abirkill

Founded in 1976 by Trottier and Matić, and according to the article and Wikipedia, since 2019 has been owned 100% by Trottier. There's no indication that the founders lost majority ownership at any time, and although they sold off one division in 2019, it appears that Trottier still owns 100% of the remaining two divisions today.

That's pretty remarkable, isn't it? How many tech companies that had a period of being a household name have lasted 50 years and are still majority-owned by all or some of the founders?

I found that there's a surprising difference in quality for what feels like it should be a commodity item. All the outlets in my newish build were tamper-resistant, and pretty much as you described -- at best they were unpleasantly stiff and awkward to use, and some specific outlets would require a worrying amount of force and wiggling to plug anything in.

After a couple of high-usage outlets got jammed to the point that nothing could be plugged in, I replaced them with ones from the hardware store, and they are a big improvement. The existing outlets are unbranded, and I guess were from a bulk box of the cheapest that the electrician could source.

In my experience, Leviton are OK (much better than what was originally fitted), but Eaton are great -- they require slightly more force than non-TR outlets, but they're consistent, reliable, and I've never had to try more than once to plug anything in.

I can't speak to the cloud provider support, as I don't use it, but they have supported scheduled backups since at least June 2019, as I have locally-stored backups from scheduled Takeout jobs going back that far.

Bear in mind that the scheduling support is extremely basic -- the only option available is to schedule six exports, one every two months. You can't change the frequency or the number.

Also, you can't pick when the schedule starts, so if you want backups every two months indefinitely, you have to remember to schedule the next set of backups two months after the final backup of the previous scheduled job finished.

It's better than nothing, but only just.

Churchill was also prime minister from 1951-55.

As a counter-example, I haven't had an entirely successful Google Takeout export in at least a couple of years, using their service to schedule the exports automatically every two months.

I always have a failure with Google Fit data, which reports 'Service failed to retrieve this item' on the same JSON file every time. I assume this is something corrupted at their end.

It's not that uncommon for my exports to intermittently show failures with other services -- for example, my latest export, taken on April 20th, also failed to include one of my YouTube videos, with the same 'Service failed to retrieve this item' error. That video is usually included successfully, so I'm guessing this was a glitch.

Nothing major, but I can well believe that others also experience regular errors, although I'm sure we're in the minority.

This is true, but I don't think any consumer-grade sensor systems offer this as an option? I guess it might be useful if you're building your own sensor, and can't afford/justify a dual-NDIR sensor.

My understanding is that with single-NDIR sensors (like the MH-Z14 and 19), the auto-calibration is intended to overcome gradual particle buildup and beam degradation in the sensor chamber. While disabling it will prevent the scenario I described, you'll instead end up with gradual sensor shift as the sensor ages. I guess this could be minimised by manually calibrating the sensor outdoors on a regular basis.

Dual-NDIR sensors split a single beam into two chambers, so any degradation of the sensor beam affects both measurements, and the particle buildup in both chambers should also be approximately equal over time, so they should remain accurate over an extended period without any requirement for calibration. I built mine about 4 years ago and I do occasionally check to make sure they read ~400ppm when placed outdoors, last check was around 420ppm which suggests they're behaving reasonably well as they age.

The auto-calibration systems on cheaper consumer sensors also cause issues if they rarely see air that has low CO2 levels. Because these sensors can't measure absolute CO2 levels, only relative CO2 levels, they provide an absolute figure by looking for the lowest CO2 concentration they've seen over a period of time, usually around a 72 hour rolling window.

This works acceptably if the sensor is frequently exposed to outdoor air, but in a residential environment that's not always guaranteed, particularly in winter when it's not uncommon to keep windows closed to retain heat. In these situations the sensor will consider the lowest level to be around ~400ppm, even if it's actually much higher. This, of course, scales all other readings, so a sensor might read between 400-800ppm, leading you to believe everything is fine, when the actual indoor range is 800-1600ppm.

Because the auto-calibration happens over a period of time, it can be quite difficult to determine that your sensor is misreading, and the only way to fix it is to expose it to fresh air to reset the baseline.

The best solution I found to this is a dual-NDIR sensor which measures two different light frequencies, one which is absorbed by CO2 and one that isn't. This allows the sensor to know the absolute CO2 concentration, rather than the relative CO2 concentration, and avoids the need for auto-calibration. (I believe for absolute accuracy it still needs calibration for altitude, but for consumer use this makes such a small difference to be irrelevant).

Unfortunately, when I last looked, I couldn't find any consumer-grade sensors which used dual-NDIR sensors, only more expensive and less aesthetic commercial sensors. In the end I built my own using a CDM7160 sensor connected via I2C to a ESP8266, which reports over MQTT.