XTension 9.4.42

Mon Aug 30 05:39:00 EDT 2021

Hi,
thanks for sharing your feelings !
In France, it’s the same : 85% of hospitalised people are unvaccinated. 
A data scientist has created a very good website about covid crisis. I apologise because it’s in French but it’s very good : https://covidtracker.fr
But, even with these numbers, anti-vax stay anti-vax : they’re stupid.

His work helps me and my family to get vaccinated by getting a schedule in a vaccine center so I thank him every day.

Take care of you and of your family.
Stay safe.
Emmanuel 
Lille, France

> Le 29 août 2021 à 22:23, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> a écrit :
> 
> Good Afternoon!
> 
> I have a new version of XTension for you folks, but first I need to apologize for my necessary absence as of late. The current situation in the country is taking a huge toll on our medical providers of which my wife is right in the thick of it with a specialty in nephrology. I have been concentrating on taking care of family and nursing the sanity and health of those I love. We are not sick, because we’re all fully vaccinated and know how to properly mask, so don’t worry about us on that level, at least not yet. We have a pretty poor vaccination rate around here and even with almost half the population vaccinated the other half is now sending more people to the hospital and the morgue as it did back during the last big surge where almost nobody was vaccinated yet. The numbers here at the hospital are exactly what you’d expect given the claimed effectiveness of the vaccine. Slightly less than 1 in 10 people admitted to the hospital were vaccinated. For those ending up in the ICU and then later in the morgue it is so close to 100% unvaccinated as to make no difference to anyone who isn’t a politician. I apologize ahead of time for the length of this preamble to the release notes, but as I play psychologist to my family to help them cope I will be sharing my own frustration and borderline insanity with you in order to help myself cope. 
> 
> Our biggest hospital here is floating around 97% bed usage even after cancelling all elective surgeries again. The ICU sometimes has as many as 3 beds still available. There is nobody in the hospital that doesn’t absolutely need to be right now. (you’d think it would be that way all the time, because who would want to be there?) At this moment I believe that they have 2 more vents available. One of the treatments before putting you on the ventilator is to put you on “high rate” oxygen. Not the same nasal cannula you’re familiar with but a non-re-breather device with a much higher flow of oxygen to try to get enough of it through your damaged lungs and into your blood to keep your brain alive. Over the course of the last few weeks the hospital has had so many people on high flow o2 that they could not keep the tank for the entire building filled up. At several points they have been within hours of running out and then just letting all the people on that die before another source who had a tank load available could be found and brought in at huge expense. Companies in Florida that were previously delivering liquid O2 to NASA and SpaceX are telling them they will have to put off launches and testing as the hospitals need it more than they do! This is not a problem I ever even imagined before.
> 
> The second hospital in town has completely filled their morgue. They can’t get the bodies out to funeral homes fast enough to cover the number that are getting sent down. The are starting to work on contracts for refrigerated tractor trailers in which they can put the dead so that they aren’t left stacked up in the hallways. 
> 
> One of the side effects of the virus is damage to your kidneys and so my wife is working with many more people who are much sicker than they would normally be. Even just laying eyes on them requires full gowning up, gloves, respirators and face shields that look like space helmets. And you can’t just dress up once and see all your patients you have to go through decontamination that sounds almost as much fun as that described by Michael Crichton in the Andromeda Strain and then start over for each one. She is doing this dozens of times a day and it adds hours and hours to her rounding schedule. 
> 
> Once you’ve exhausted all the other ways of getting oxygen into your body the last step is to put you on ECMO which is basically a simplified heart lung machine. They do a bit of probably not major surgery to get an alarmingly large tube into your main vein and artery which they bring out of your body through a hole that they can’t close since you have big tubes running out of it, into a machine which pumps it through a membranous gas exchange system with O2 bubbling through the other side. Until the hospital runs out of oxygen anyway, then you just die. My wife is dialyzing far too many unvaccinated people who are dying of multi-system organ failure just so they can suffer a little longer. No vaccine, thats too dangerous, but go ahead and do the surgery to put these huge catheters into the biggest artery and vein they can get to. Then go on blood thinners to keep your blood from just turning to a clot in the machine. Then require someone be gowned up and sitting with you 24/7 to make sure that none of the pipes come unconnected as the rate at which the machine has to pump your blood through is fast enough that you’ll have your entire blood volume in a pool on the floor long before anyone not watching could get to your room and hit the stop button. Oh and then you’ll need kidney dialysis for the rest of your life, and a liver transplant as well, probably a spleen too while you’re at it.
