Longer-form writing: notes on programming vintage hardware, things I have repaired, and the occasional opinion about modern software.
I bought some of those Sonoff BASIC smart switches off Amazon and flashed them with Tasmota. It’s a pretty painless affair, the programming contacts are right there on the board, and the case comes apart with your fingernails.
This is where I figure out a simpler way to make my videos, and it seems really obvious when I explain it. Which generally means it’s a good way to work.
It’s my opinion that if you’re going to fill your home with smart devices, they need to be easy to control and monitor. Having to pull a phone out a pocket just to switch some lights on is annoying. Equally, having to open a browser just to see the state of everything is equally annoying.
In preparation for my next video I’ve been tidying up some cellular automata code I wrote. There’s some good old Conway’s Life, some 1D CAs that make pretty patterns, and one I recently discovered called Wire World.
Hello everyone! Let’s get on with it, shall we? Last year went pretty well, I released 14 videos and towards the end of the year experimented with releasing more than one video a month. I’ll also experiment with some more spontaneous content on here and maybe the odd Short. YouTube seems to like those, and doing what YouTube likes is the secret to growing.
I have a whole house battery solar system with 3kW of roof mounted panels and 9.6kWh of battery storage. I can monitor this using Home Assistant and it’s interesting to see my power usage and generation stats. Interesting, but not that relevant to daily life.
What is relevant is knowing how long the battery has left, especially now we’re in autumn/winter and the typical British weather is in full effect. As I look out my window right now it’s misty, yesterday it rained all day.
Some more stats on my home solar setup now it’s autumn and daylight seems to be a distant memory.
Is it self aware? No… of course it isn’t, but it’s fun trying to break it.
How to remove stupid “It looks like you’’re using an ad blocker” message from websites, and why they’re a stupid idea in the first place.
Here’s how my solar panels and battery system have been performing this month. I might do this more frequently, it’s hard going back in the historical data in my monitoring software and these posts are easy to find.
