Rebuilding and Redesigning this site

Creative / Writers Block

Sometimes the best way out of a slump is to gut the project and redesigning it from the ground up … So, I’ve been a major creative slump with a lot of things going on in my personal and professional lives – as well as the phase of all of Jupiter’s moons or some shit. […]

Security and the (in)Human Element

way too many passwords and credentials to manage?

This weekend a friend of mine was caught by yet another Facebook social engineering security event. It was a run of the mill phishing attack, and his credentials were compromised and scores of messages were sent out. The messages were simple “It’s you in this video?” with a fake link to Youtube (see image). This […]

WordPress Updates and New Look!

Website Redesign Wordpress Themes Header

I spent a few days of this COVID-19 crisis sitting in front of the computer and rebuilding a lot of this blog’s WordPress front end. The prior theme was nice looking but I was starting to find issues with its speed. Ultimately, it was just easier to gut and redo it than fix. I also […]

Pixaloop – Animate Still Photos

Pocono Mountain Sunset

I downloaded the free version of Pixaloop (Apple iOS | Android) to my phone a few weeks ago, but never got around to taking it for a test drive until this morning. I loaded a recent photo of a sunset in the Poconos and started to run with it. Pixaloop’s interface is pretty straight forward, […]

What’s in my camera bag?

Updated 14 March 2020 with new gear I picked up recently 😀 I’ve been asked on a couple different occasions lately: “what’s in your camera bag?”. Alternatively, “You always have your camera bag with you, what do you carry around day to day?”. I’ve been using a Peak Design large backpack for a few years […]

Using WeeWX for Home Automation

Logo of Weather Underground - an IBM company that will screw its data providers for no apparent reason

Now that Wunderground has decided to remove free API access for PWS owners, we needed a local replacement using WeeWX for home automation systems.

WeeWX Weather Station Post Install Configurations

WeeWX Logo

Previously I posted about migrating my Davis Vantage Pro2 Weather Station running WeatherCat software on a MacMini to WeeWX software on a Raspberry Pi. This continues the configuration and customization of the solution

The Hubitat Journey Continues – WebCoRE

WebCoRE Logo

The continuing saga of Local Processing – WebCoRE  Updated January 2nd 2021: A reader, Robert Challoner, messaged me that the GIT package address changed since I wrote this and I updated it below. Robert – thanks for the heads up! I also did some cleanup of the layout to make it easier to copy and […]

Migrating from SmartThings to Hubitat

smarthome image

All Politics (and Automation) is Local As I have written about previously, I’ve been working on a smart home / automation solution in my house for about 12-18 months now. My initial buildout was heavily based on the Samsung SmartThings ecosystem, which at the time was probably the best available for the investment (time and […]

Weather Station Migration to weeWX on Raspberry Pi

Weather Station Migration: Mac to Raspberry Pi I have been running a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station in my backyard for just under four years now. The area I live in has so many microclimates that if you don’t like the weather you can drive 5 minutes and be in completely different weather. As […]