> 
> The last person that died in our largest hospital was 31 years old and only a couple of hours ago. If you think your age or health will protect you, you’re wrong. The last person that died of the vaccine was never. If you’re afraid of long term effects of the vaccine, looking into the history of all non-live virus vaccines like this one there was never a single one that caused a problem after the first 3 months, 99.9% of reactions happen in the first 10 minutes. If you think it’s new technology you’re right, as far as vaccines were concerned, it’s only about 20 years old. And that is just specifically for the covid one not just the newer technique that was used to produce it. 20 years ago they began working on a vaccine for these viruses but it went very slowly because nobody was paying for it as it wasn’t infecting very many people. As soon as money started pouring in, it was not difficult to finish the work and the testing in record time. If you have the money you don’t have to take the shortcuts. It is incorrect to think that this is new and untested. I have spoken to friends who’s first question is, but what else did they have? This is amazing to me, some of them had other conditions, but grandmas diabetes was not killing her and did not result in her catching covid and had nothing to do with her lungs becoming bricks unable to transfer oxygen. How is this an argument against the vaccine? It’s an argument for it!
> 
> Right now those that work in healthcare are trying very hard to find any more energy to be compassionate. At this point everyone who wanted a vaccination has gotten it, and the people that are sick chose that route. They chose not to. How do you emotionally offer the same level of care to someone who is dying because of the exercise of their own free will, even if it is completely misinformed? I suppose compassion doesn’t matter as much once the patient is in an induced coma on a vent or ECMO. How do you keep doing that with all the other stressors when there is no end to the line of them in site? They simply can’t operate at that level under those conditions for this long without starting to lose it. 
> 
> Doing some fairly simple, and therefore probably vastly wrong, math on the numbers vs the vaccination rates and how people are finally starting to respond by getting vaccinated again I would expect the current surge to ease off a bit by the end of this coming month. I am not trained in such things of course, but I like statistics, or rather I hate statistics… but still. The reason that so many predictions of complete and total doom are so very wrong is because those equations expect nobody to change what they are doing. People do respond. They don’t just ignore that people around them are dying, they go do something. Sadly it actually takes people they know and love dying before they take notice. And indeed vaccination rates are very good again! If they had continued at this level we wouldn’t be where we are now. 
> 
> Yes, the vaccine still works for the delta variant, it’s just much more contagious, not much more deadly. Whether or not it will always work for future variants is unknown because we haven’t seen those future variants. Will you need a booster next year? Who cares! The day I’m eligible for my booster I’ll be standing in line for it. Not because I think I’m actually going to die from the thing, most folks don't, but I cannot take care of my family, or drive my son to school, or make dinner while I am locked in a hospital that won’t let my family visit me for weeks or months which is not uncommon right now. There are a lot of outcomes lesser than death that you should put on your unacceptable list and not just look at that single metric. As far as future variants, having a half vaccinated world is exactly how you get variants that are resistant to the vaccine. It is exactly the same mechanism that causes antibiotic resistance in bacteria. You have an infection and you start antibiotics, that knocks back the bacteria that are susceptible to the meds very quickly and you start to feel better, so you don’t want to finish the 10 day course because it upsets your stomach. So you stop. The bacteria that are left are the ones the antibiotic did not or could not kill as rapidly. Normally the very few left would be mopped up by your own immune system, but if you stop too soon and have a relapse of the infection the ones growing in you now are the ones the antibiotic didn’t kill. Next time it won’t work at all. It is exactly the same for the virus and the vaccine. By refusing the vaccine people are ensuring that we will eventually see a surge of a variant that really is not covered by the vaccine. 
