Blogs on Projects and Coding Adventures

Wiring up the home network with MoCA

Wed, 15 May 2024 19:53:00 -0400

Our home WiFi coverage is … not great. We’re getting by with the old router from our ISP, and while it mostly works alright, the coverage isn’t fantastic everywhere. The upstairs rooms furthest from the router sometimes don’t get much signal at all. Updating that with new WiFi mesh devices might be awesome, but I’d also like to have the speed and reliability of a wired connection.

Sadly, our house is not wired up with ethernet. It is, however, wired up with coax to every room from our cable installation. We’re no longer using that for television, so why not use it for our network? Enter MoCA. MoCA is a standard for passing network traffic over a network of coaxial cables. With a handful of MoCA 2.0 adapters, I can ensure each room in the house that needs a reliable connection with speeds of up to 2.5Gbps.

On Twitter's fall and the rise of the Fediverse

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 12:47:00 -0500

tl;dr: Mastodon is not Twitter, and that’s great for many reasons, but I have no idea what, if anything, will end up filling the giant void that’ll be left when the birdsite disintegrates.

I’ve found a happy new home in the Fediverse, but I find myself wondering what the broader effects of Twitter’s implosion will be. Navigating Mastodon’s federated nature is a stumbling block for lots of people. I do wonder what will come of it next, but I am liking how much interest there genuinely is for networks not controlled by a single entity.

Automating our garage door with an ESP2866 and Home Assistant

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:57:00 -0400

Now that I’ve got a house again, I can really start playing with home automation projects a lot more. The first thing I plan to do is come up with something to monitor and automate the garage door, as I’ve already panicked from not remembering whether I’d closed it when leaving the house. It turned out I had closed it, but I can definitely do without that anxiety. What better way to remove that anxiety than by being able to remotely monitor and control the door!

Trans Day of Visibility 2022

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0400

It’s hard to feel positive about this year’s Transgender Day of Visibility. On the one hand, trans visibility is extremely important. It’s because of out trans people that I was able to understand my own identity. The more cis people really see, talk to, and come to understand trans people, the easier it will be for them to understand that we’re, well, just people. Transitioning is a beautiful thing. Look at any set of photos trans people share, and you’ll see that they’re not just happier, but more vibrant, more full of life, and so very genuinely themselves! This is what folks need to see more of, and what I think this day is meant to be about. Unfortunately, a lot of what folks are seeing nowadays isn’t trans people thriving, it’s misinformation and vitriol. This isn’t at all a new phenomenon, but in recent years it’s gotten overwhelming.

Automating My Apartment With Home Assistant

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 18:13:00 -0400

A while ago, I posted about my experiments with the Phillips Hue API to create an automated morning sunrise effect. The end result was nice, but all that mucking about with their HTTP APIs was a hassle any time I wanted to tweak something. I wanted to define what I wanted in a more declarative style, and have all the API calls managed behind the scenes. Home Assistant allowed me to do exactly that, and more.

How Does The Phillips Hue Wake-Up Feature Work?

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0400

I recently got myself a set of Phillips Hue White and Color Ambiance lights. One of the features I was looking forward to in particular (besides playing with all the color options) was setting a wake-up alarm with the lights gradually brightening. This was pretty painless to get set up using the phone app. I’m pretty happy with the result, but there’s certainly some things I wouldn’t mind tweaking. For example, the initial brightness of the bulbs (at the lowest setting) still seems a bit bright, so I might want to delay the bedside lamps and let the more distant lamp start fading in first. I also want to see if I can fiddle it into transitioning between some colors to get more of a sunrise effect (perhaps “rising” from the other side of the room, with the light spreading towards the head of the bed).

Cleaner Recursive HTTP Requests with Elm Tasks

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Continued from part one, Recursive HTTP Requests with Elm.

In my last post, I described my first pass at building a library to fetch data from a paginated JSON REST API. It worked, but it wasn’t too clean. In particular, the handling of the multiple pages and concatenation of results was left up to the calling code. Ideally, both of these concerns should be handled by the library, letting the application focus on working with a full result set. Using Elm’s Tasks, we can achieve exactly that!

Recursive HTTP Requests with Elm

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

So I got the idea in my head that I wanted to pull data from the GitLab / GitHub APIs in my Elm app. This seemed straightforward enough; just wire up an HTTP request and a JSON decoder, and off I go. Then I remember, oh crap… like any sensible API with a potentially huge amount of data behind it, the results come back paginated. For anyone unfamiliar, this means that a single API request for a list of, say, repositories, is only going to return up to some maximum number of results. If there are more results available, there will be a reference to additional pages of results, that you can then fetch with another API request. My single request decoding only the results returned from that single request wasn’t going to cut it.

