Week 58: Wired

A week of travel plans, electrical wiring, smart thermostats, finally having only one house, assembled desks, and a surprise bonus at work.

Posted on by Rowan Manning.
Tagged with HolidayHouseWorkDIYHome Automation

  • Early weeknote this week, as I’m going away and I will not be taking a laptop with me. I’m looking forward to a slightly less-connected ~10 days.

  • I’m flying to Jordan, which I’m really excited about, I haven’t left the country in about 2 years and it’s gonna be weird as hell. We got our negative PCR tests back today, the only thing that could go wrong is if the rules change over the next week and we get stuck abroad 😬

  • We’re going with Gallal (his partner is living over there) and Euan, and we have so much planned out. I’m really excited to visit Petra and the Dead Sea and go desert hiking. My next weeknotes might be insufferably upbeat.

  • Travelling is very expensive with buying all the COVID tests. I don’t think it’ll be a common occurrence for a while.

  • A mess of cables wired into an old thermostat

    I’m very smug about the fact that I correctly wired up a smart thermostat. So far our boiler hasn’t blown up and I managed to do it without shocking myself. I bought a Tado wireless thermostat and so far it’s been excellent, I’ve hooked it into my open-source hub and I can control the heating based on the output from all my various temperature and humidity sensors.

    I think my wiring turned out better than the previous thermostat’s wiring (pictured) – it’s now all clearly labelled and they’re more securely tightened.

    The failure state is pretty reasonable as the boiler’s manual heating controls are accessible, so it’s not like we’ll cook or freeze if we have WiFi issues.

  • We finally no longer have two flats, I gave the keys back early in the week. Paying a mortgage and Central London rent last month isn’t something I want to repeat.

  • Great news this week, everyone at the FT got a nice and not-insignificant surprise bonus just in time for Christmas 🎉 I really like working at the FT generally, and we happen to be hiring a lot of people at the moment 👀 (apologies for the job site, if you search “engineer” here you’ll get more technology-based stuff)

  • I assembled our desks, I love them. The office space is starting to come together, next we need some actual storage so we can unpack the last boxes.

    Two beautiful wooden desks set up in our office space