If you want to use your Google account as an OpenID provider, the provider URL to use is https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.

Unlike the AppEngine demo, this has worked every time.

Thanks to the StackOverflow site for demonstrating this.

Part of this involved canceling service with Pair, where I’d been hosted for nearly a decade. I am happy, but not really surprised, to report that this was handled with the same professionalism they’ve shown in hosting my sites.

It’s been my experience that when you cancel service with a company, they will often throw obstacles in your way, or send you to a “save” representative whose job is to talk you out of canceling completely.  Pair did none of these.  The “why do you want to cancel” questions came in the form of an e-mailed request to complete a survey.  The “save” attempt was an offer to waive the setup fee if I ever needed to come back.   Both came after the cancellation, not before.

If you add to this the near-flawless service, and the fact that my monthly bill went down while my disk and bandwidth quotas went up, I have a hard time seeing how I could have done any better elsewhere.

In other words, if you need professional web hosting, just go with Pair, unless you need something they just don’t do.

Other than that, I’m just having the usual “where the hell is the button that does this” issues that always occur when moving from one application to a competing one.  So far, I am not noticing any stark differences in performance between Chrome and Firefox 3.  I’ve used it with GMail and Maps.  I’ll take a gander at Google Docs later on.

This is just to say

I’m sorry that I
unloaded a whole clip
of 10mm JHP

Into you
Ian
Dogmeat
and Tycho

Forgive me.
I am not yet used to
How this SMG vibrates
And you guys were in the way

This ought to be good.

It’s not clear from the previous post how I will get one chest freezer to keep things at two different temperatures. That’s because it’s impossible to do that with just a chest freezer.

What I plan to do is to keep the chest freezer cold enough to maintain the lowest temperature I need held. Anything that needs to be warmer will be heated to the proper temperature, probably with a heating pad.

One of the features planned for this temperature controller is a “master cool” mode, where the master cooling device will not run as long as everything is already cool enough. In my case, this would be the freezer, and the idea is that if the freezer does not run constantly, energy will be saved.

Now, there are some nice controllers available on the market, but they run around $50 for analog or $80 for digital, and only control one device. This would be good for fermentation, but it would be nice to also be able to use the same cooler for serving beers, which would be too cold for ale fermentations.

I had heard a lot about the Arduino and a quick question to Professor Google brought me to an article on uC Hobby describing a project by Sean Coates that did just what I was thinking of.

I decided to run with the Arduino, and at first an LED display, but I quickly decided that I wanted a serial LCD display so as to take up fewer output lines. A brief deliberation led me to stick with the thermistors of Coates’ original design, rather than LM-35 or 1-Wire sensors (Coates has since gone to LM-35s.) I decided on a 4-channel controller, although I may change my mind on that.

I ordered the Bare Bones Board by Modern Device, and also a low-cost serial LCD driver kit and LCD display which they sell. Since the BBB does not have a USB driver as the official Arduino boards do (why have one just for programming the thing) I also bought a USB cable from them for programming.

I bought ten thermistors on eBay for around 60 cents each, shipped. For around 45 dollars, I bought six Opto22 solid state relays (these are $22 new from the manufacturer.) Total costs, including the cable, are $110 so far, and I have extra thermistors and SSRs for another project.

Next post — clipping leads and heading to Radio Shack, or: re-learning soldering.

The battle against the striders near the end is a lot easier once you realize that you can barrel-ass into the hunters with your car and it hurts them lots.

Now you know.

I think this is the first time that such a mundane errand left me muttering “wow, that was cool.”