The Noel Blog

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Hollywood Bowl

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AI Image Processing at Home (Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog)

Home automation is wonderful.  Up until recently, I used things like motion sensors and contact sensors to trigger various things.  While these devices still have their place, they are "dumb."  For example, I could have a motion sensor in my backyard that triggers lights, but any motion from

A Simple Utility to Expose Shell Commands as an HTTP API

I lost most of this original post due to datacenter outage at my cheap VPS provider (https://buyvm.net/ - they are pretty good cause they are pretty cheap).  Since I don't want to forget things and it may be useful to some, here is a link to the

Freedom! (From your wireless carrier's hotspot throttling)

So, for Independence Day, my family set out on a road trip to Lake Tahoe.  My wife and I take turns driving.  During one of my turns riding shotgun, something came up at the office that required my attention.  It should have been a quick task, but my particular carrier

BlueKeep Scanner Docker Image

"Hey - this isn't a security blog!" IKR?  But yeah, this BlueKeep stuff  a.k.a CVE-2019-0708 seems scary.  So, some nice peeps out there have made scanning utilities for this stuff. https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/rdpscan There are pre-build MacOS and Windows binaries

Featured

Docker Container for August Lock Bridge

It turns out that my old blog post about making an August lock bridge device was popular https://www.thenoel.org/diy-august-l/ [https://www.thenoel.org/diy-august-l/] Unfortunately, some folks had problems getting things to run due to a combination of some vague instructions I put

Ghost 2.0 and Sausage!

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 cooking up on a grill that I took in Prague.  The street food

Great Utility - ngrok

https://ngrok.com/ It lets you make a public, Internet accesible endpoint. It's great for doing quick tests.

1 Year with the Chevy Bolt

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, long range battery (60KWh), and the DC fast charger make this an awesome car. There is

Things I Learned While Trying To Solve Euler Project Problem #3

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 an IT guy requires me to have some knowledge of scripting and I thought I was good

Getting Laid Off Sucks - And Then it Doesn't

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 usual range of emotions. I read multiple articles on how to dust yourself off and get back

ESP8266 DeepSleep Mode Button

I ran across this neat idea on Random Nerd Tutorials [https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-wi-fi-button-diy-amazon-dash-button-clone/] that is basically a way to make your own Amazon Dash button with a customizable action. While you can certainly get your own Amazon Dash button and hack

HomeGenie - A Look at My Home Setup

HomeGenie [http://www.homegenie.it/] 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 [http://www.z-wave.com/] support. * Multi-platform. It's an app coded in C# and packages are built

DIY Digital Pool Pump Control

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 want to talk about my pool pump. (and yes, Alexa will be mentioned in this post - again!

Stumbled Across Something Neat - vutil

So, since I'm trying to blog more, let me share some little neat thing I found tonight. It's called vutil [https://github.com/vrest-io/vutil]. It does a few things, but the neat thing I found is being able to execute system commands via HTTP

DIY August Smart Lock Wi-Fi Bridge

I briefly mentioned the Wi-Fi bridge used for my August Smart Lock in my Control Practically Anything with Alexa [https://www.thenoel.org/control-practically-anything-with-alexa/] post. I'm writing this post now to describe it more in detail. The August Smart Lock [http://august.com/

Control Practically Anything with Alexa

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 things. Now, there are plenty of skills out there developed or

Cheap Wall Sconce Conversion - Part 2, The Software

Continuing my post in part 1 [https://www.thenoel.org/cheap-wall-sconce-conversion-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 used in many IoT applications. There are

Cheap Wall Sconce Conversion - Part 1

A few years ago, I picked up 3 sets of cheap, AA-battery powered wall sconces for my home theater. You can pick these up anywhere including Ebay for good deals. Here is one I found in a quick google search (but I'm sure you can find it

kodi

Some Neat Kodi Automation

I use Kodi for my home theater management. There are a couple of neat plugins I want show off. The first one is the PseudoCinema Poster plugin. This neat plugin lets me show a "Now Playing" movie poster on a dedicated screen for my home theater. When a

It's That Time of Year Again!

This is the time of the year where I resolve to blog more. I just updated a bunch of stuff on the server and hopefully this motivates me to write and take pictures again. Some upcoming things I hope to blog about: * Amsterdam! * ESP8266 with arduino. * Disneyland stuff * Finally running

Voice Control Airfoil (aka, my home audio rube goldberg machine)

So, I've always wanted to control my home audio setup via voice. Sure, there have been solutions for voice control in the past, but nothing has really worked well for me. I use Airfoil [https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/] for synced audio around the home. When I first got

My 2016 Predictions

* In the Blu-Ray release of The Martian, an alternate ending shows Sean Bean dying as the Hermes lands right on top of his house. * Someone on the internet will do a mashup of the new X-Files series and Californication. Spoiler: His name is Cox Mulder. * Metallica will play

F the Internet

Horrible Skiing Accident

Horrible Ski Accident [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3j5hdy_horrible-ski-accident_sport] by great-and-funny-videos [http://www.dailymotion.com/great-and-funny-videos]