latest insulin pump. I would’ve been very disappointed if I was stuck a generation behind.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with how Medtronic contacted me, shipped the insulin pumps quickly and got training set up. Because of their speedy process, I was up and using the new pump and Continuous Glucose Monitoring in just over one week from their phone call about the MiniMed 530g.

Training

Before my pump even arrived, Medtronic contacted me and set me up with a training session in the area to review the new features of the pump especially, the Continuous Glucose Monitoring. That training took place early this week. There was also a ton of helpful material included with the insulin pump and continuous glucose monitoring packaging. Furthermore, my trainer recommended that I check out the Medtronic MyLearning classes to learn about the new pump and using it with the continuous glucose monitoring.

Having read over the material and skimmed through the online training, I really felt I had a pretty good idea about how everything needed to work and I was tempted to just give it a try on my own. However, the in-person training I did was still quite handy. The trainer had plenty of demo-sensors that we got to practice with. It was definitely advantageous to get to practice a bit before trying it out for the first time on my own.

CareLink

Medtronic also features a Diabetes-management software package that they call CareLink. It’s convenient in that it is web-based, but I’m a bit disappointed there’s not some sort of alternative that I can use locally. I hate to seem a bit nutty, but that’s pretty personal information I’m not entirely sure that I want stored up in the cloud. I’m also disappointed that the site is not compatible with Google Chrome, my preferred browser.

My old Paradigm 722 works with the CareLink software, so I’ve tried using it in the past. At one point, it required a special USB adapter, which plugged into my glucometer and then talked to the insulin pump to pull the data down. Which was eventually replaced with a different glucometer and USB adapter that didn’t require so much connecting. I didn’t find either setup to be particularly convenient, and I didn’t exactly find the data all that compelling to make it worthwhile to use.

Hopefully, the data from the insulin pump, the CGM and the glucometer will be much more useful and valuable. If it is, I can see adding CareLink into my routine and to share that data with my doctors for the management of my disease. The range of options in CareLink is intriguing, and I especially like that I can export the data in a CSV format so that I could use that data elsewhere off-line. However, I’d still prefer if this were isolated to my own personal devices, and it’d be ideal if the glucometer included a Bluetooth feature that could communicate with my smartphone.

First Time

As I mentioned earlier, I took part in some training earlier this week. During the training we covered how to insert, set up and use the Medtronic Enlite CGM. By the time the class was over, each of us had inserted the sensor, paired the pump with a transmitter, and hooked the sensor up to the transmitter. Based on what I had read and heard about the prior generation of CGM, I was really pleased with how easy it was to insert/inject. The sensor is inserted at a 90-degree angle from your skin using a spring-loaded inserter, much like the infusion site. Additionally, the part that is inserted into your skin is noticeably softer and more malleable than the prior CGM sensors.

As far as the actual insertion and installation goes, it was slightly more difficult than changing the insulin infusion site and I’m sure that my years of pump use has probably made that seem pretty mundane. Inserting and using the CGM sensor & transmitter is not any more uncomfortable or painful than the infusion site is. There’s are a couple more steps to insert the CGM and get it working, but you get to wear it for up to six days as opposed to the infusion site’s three. In terms of discomfort and difficulty, I think they’re pretty equivalent. Based on my research into prior generations of CGM and what word of mouth I’d heard, this is a marked improvement.

When I got home from training, I went ahead and set up my MiniMed 530g and got it going. Other than changing a few of the menu prompts to rewind, prepare and prime the insulin pump, there wasn’t really anything new or exciting to report. This is largely unchanged from my very first insulin pump. The new menu prompts are a bit more user-friendly. There are also a bunch of alerting options related to the CGM sensor and other pump functions that I’ve tinkered with a little bit and will continue to adjust and use them as I have more experience with the MiniMed 530g.

