Update 2024-04-13

 Posted on April 13, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  

Updated site to new Hugo and Beautiful Hugo theme. Use of Go module approach to incorporating and pinning the theme version instead of git submodule “vendoring” of the theme. Fairly minimal changes required to update from Hugo 0.80.0 to 0.124.1 Tested and previewed on Netlify in a pull request with a bunch of reworking and iteration, and cleanly merged to deploy. Git, github, Hugo, Beautiful Hugo and Netlify for the win. [Read More]
coding 

Decent espresso finally arrives

 Posted on July 20, 2018  |  2 minutes  |  

Many people have stories of crowdfunded projects never delivering and resulting in nothing to show except a warning tale for anyone who might considering backing another crowdfunded campaign. Well this is a story that started out as another Kickstarter project gone undelivered, but reimagined and finally delivered by another company. I finally received the Decent Espresso DE1+ after waiting for 6.5 years in total from the first idea of getting a high tech espresso machine and 1. [Read More]
food 

Home energy monitoring - InfluxDB onto t2.micro

 Posted on June 14, 2018  |  2 minutes  |  

I would not recommend running an I/O hungry process like InfluxDB on a Raspberry Pi. The fact that it can work is convenient for demo purposes, but for reliable long term use, we need something more performant.

[Read More]
coding 

Home energy monitoring and savings project

 Posted on March 24, 2018  |  4 minutes  |  

One goal for this year is to reduce expenses and one way is through using less energy. I know the heater consumes a lot of energy: 300w of electricity to run the blower fan, and gas to run the furnace. It could run it less often if I’m not at home. Besides reducing energy use, I want to improve the comfort of the living areas and measure it. Certain rooms that I’m in often are up to 10 degrees hotter than others. [Read More]
coding 

Raspberry Pi aquarium heater control and monitor

 Posted on February 23, 2018  |  4 minutes  |  

This project fits into a larger project of lowering home energy cost. I plan to drop the thermostat to below 60 when I’m away from home so that the gas furnace and blower don’t run for hours a day. However, the ideal water temperature for a tropical betta fish is between 78 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. This project will keep the aquarium warm even though the ambient air temperature may be below 60. [Read More]
coding 

Most recently used - a heuristic that works for computers as well as humans

 Posted on January 27, 2018  |  6 minutes  |  

We use the “most recently used” heuristic to make things faster given a limited amount of physical or mental space. With computers, we use the “most recently used” heuristic to make software run fast with a limited amount of memory. This applies in everyday human life too. Keeping salt and pepper at the table instead of in a distant spice rack makes eating a faster experience. We can also make iPhone apps organization faster and less painful. [Read More]
workflow 

Hello and Happy Holidays

 Posted on December 26, 2017  |  1 minutes  |  

This site has been slow cooking for the last year. Finally it surfaces just in time for the new year. I just set up this blog using Terraform and Jekyll. Implementing a blog is the new “Hello World” of not sure what to call it the new media writing world? Update May 30, 2018: I moved to Hugo, GitHub and Netlify. The idea is to be able to compose mostly by pushing new draft content to a git branch which can be done with an iOS client instead of needing to run a server locally. [Read More]
coding 

Workflow v1

 Posted on August 31, 2016  |  11 minutes  |  

This describes my workflow as of October 10, 2015. I follow a personal Kanban approach inspired by the book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life with weekly, monthly and yearly reviews. I’ve added planning elements from the Getting Results the Agile Way book and occasional anti-procrastination focusing techniques from the Pomodoro technique. I evolved to this current approach from an original approach of Getting Things Done (GTD) using OmniFocus on the desktop. [Read More]
workflow