Our next-door neighbors used to have the same kind of alarm system that we have; when they replaced it, they gave me all of their hardware. I used one of their motion detectors to replace one of mine that had gone bad and put everything else in a box in the garage and forgot all about it.

Part of trying to figure out what’s going on with the AlarmDecoder is looking at the logs it creates so that I can correlate events caused by opening and closing windows with what the system reports. I kept seeing a LOT of events for devices that aren’t attached to our house’s system, which I had to filter out. I decided to look at the box in the garage and discovered that all of the detectors still had batteries installed and were faithfully reporting their status every few minutes – probably including a plea for a new battery.

I took all of the batteries out (fortunately, they weren’t leaking) and put the box back in the garage, where it will sit more quietly.

There are still a lot of events in my log from other people’s systems, but it’s a little less messy. And what else can you ask for these days?

Diane read Torah and I led services today at Shir Hadash – over Zoom, of course. Our lay cantor participated from her home in South Carolina (she moved there a few years ago to be closer to her children; she’s been a regular again since we went to Zoom services), and the Rabbi read the Haftorah and gave the drash.

In addition to leading the service, I was also taking care of streaming it to Boxcast for later viewing, and that nearly was a disaster – I probably copied an extra blank at the end of the stream encryption key when I pasted it into Zoom, and there was no obvious recovery. We even stopped the Zoom meeting and set up a new recording on Boxcast in hopes of fixing it, but got the same error. Eventually I found the link that let me re-specify the encryption key and I was VERY careful in copying things.

This afternoon, we sat in on Lyric Theatre’s sing-through of The Pirates of Penzance – it was a lot of fun, especially when people used stuffed animals or sock puppets to add to the experience. They needed singers, chorus members, dialog readers, and audience – we were audience. They’ll be having more sing-throughs between now and when they can have another show; if you’re interested, click the “sing-through” link and get on their mailing list.

I made it through half of 2008 in photo culling – somehow, the hundreds of photos that Jeff took on his senior class trip to Israel wound up in my photo library, so I just put them aside for him. :-)

Just another pandemic Saturday, I guess!