VMWare missing /dev/vmmon?

From time to time my VMWare Fusion refuses to start saying that it can’t find /dev/vmmon device. Which shouldn’t be a surprise considering that pursuing every last bit of battery time I have turned off every possible daemon I could find that I do not use frequently (I use Fusion maybe once a month). One could argue that Fusion should be able to start it’s own daemons automatically when it’s opened but apparently guys at VMWare did not get that far yet.

Bottom line – to start up all the daemons you need to run Fusion simply run this command from the terminal:

sudo ‘/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh’ –start

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Apple Airport Extreme USB disks problem finaly solved

Living in WiFi crowded environment (more than 10 stations in 2.4GHZ band) forced us to move to 5GHz band. For many months now we have an Apple Extreme base station installed at home. It performed almost flawlessly with one exception – the airport failed to recognize more than one hard drive connected to it’s USB port. After almost giving up on it I have finally found a solution. Connecting the drive directly to my mac and running on it Repair Disk function from Disk Utility solved the problem. Now our airport sees both disks and I’m a happy camper again :-)

Balanced zone controller

One of the nicest features of our new HVAC zone system is module called balanced controller. Basically it’s an algorithm calculating heat demand in every zone and opening and closing registers accordingly.

Here you can see that one of the zones (middle one) was fully open while remaining two were just barely moved, Then when this zone was satisfied in it’s heat demand it was closed and the first one was fully open to direct all hot heat into this zone to shorten furnace running time to the minimum.

I don’t have any statistic data to prove my theory yet but it seems to me that such behavior shortens greatly overall running time and simply saves us money.

HVAC zoning resurrected

A comment posted under one of my older posts reminded me that it can be a good idea to resurrect and finish my HVAC zoning project I shelved some time ago. Main cause I did so was that I couldn’t get dz compiled. I didn’t have time to mess with it any longer then, but I decided to give it a try this time. It turned out that over last two years Ubuntu project went forward so much that this time dz compiled successfully the very first time I tried. So right now I have a spider web construction on my desk consisting of two 1-wire temp sensors and two servos run by phidget boards. And they work. Servos are opening and closing according to changes in the temperature of my office. They have no influence as they aren’t running registers yet, but they proved to work. Now it’s time to run wires around the house and motorize registers.

Stay tuned.