Next Steps

My plan is to accustom myself to wearing the CGM along with my insulin pump 24/7 for the next couple months. I want to evaluate whether it’s better to use it every day, or to use the CGM periodically to help adjust my pump settings from time to time. Thankfully, my insurance covers the CGM, but I still anticipate doing some calculations to find out how much it’ll wind up costing me to use it constantly. I’m planning to write a follow-up blog in a couple weeks or so to talk about my experience and to share some of the data that I am able to extract from the pump via CareLink.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been tinkering around with network attached storage (NAS) at home. I’ve both built my own do-it-yourself NAS as well as blogged about a suggested a similar build in 2013 as well as a newer build for 2014. Since then, I’ve gotten feedback from a number of different sources that there’d be some interest in a related article. Instead of trying to build a compact, power-sipping NAS, I’ll try and build out a frugal, bang-for-buck NAS device instead.

As with prior articles, I can’t recommend the use of FreeNAS for powering the NAS device enough. I’ve been a user now for almost 2 years and I’ve been incredibly pleased with FreeNAS. Other than hardware, I’ve yet to have a single significant issue with FreeNAS and I’m really excited about the FreeNAS plug-ins which was an important new feature in one of the recent releases. Personally, the ownCloud plug-in and ReadyMedia plug-in are both very interesting to me.

Because saving money is the ultimate goal, my best advice is to scavenge up some hardware somehow. Upgrade your computer or help a friend upgrade his computer and offer to take the spare parts off your friend’s hands for a modest price. Alternatively, you can always try looking for a good deal locally on Craigslist. If you don’t have access to some old functional hardware or you’d rather buy new parts because you trust brand-new stuff more, here’s a list of parts and prices to help you start shopping.

CPU & Motherboard

In order to save money, I first started looking at the processors that were very affordable, preferably under the $50 price. The AMD Sempron 145 priced at $39.99 completely fit the bill. The budget friendly single core processor is clocked at 2.8GHz, which is well suited to our purpose. As an added bonus, I picked the retail-box version of the CPU, which includes the heatsink and fan. In my research, my primary criteria for a motherboard didn’t start with price; instead, it was the number of available SATA ports. My preference for a FreeNAS box is at least 6 SATA ports. Boards were available with more ports, but price increased dramatically when you got up to 8 on-board SATA ports. It’s a far better to deal spend $20 to $30 on a SATA Controller Card in order to gain the additional SATA ports rather than pay the premium for an 8-SATA-port motherboard. For the motherboard, I decided on the Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2, which is a Micro ATX motherboard with 2 DIMM slots, 6 available SATA ports, a PCI-e slot and a PCI slot all for the price of $47.99. For what I had in mind, this motherboard both offered exactly what’s needed to build a nice NAS today and also allow for some easy upgrades down the road.

Running Total: $87.98

RAM

BecauseFreeNAS recommends giving as much memory as possible for the best performance, I was tempted to go ahead and go with 8GB of RAM I’ve typically added in the past. However, based on my usage of 8GB over the last two years for only a couple of users, I think that you could safely drop down to 4GB of the same RAM to save a bit of cost. I wound up picking PNY Optima 4 GB PC3-10666 1333 MHz DDR3 Desktop DIMM Memory MD4096SD3-1333 at $35.99. I chose a single 4GB DIMM over two 2GB DIMMs to leave a slot free for an easy upgrade down the road. ECC RAM has come a bit in these blogs’ comments, so I addressed my thoughts on ECC in this article.

Running Total: $123.97

Case

In both of my prior builds, I’ve looked for a good deal on a purpose-built case. Since I’m trying to rein in the total cost, I decided to go as inexpensively as reasonable. In addition to my own upgrade, I’ve upgraded other computers and have really liked the NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case. For its price, there’s a ton of room for drives (8x3.5” drive bays and 3x5.25” drive bays) and the case is very well made for only $34.23. The case does not come with a power supply, so factor in another $26.99 for a 550W ATX Power Supply.

