So, I had this crazy idea of using the Amazon echo to wake my computer. "Alexa, turn on desktop". I thought about it and it's pretty easy. You just need a few things: An Amazon Echo (of course!) Home Automation Bridge This
2019 is here. That means it's time to update Ghost to 2.0. Also, I put a new picture up as the cover for thenoel.org. It's a picture of some hot sausage
https://ngrok.com/ It lets you make a public, Internet accesible endpoint. It's great for doing quick tests.
It has been about 1 year since I got the Chevy Bolt. It's time to reflect on this revolutionary EV. First, I have to say - this thing is still awesome. Instant torque,
Euler Project problem 3 took me way longer than I expected. While I am not a real programmer, I thought I was good enough to script this in bash quickly. My life as
Of course getting laid off sucks! Duh, right? It bruises the ego and makes you question your own abilities. I was laid off recently about a month ago. Ouch. I went through the
I ran across this neat idea on Random Nerd Tutorials that is basically a way to make your own Amazon Dash button with a customizable action. While you can certainly get your own
HomeGenie is what I have been running for my Home Automation needs. It does a lot, but I mainly chose it for these features: Z-wave support. Multi-platform. It's an app coded in C#
Most of the motivation behind my projects comes from being cheap. There are usually easy solutions out there to problems I want to solve, but they are expensive. For this blog post, I
So, since I'm trying to blog more, let me share some little neat thing I found tonight. It's called vutil. It does a few things, but the neat thing I found is being
I briefly mentioned the Wi-Fi bridge used for my August Smart Lock in my Control Practically Anything with Alexa post. I'm writing this post now to describe it more in detail. The August
Alexa is great. I'm not talking about the silly stuff you see on TV or strange skills available from Amazon. I'm talking about it's simple ability to control things in your home. Physical
Continuing my post in part 1, now we will look at the software side of things. As I mentioned, the heart of the controller is the ESP8266. It is a very popular MCU