The Noel Blog

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 squirrels or

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 github

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

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 was amazing.

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

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

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

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 Amazon Dash button and hack it for your needs, this solution uses a simple ESP8266 module and

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# and packages are built for all flavors of servers/arches including Windows/Linux and x86/arm (running

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 -

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 able to execute system commands via HTTP requests. So, you can then interface with your computer via

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 Smart Lock allows you to unlock a deadbolt with your smartphone. It uses Bluetooth to achieve this.

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 being developed to control various things.

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 used in many IoT applications. There are many SDKs available to choose from to program these things

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 cheaper on Ebay)

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

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 for synced audio around the home. When I first got an Amazon Echo, I was excited