Running Total: $185.19

Storage

FreeNAS Drive

The OS and all of the FreeNAS bits go on their own drive which allows all of your hard disk drives’ storage capacity to be used for your NAS. The recommendation for the FreeNAS drive is actually a USB drive. For prior builds, I’ve suggested the same drive, the SanDisk Cruzer Fit 8GB USB2.0 Flash Drive which comes in at a whopping $7.99. However, hopefully some money can be saved here and there’s a free USB drive laying around your house somewhere that can be re-purposed for use inside your NAS.

Alternatively, check out the Brian’s Face 16GB USB Drive on Tindie for $12.00 or pre-loaded with the current FreeNAS ISO for $15.00.

NAS Drives

The meat and potatoes of any NAS is ultimately going to come down to the hard disk drives. 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB drives are all available right now. Because price is a driving factor behind this NAS, I decided to price out two different configurations: 6TB (6x1TB) and 12TB (6x2TB). And because I’m a bit paranoid about bad batches of drives, for each configuration I picked out two different models and manufacturers of drives.

1TB:

• Western Digital 1 TB – WD1002FBYS
• Hitachi Deskstar 1TB – E7K1000

2TB:

• Western Digital Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive – WD20EZRX
• Seagate Barracuda 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive – ST2000DM001

2013 EconoNAS HDDs
Drive
NAS Size	6TB		12TB
Quantity	3	3	3	3
Price Per HDD	$51.99	$55.00	$89.00	$93.30
Subtotal	$155.97	$165.00	$267.00	$279.90

There’s been some discussion as to whether or not the Western Digital Green drives can be safely used in a NAS device. I’ve been running two of them in my own personal NAS for nearly 2 years now without any problems. If you wanted, you could upgrade to the WD Red 2TB drive at a premium of $16 per drive. Here’s an excellent review over whether the NAS-optimized drives are worth the premium. However, because being frugal is an important objective of this build, I don’t see any reason to shy away from any model of drive that is economical.

Conclusion

Final Price

• 6TB NAS: $505.12
• 12TB NAS: $752.98

For nearly $500, you can have all the parts and software for a 6TB NAS. And for about 50% more you can double the storage up to a 12TB NAS at roughly $750.

When I came up with my final prices I did some shopping around for comparable off-the-shelf NAS systems. Some of the off-the-shelf systems are pretty competitive with this price at the low end. For example, the WD My Book Live Duo 6TB Personal Cloud Storage NAS Share Files and Photos is $451.29 and the Seagate Business Storage 2-Bay 6TB Network Attached Storage (STBN6000100) is $460.35. However, these machines are not very comparable because their feature-set simply can’t stand up to the features of FreeNAS. The difference is so wide that the price gap of $50-60 is quickly closed by the FreeNAS features. The FreeNAS machine is not a proprietary piece of equipment, it’s a PC, which means it is upgradable and it is repairable. Furthermore, because the storage is spread across six drives instead of two, FreeNAS is going to offer you more redundancy options, and depending on your configuration more usable storage space. Furthermore, I have concerns that the hardware in those off-the-shelf NAS systems is the equivalent of something you’d find in a consumer-level router or WiFi Access Point, which is nowhere near the quality of components in your average desktop computer.

At 12TB, the off-the-shelf systems just can’t compete in either price or features. In my research I found the Seagate Business Storage 4-Bay 12TB Network Attached Storage (STBP12000100) for $846.99 and the BUFFALO TeraStation ES 4-Bay 12 TB (4 x 3 TB) RAID Network Attached Storage (NAS) – TS-XE12TL/R5 for $834.98. Even at this price, I’d still have the same concerns about the proprietary nature of the hardware and whether its quality is at least equivalent to what you would find in your PC. Ultimately, I have all the same concerns about these bigger more expensive off-the-shelf NAS systems and they don’t even include the minuscule price advantage.