> 
> Thank you for letting me get that off my chest, I will attempt to start getting caught up on emails and other projects soon, but don’t be surprised if my email queue remains quite swollen for the immediate future. And now, release notes!
> 
> Also George! If part of the weeder problem is being unable to edit the settings for them then this version may very well help as I found and fixed a problem with that! load this new version and make the configuration changes once more to see if they stick.
> 
> As always the latest version is available here: https://machomeautomation.com/doku.php/current <https://machomeautomation.com/doku.php/current>
> 
> 
> 9.4.43 Change Log:
> 
> NEW: Generac Generator Monitor Plugin <http://machomeautomation.com/doku.php/supported_hardware/genmon>. This plugin can connect to the excellent genmon open source replacement for the proprietary Generac monitoring device. It replaces their custom device that offers no local data with a raspberry pi running the genmon software. As much relevant data as can be is turned into XTension units. As of this alpha release of the plugin no attempt is made to be able to control the generator or transfer switches. If people desire to do such a thing I can add that in a future build of it.
> NEW: MQTT Broker Plugin <http://machomeautomation.com/doku.php/supported_hardware/mqttbroker> An alpha version of an MQTT broker. This is not feature complete yet, but since it is so popular for IOT devices we really needed to start some support for this protocol. As of this moment only devices shared to XTension are supported. It will not share XTension devices TO an MQTT broker yet. It will also only work with devices that send a reasonable numeric value or a string that can be parsed to a numerical value. See the wiki page for more info. I do plan to flesh this out with a lot of parsing options depending on what people need to want to be able to do so experiment and let me know.
> I added a “Send Query” command to the contextual menu for some, but not all, device types that support it. So instead of resorting to the command line window you can just control click on a unit and select that. Useful for the hubitat and the vera and such but not yet expanded to the CM11 and UPB interfaces. Only newer plugin device types that support a query will have this menu item enabled. Which means there is a new key in the device definitions for plugins that lets XTension know if the unit can be queried or not.
> FIX: The hubitat would return goofy levels for dimmable devices after they were turned off sometimes leading to XTension thinking they had been turned back on locally when they had not. I’m now using the switch parameter from the hubitat to know if it thinks the device is on or off and completely ignoring any level values when the device should be off. On my own system this has solved 100% of the problems I was having while not adding any new ones, but if anyone sees anything else odd please let me know.
> FIX: Fixed a problem with the ControlByWeb plugin that could lead to it not seeing all the available end points and or log a lot of errors.
> FIX: The color preset display in the edit unit dialog for color capable units no longer has bad placement that overlaps some of the titles in the window.
> FIX: Fixed a path where a blocked unit would still log it’s reception of new states even when it should not.
> FIX: The hue hub plugin had an issue that could make it difficult to get it to sign into a new hub even after you had pressed the button on it. This is now fixed and you should be able to add new hubs or new interfaces to one without difficulty.
> FIX: A bug introduced a few versions ago could cause changes to your web remote layouts to not be saved. This could also effect other plugins specifically the weeder plugin where it might not have actually saved any of your configuration changes. George! If you’re reading this please try this new version!
> Added better error handling to the loading of graphic resources during the startup of the program. I suspect that big sur or there abouts changed some things that are no longer available. If so you’ll get an error during load but the load will now continue and the program will be usable though it might throw errors later on or not display some icon types. Please let me know if you’re seeing any of these problems so we can collect some more data.
> Removed some remaining debug logging stuck on in the shared database plugins.
> Removed a debug dump of the database that could happen when starting up any shared item capable interface.
> rtl_433: added support for moisture/water sensor devices that send a numerical value rather than just an on or an off.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
>  James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org <http://www.planetarygear.org/>		http://MacHomeAutomation.com <http://machomeautomation.com/>
> 
> 
> 
> 
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