Use a different theme when publishing Org files

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been using material-theme lately, and I sometimes switch around, but I’ve found that solarized produces the best exported code block results. To avoid having to remember to switch themes when exporting, I wrote a quick wrapper for org-export to do it for me:

(defun my/with-theme (theme fn &rest args)
  (let ((current-themes custom-enabled-themes))
    (mapcar #'disable-theme custom-enabled-themes)
    (load-theme theme t)
    (let ((result (apply fn args)))
      (mapcar #'disable-theme custom-enabled-themes)
      (mapcar (lambda (theme) (load-theme theme t)) current-themes)
      result)))

(advice-add #'org-export-to-file :around (apply-partially #'my/with-theme 'solarized-dark))
(advice-add #'org-export-to-buffer :around (apply-partially #'my/with-theme 'solarized-dark))

Voilà, no more bizarrely formatted code block exports from whatever theme I might have loaded at the time :)

Drawing Git Graphs with Graphviz and Org-Mode

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Digging through Derek Feichtinger’s org-babel examples (which I came across via irreal.org), I found he had some great examples of displaying git-style graphs using graphviz. I thought it’d be a fun exercise to generate my own graphs based on his graphviz source using elisp, and point it at actual git repos.

Getting Started

I started out with the goal of building a simple graph showing a mainline branch and a topic branch forked from it and eventually merged back in.

Keeping Files And Configuration In Sync

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I have a few computers I use on a daily basis, and I like to keep the same emacs and shell configuration on all of them, along with my org files and a handful of scripts. Since I’m sure other people have this problem as well, I’ll share what I’m doing so anyone can learn from (or criticise) my solutions.

Git for configuration and projects

I’m a software developer, so keeping things in git just makes sense to me. I keep my org files in a privately hosted git repository, and Emacs and Zsh configurations in a public repo on github. My blog is also hosted and published on github as well; I like having it cloned to all my machines so I can work on drafts wherever I may be.

Birthday Puzzle

Sat, 18 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

This logic puzzle has been floating around the internet lately. When I caught wind of it, I thought it would be a great exercise to tackle using Prolog. I’m not especially good with the language yet, so it added to the challenge a bit, but it was a pretty worthwhile undertaking. When I got stumped, I discovered that mapping out the birthdays into a grid helped me visualize the problem and ultimately solve it, so I’ve included that with my prolog code so you can see how I arrived at the answer.

Coders at Work

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

A few days before leaving work for a week and a half of flying and cruising to escape frigid Pennsylvania, I came across a Joe Armstrong quote during my regularly scheduled slacking off on twitter and Hacker News. I’d come across a couple times before, only this time I noticed it had a source link. This led me to discovering (and shortly thereafter, buying) Peter Seibel’s “Coders at Work – Reflections on the Craft of Programming”. I loaded it onto my nook, and off I went.

Adventuring Through SICP

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Back in May, a coworker and I got the idea to start up a little seminar after work every couple of weeks with the plan to set aside some time to learn and discuss new ideas together, along with anyone else who cared to join us.

Learning Together

Over the past several months, we’ve read our way through the first three chapters of the book, watched the related video lectures, and did (most of) the exercises.

Getting Organized with Org Mode

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been using Emacs Org mode for nearly a year now. For a while I mostly just used it to take and organize notes, but over time I’ve discovered it’s an incredibly useful tool for managing projects and tasks, writing and publishing documents, keeping track of time and todo lists, and maintaining a journal.

Project Management

Most of what I’ve been using Org mode for has been breaking down large projects at work into tasks and subtasks. It’s really easy to enter projects in as a hierarchy of tasks and task groupings. Using Column View, I was able to dive right into scoping them individually and reporting total estimates for each major segment of work.

Erlang: The Movie

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Hopping through Joe Armstrong’s blog, I happened across Erlang: The Movie. More programming languages need videos like this.

Learning Functional Programming, Part One

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Part One: Lambdas? In my Python?

Over the past few months, I’ve decided to take a stab at learning some functional programming. I’d been doing python for a few years (and completely falling in love with it), and so I’d been exposed to a few functional concepts it offers - primarily higher-order functions and list comprehensions, both of which allow for very clear, concise and powerful code. Since that’s where I started my journey, that’s where my post will begin as well.

Transmission, RSS, and XBMC

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:01:00 -0400

I’m a huge fan of XBMC. My pc (currently running Ubuntu 10.04) has taken root in my living room, piping all my movies and tv shows straight to my HDTV.

While my pc is set up as a DVR using MythTV to record shows off my FIOS box, it tends to be a little unreliable, which can suck when it’s time to catch up on Daily Show and Colbert episodes. I’ve had Transmission set up for a while for all my torrenting needs, and I’ve even written an XBMC script to manage torrents, so I got to looking for tools to track tv show torrent rss feeds.

Meh.php

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

<?php
if (!defined('meh')) define('meh', null);

class Meh {
    public function __set($name, $value) {
    }
    public function __get($name) {
        return meh;
    }
    public function __isset($name) {
        return true || false;
    }
    public function __unset($name) {
    }
    public function __call($name, $arguments) {
        return meh;
    }
    public function __callStatic($name, $arguments) {
        return meh;
    }
}

$bwuh = new Meh();
$bwuh->give_a_shit();
echo $bwuh->concerns;

class SuperDuperBillingProcessor extends Meh {}

$p = new SuperDuperBillingProcessor();
$p->calculateEverything();
$p->profit();

Potatoes and Portal Guns

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Got my hands on Portal 2 and finished a run through the single player campaign. Was a lot of fun, the characters were bursting with humor and personality. Just like the first game, it was hard to stop playing. Unlike the first game, it’s got some length, so I stayed up late a couple nights with my eyes glued to the television. I already want to play through it again to find any little things I my tired eyes may have missed.