The Noel Blog

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.

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

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

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

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/ Unfortunately, some folks had problems getting things to

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

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

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.

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

ESP8266 DeepSleep Mode Button

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

HomeGenie - A Look at My Home Setup

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

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

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. It does a few things, but the neat thing I

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 post. I'm writing this post now to describe it more in

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

Cheap Wall Sconce Conversion - Part 2, The Software

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

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.

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

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

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

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

F the Internet

Horrible Skiing Accident

Horrible Ski Accident by great-and-funny-videos

Wiring Up the Coin Door

So I got a good deal on a coin door for my MAME cocktail cabinet. I'm waiting for some other parts to wire up control, but I grew impatient tonight and wanted to do something. So, I started wiring up the lights behind the