Three things from this week. This week there’s more of a common thread between the three things that bubbled to the top. Home assistant Home assistant keeps showing up in the periphery for me so I finally made some time to try it out. It’s a self-hosted home automation software that runs well on a Raspberry Pi 4B. I plugged in the RPi to the router, I found a blank microSD card, and imaged it.

Three things from this week. This week I’ve been following a lot of random threads again. Here are a few of them. Octoprint If you use a 3d printer you might be interested in Octoprint. It runs on a computer connected to the printer and handles a bunch of features like managing prints sent to the printer, tracking progress, or (with a webcam) streams video of the printer while it works.

Trying out something new, we’ll see if it sticks. I read a lot of random stuff online and rather than just forming an opinion and dropping it I thought I’d try sharing my thoughts. That’s all a blog is anyway, but sometimes they’re just little thoughts. Since each one is just little I’m putting a few together. I won’t claim they’re related in any way except that the all went through my brain.

Overview I wanted to build a self-sufficient portable lab network consisting entirely of Raspberries Pi. The lab network should be able to access the internet if there’s wifi available. And it should be easy to connect an external computer to the network and access any of the Raspberries Pi over the lab network. Basically I’d like to be able to run the whole thing on battery power and use it with or without upstream internet.

I’ve been thinking for a few weeks about how a self-hosted personal feed mixer could work. Like many other folks I’ve recently revived my presence on Mastodon - @Rob_Russell@mastodon.cloud. When I read this post from @nuthatch I started dumping my ideas into a reply but soon realized I was hundreds of words off on a tangent. So instead I captured my ideas here. A personal feed mixer, as I’m calling it, is a way to take multiple periodic data sources and produce a ranked list for the reader.

This one’s a bit dry but it lays out some ideas I think are really important for successfully launching a niche engineering product. The kinds of products I’m thinking of become a tool for someone else so they should adapt to the goals of the user rather than requiring the user to think differently about their goals. They should be blend in with the world they’re used in but they should be open to inspection and modification without undue effort.

SD cards are hard to keep track of because they’re tiny, they hold a lot of data, and no one device can read every format of card. I’ve accumulated a lot of these little media cards; technically some are MicroSDHC, some are MicroSDXC, and some are older “full size” SD cards in my collection. I’d like to inventory my cards so that I can spend less time looking for a card when I need one.

When you wake up in the morning and you don’t have something on the calendar already how do you decide what to do? Or maybe you have leisure time in the evening. Suppose after dinner you can spend an hour however you like. What happens in the next sixty minutes of your mortal time? Obviously these are questions that you’d never ask yourself. Such a thought would never even rise to your conscious mind.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve observed as a language-learner. I’d like to talk about it today by way of some experiences in my own life. I grew up in a city with a healthy mix of humans from many parts of the world. That gave me access to lots of people whose first language differed from mine. Inevitably that makes for some fun - like all the kids in my gradeschool learning how to swear in Italian complete with expressive gestures.

Late Night PC Service was a business I started back around 2003. I had a fulltime job writing software when I started it. My idea was to spend evenings solving hands-on computer problems for people in their homes and spend my weekends building websites for myself or clients. The logo was pretty nice and I liked the amusing mix of risque and nerd colliding in the business name. It was pretty demanding sometimes, wearing all the hats: technician and developer were the roles I wanted.