Whether you’re building a small or larger NAS for use at home; a do-it-yourself NAS using FreeNAS is simply going to give you the most features, the best redundancy and the ability to upgrade your NAS as go down the road. The NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case has room for up to five additional 3.5” HDDs, and while the SATA ports on the Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2 are all in use it’s still possible to increase your storage by replacing the HDDs with larger HDDs to grow the array or alternatively you could add an additional SATA controller and fill up the empty bays in the case as well.

In the beginning of this spring I started a project to give a facelift to my garage. I was making progress the first couple weeks of spring, but because this is Texas it very quickly became unbearable to be in the garage. Spring may not have technically ended according to the calendar, but according to Texas it was summer time. So, finishing my Garage Makeover slowly slid down to the very bottom of my to-do list.

But then I bought my arcade cabinet and I needed to work on it somewhere. Even though summer was most certainly still in effect, I wanted to make some progress on my arcade cabinet. So I moved my mess around in the garage and cleared out a place to store and work on the arcade cabinet but quickly realized that it’s just absolutely insufferable in the garage.

The architecture of our house (and I assume, many in Texas) includes keeping the hot-water heater in the garage. Because of this, garages have to be insulated well enough to keep the hot-water heater from freezing over during our modest winters. In my garage, the walls, the attic and even the garage door have some degree of insulation. Our recent trip to Washington state included staying at a cabin which used portable and window air-conditioning units throughout the cabin in place of a centralized HVAC system. Upon returning to Texas and working on the arcade cabinet, I began to wonder if it’d be possible to use a portable air conditioner in my garage.

During an unrelated trip to Lowe’s I spitballed my idea at Pat to air-condition the garage. We’d both seen where people had placed window units in a panel on their garage door, but I use my garage door to park my car, so I couldn’t do that. There also aren’t any windows in the garage, which completely ruled out a window unit. On an impulse, I checked out their air conditioning units and felt like we could pretty easily run some ductwork up into the attic to handle the exhaust of a portable air-conditioning unit. We eye-balled a couple different portable A/C units and settled on a 10,000 BTU unit and we figured that the exhaust was about 4 inches and bought some various dryer exhaust ducts. The Lowe’s we were at had some issues with selection, so we wound up buying 4” ducting to run up to the ceiling and then some 3” ducting in the attic to park the exhaust right near an attic vent.

Unfortunately, DIY newbies like myself should never launch into a project on a whim. When we got home, we soon discovered that the exhaust ducting that came with the A/C unit was 5 inches. We made a couple different trips back to Lowe’s and Home Depot looking for 5” ducting bits and pieces and basically struck out on what we needed. So on a lark, we decided to use some things we found around the Lowe’s to adapt down from 5 inches to 4 inches and hooked up all of our duct work.

At first, I thought we were geniuses. We fired up the portable air conditioning unit and instantly cold air was blowing in the garage. We took little notice of it, but the 4” duct snapped itself taut as it began dealing with the volume of exhaust being pumped out by the A/C unit. Within the first few minutes, we noticed that the air conditioner had shut off and it was on fan-mode only. A few minutes later, it cranked back up and began to cool. A few minutes of cold air followed by a few minutes of fan only. The temperature in the garage seemed to be falling, or so we thought. We decided to go inside and come back out after an hour or so. An hour later, I went out into the garage, and it hadn’t cooled down any further than the hour before which I thought was unusual. Upon further examination, the exhaust hose had become disconnected and the hot exhaust air was just being pumped into the garage. We fixed this, then went back inside for another hour or so and checked back on the garage to find that it really hadn’t cooled any further. We checked the exhaust hose and realized that there was hot air leaking from the exhaust hose through a number of small holes. We also noticed that the hose was quite warm to the touch. At this point, we decided to go ahead and use duct tape anywhere we felt air escaping the exhaust hose and then to let the thing run overnight to see if it ever cooled down.

