Ry4an's Unblog

My Home Assistant automations keep growing, more so in number than in complexity.

I’m taking a brief break from tech employment but things are changing fast enough in our industry that I’m keeping current with personal projects.

We’re fortunate to have a lovely, old home, but like any long-lived system, it has a lot of operational complexity.

Over the last month I put about 40 hours of effort into preparing to get documentation for my Canadian citizenship.

With a Meshtastic antenna the advice is to put it as high as you can with as few obstructions as you can manage.

I mentioned previously that I was playing around with Meshtastic stuff, but here’s more detail on the software side of those projects.

Back in October I talked about my growing, local Home Assistant setup, including some of my favorite custom automations.

An acquaintance asked me about entering tech in today’s job market with a SRE, operations, or “devops” type role, and here’s the best response I could come up with: The tricky bit about SRE and devops is that in any company we’re on the cost-side of the b…

When I was growing up the science fair, where you do an experiment and make a display about it, was a non-optional part of our science curriculum.

I’ve been futzing with home automation projects for longer than I’ve had a home, but it sure has gotten easier lately.

Kate and I like old homes even if they come with a lot of mechanical puzzles.

A friend has long run a non-profit, called Futel, that’s sort of a hybrid community service and art project providing free payphones.

Back in 2018 I gave a 15 minute talk at Ann Arbor Nerd Nite, and I just came across the video again.

After 30 years of steady employment in the tech industry I’ve gotten the family on board with my taking a one year sabbatical.

I’ve been blogging, unreliably, at ry4an.org since 2003, and just changed the software powering it for the third time.

Back in 1994 my circle of high school friends spent a lot of time sitting around talking (there were no cell phones) and for about a week we were all playing one handed solitaire.

An 11 year old in our house needed to do a book report for school in the form of a board game and selected a gamebook, apparently the generic name for the trademarked Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I've been running my (this) vanity website and mail server on Linux machines I administer myself since 1998 or so, but it's time to rebuild the machine and hosting static HTTPS no longer makes sense in a world where GitHub or AWS can handle it flexibly and

Python has a uniquely bad title case function which turns my already silly name into Ry4An, capitalizing the 'a' because it follows a non-letter character.

When reading I've always underlined sentences that make me happy.

Home security system projects are fun because everything about them screams "1980s legacy hardware design".

I'm starting to do more on a raspberry pi I've got in the house, and I wanted it to survive short power outages.

I spent a few hours trying to get the Jenkins Git & Github plugins to: run pylint on all remote branch heads that: arent' too old haven't already had pylint run on them send the repo status back to GitHub I'm sure it's possible, but the Jenkins Git plugin…

I've been using Charlie Lee's excellent Google Spreadsheet Bitcoin tracker sheet for awhile but it pulls data from a single exchange at a time and relies on the ordering of those exchanges on the bitcoinwatch.com site, which vary with volume.

In our NY office We've got 40 people working in a space with two bathrooms.

Last weekend we bought two Rodd lamps at Ikea for the guest room, and it struck me how amused I'd be if each one switched the other.

As a hack, when I need an append-only datastore with no authentication or validation, I use Amazon S3.

At DramaFever I got folks to buy into to burn down charts as the daily display for our weekly sprints with the rotating release person being responsible for updating a Google spreadsheet with each day's end-of-day open and closed issue counts.

GitHub doesn't let you use the same deploy key for multiple repositories within a single organziation, so you have to either (a) manage multiple keys, (b) create a non-human user (boo!)

I'm often on unencrypted wireless networks, and I don't always trust everyone on the encrypted ones, so I routinely run a SOCKS proxy to tunnel my web traffic through an encrypted SSH tunnel.

This is going to be one big jargon laden blob if you're not trying to do exactly what I was trying to do this week, but hopefully it turns up in a search for the next person.

This whole post should just be a single tweet, but somehow it doesn't feel safe to say anything comparing Android and iOS development, even implicitly, without five paragraphs full of disclaimers.

When I start up the shower it's the wrong temperature and adjusting it to the right temperature takes longer in this apartment than it has in any home in which I've previously lived.

My primary home machine is a Linux deskop, and my primary work machine is an OSX laptop.

NFC tags are tiny wireless storage devices, with very thin antennas, attached to poker chip sized stickers.

WordStar was the first word processor I ever used.

Back in 2008 I wote an extension for Mercurial to render activity charts like this one: Yesterday I finally got around to updating it for modern Mercurial builds, including 2.1.

Now that I no longer live in Minneapolis it seems a fine time to shut down the Minneapolis Surveilance Camera Project I launched in 2003.

Two days ago I powered down a good server for the first time in years and the last time ever.

I've just emptied out my safe deposit box for the move, and thought I'd re-post this: If you hear I've died someone who knows their way around gpg should ask Kate for the CD pictured below.

I'll take Mercurial over git any day for all the reasons obvious to anyone who's really used both of them, but geeyah github sure makes contributing to projects easy.

I just rebuilt the ry4an.org server, and as part of the migration I realized a still had a lot of very old, almost embarrassing content online.

The Python logging module has some nice built-in LogHandlers that do network IO, but I couldn't square with having HTTP POSTs and SMTP sends in web response threads.

We just passed through another graduation season, and for the second year running I was able to get by with the same stack of form letters: Dear _______________________________, My ( Congratulations | Condolences | ___________________ ) on your recent (…

The University of Minnesota has a Scholar's Walk which celebrates great persons affiliated with the U and the awards they've won.

I just made my third batch of tonic water from Mark Sexauer's Recipe: 4 cups water 4 cups sugar 1/4 cup cinchona bark 1/4 cup citric acid Zest and juice of 1 lime Zest and juice of 1 lemon Zest and juice of 1 orange 1 teaspoon coriander seeds 1 teaspoon d…

Like half the internet I'm working on duplicating a setup from one Amazon EC2 availability zone to another.

I'm a huge fan of the Khan Academy (and if you haven't yet watched Salman's presentation at TED2011 you should go do that).

I've had a resume in active maintenance since the mid 90s, and it's gone through many iterations.

Tonight I tried Hirelite, and I really think they're on to something.