Case Larsen

Update 2024-04-13

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 17:01:29 -0700

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.

The writings on this site are copyrighted

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hidden page to update copyright

Adding PID control to Raspberry Pi aquarium heater control

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

No fish were harmed in this experiment.

Decent espresso finally arrives

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Home energy monitoring - InfluxDB onto t2.micro

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Home energy monitoring and savings project

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Raspberry Pi aquarium heater control and monitor

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hello and Happy Holidays

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Workflow v1

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Front Page Content beautifulhugo supports content on your front page. Edit /content/_index.md to change what appears here. Delete /content/_index.md if you don’t want any content here.

About me

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a little bit OCD. I like to think it comes out of my Japanese heritage. It can be a force for good (of self and others) when directed appropriately. I like taxonomies to understand differences and commonalities. I like to group things together, sort and compare things along different criteria. I like to make a mass of unrelated material hold together. I also like learning (sometimes hard but definitely a slow, continuing journey) and recounting what I’ve learned (less hard and often skipped over until recently).

Laptop Camping Resources for the San Francisco Bay Area

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So you’re a remote worker and you’re getting stir crazy in your home office. Or you’re visiting the San Francisco Bay Area and need to know where you can spend a few hours working. This page is for you. The criteria Do they have free WiFi or not? Just because they don’t have WiFi isn’t necessarily a deal breaker. You just need to plan your work accordingly. However if they don’t have WiFi, they might intentionally be discouraging people from using personal computers and staying for long periods.

Some curated links

clarsen@gmail.com (Case Larsen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

7/24/2018 Burdian’s Ass - having too many important choices but can’t decide which one to focus on first. 6/29/2018 Measuring of intuition (archive.org link) from the Smart Drug Smarts (archive.org link) podcast, because quantification and unconscious learning… 6/21/2018 Lava baked bread from Iceland ( article no longer exists and no archive.org capture), because Iceland…, travel, and cooking food. Seen on Great Big Story: 5/20/2018 Horrible traffic jams by design. The US is a lot better by comparison.