The Home app has some frustrating limitations around creating automations or triggering events that don’t require auth from the user. Apps like Eve allow you to hook into more HomeKit APIs and create automations that can react to more sensors. What’s missing though is awareness of the automation suite as a whole e.g. overrides, priorities, and general awareness of how a bunch of automations could be modelled as a whole system. Continue reading.

Homebridge has been an amazing contribution to connecting most of my home into a single automation platform. If you’ve read this blog you’ll know that I’ve electrified my home and dumped fossil gas into the past where it belongs. Bringing solar into HomeKit Part of electrifying my home was adding solar and I’ve talked about how I’ve extracted data from my realtime circuit hardware via a dashboard created with a magtag device on my fridge. Continue reading.

Let’s start with the acknowledgment that I am in a very privileged position to be able to do this to a home I own. I do believe that my home will be commonplace in the coming decade, clean, fossil fuel-free, and efficient. I just got here earlier as I had the means and passion to be an early adopter. I electrified my home about 18 months ago but have only now clocked over 12 months of an electric home with rooftop solar. Continue reading.

Every year I produce a timelapse video of my @earthin24 twitter bot for each of the 5 satellites that it tracks. Earth in 2021, a year in review thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/L485FyF7EH — Earth (@earthin24) January 3, 2022 This year was the first year I built, tweeted, and stored each video and fulldisc frame inside github using their actions infrastructure. So my usual process of ssh’ing into my VPS and running some flaky scripts to generate the videos would have to be changed. Continue reading.

I recently had the privilege of being able to install solar on my roof and with that came the need/want to track and monitor lots of information about my solar install and my usage patterns of it. Having recently electrified my home and completely removing gas all together (I plan to write about this too), I wanted to know where I could load shift some of my usage patterns. Another aspect of monitoring was to know my panels were performing at their optimal, and expected, output. Continue reading.

So a while back I created a twitter bot @earthin24 that generates a video of earth, as seen from himawari8 satellite, every day.

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At work my team have recently taken over a golang app. To learn a new language I like to build something that keeps my interest and by the nature of exploring something of interest you tend to cover way more surface area of a language this way.

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I had twitter open the other day and I had to put my phone down and attend to something else, the timeline happened to be on a looping gif video and I noticed when I came back that my phone was still awake and unlocked the fact that video was in view kept the phone awake and this got me thinking about the new playsinline attribute that has been enabled for <video> elements in iOS10 Safari.

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The other day I had to test an API response based on a file having the incorrect Content-Type of a FormData PUT request.

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September 2015 I had the privelage of giving a talk at JSConfEU 2015 in Berlin. My topic was about what the browser actually does to construct your website and show it on the screen. This is a topic I’ve been digging into for a few years now and it was really fun trying to distill it into a ~25 minute talk.

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