The next morning, I was hoping to go outside into a “chilly” garage. However, what I discovered was that the temperature was still pretty high. It was cooler than what it had been the night before, but the temperature outside had dropped more than the temperature in the garage. The A/C unit was still acting the same way, a few minutes of cooling and then a few minutes of hot air only. I decided to unhook the A/C unit and then run it all day in its more normal configuration: through its exhaust hose, which would be hooked up to one of our windows inside the house. I set the temperature down to the lowest setting and let it run for hours, and in those hours it never stopped blowing cold air. Based on this conclusion and a little bit of arithmetic (Hooray, pi!), we decided that we were foolish in the first place to try and adapt all the way down to 3 inches. We figured that our exhaust was too small and that the unit was overheating and shutting itself down. Furthermore, in doing some additional research, I decided that the 10,000 BTU Portable A/C unit probably wasn’t big enough. Measuring the garage, it’s about 505 square feet. The information I found all suggested that at least 12,000 BTUs would be needed to cool that big of a space, and I also felt square footage was probably a bad way to be communicating that. Square footage didn’t account for ceiling height, how much direct sun the room gets, the insulation or the typical ambient temperature. All of those factors could dramatically change how much cooling a room would need.

Having learned our lesson (hopefully), I returned everything that we could and went back to the drawing board. I decided that we were going to need a 14,000 BTU Portable Air conditioner, 5” ductwork for the exhaust, and some sort of insulation to prevent that exhaust duct from turning into a radiator that worked against the A/C unit by heating the room.

Parts List

1. NewAir AC-14100H 14,000 BTU Air Conditioner Plus Heater with Energy Efficiency Boosting Function
2. Lambro Industries 5” x 8’ Alu Flexible Duct 304 Aluminum Ducts
3. Speedi-Products FDSC-05 5-Inch Diameter Flex and Sheet Metal Duct Splice Connector Collar
4. Pro Tie 33019 SAE Size 80 Range 4-5/8-Inch-5-½-Inch Regular Duty All Stainless Hose Clamp, 10-Pack
5. Speedi-Collar SC-05 5-Inch Diameter Take Off Start Collar without Damper for HVAC Duct Work Connections
6. Galvanized Pipe Strap, ¾” x 10” x 24 Gauge
7. Thermwell FV516 Frost King Foam and Foil Insulation Duct Tape, 15’ Length x 12” Width, 1/8” Thick

Setting everything up was pretty straightforward except for the Speedi-Collar SC-05 5-Inch Diameter Take Off Start Collar without Damper for HVAC Duct Work Connections. With two of these, we wound up using a hacksaw, a drill, a file, some caulk, and a few nuts and bolts to create a flange. That flange we stuck up through the bigger 5-inch hole in the ceiling. On the other side of that hole, we had affixed a couple 1x2” boards between the ceiling joists. We screwed the flange right up into those 1x2”s to hold it firmly in place in the ceiling. In the attic, we used the 5” duct, the 5” duct connectors, some 5” clamps and the pipe strapping to run the duct work from the ceiling to near one of the attic vents. Inside the garage we used all the same parts and some self-adhesive insulated duct wrap to insulate the duct and then we hooked it up to the duct that came with the A/C unit. All of this went rather pleasantly. We powered up the A/C unit and sat there enjoying the cold air in the garage.

Conclusion

I’ve been doing my testing. The weather is a bit cooler than when we started this project; today’s high was only 95. I let the NewAir AC-1400H run all day while I was at work. When I got home, around 10 hours later, the garage felt nice, and it was a reasonable 76 degrees in the garage. Unfortunately, all of the heat coming off my car warmed the garage up to 85 degrees within a half hour of being home. After seeing that, I ended my experiment and turned the A/C unit off. There’s no use having it running while a hot car is in the garage. However, next time I want to work in the garage, I can move the car out of the garage and turn the A/C unit on a few hours before I start working and I think the garage will be considerably more comfortable than it has ever been before. I don’t think that the insulation, the size of the garage and the cooling ability of the portable air conditioner will ever enable me to set a temperature on the A/C unit and have it maintain that temperature all day, but I’m quite confident that with it running we can keep the garage much cooler than the ambient temperature and hopefully be able to work in the garage year-round.