The Power of a Testing Framework

I am now ready to call Vegetables a huge success. In my last post I discussed its design and construction. I am now using it in a project at work. The power and convenience it has brought us is huge. The design of Vegetables is such that its use highly encourages writing your tests in a …

Eat Your Vegetables

About a year ago, I was starting a new project at work using Fortran. For anybody who didn't know, the tools and libraries available to Fortran programmers are few and far between, and not particularly extensible or adaptable. But, being the testing and automation proponent I am, I went looking for a testing framework. The …

A Less Obnoxious Assistant

My last rendition of my Home Assistant Configuration (which you can read about here) was left in a rather obnoxious state. My wife isn't particularly good about checking her notifications regularly, so while I was at work, I would get a notification every 10 minutes for a while, until my wife finally realized she should …

Triggered

My Home Assistant now controls my HVAC the way I want it to. I'm now super happy about how it works, but man is the code ugly. To start with, I bought a very basic, Z-Wave thermostat. It has no smarts of its own, but can be controlled via Z-Wave. This means my home automation …

Maintainable Secrets

In my last post, I got Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) working for my Home Assistant home automation server. It worked at the time, but that was for a very basic configuration of Home Assistant. As I started to set up more components that needed keys or passwords, things started to get hairy. Luckily, …

Automating The Automation

I just got Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi in my previous post. Unfortunately, trying to edit the configuration file on the device is a major pain. The good news is, with the magic of automation, we can make things more convenient. We can put our configuration in a git repository, and set up …

Home Assistant Setup On Raspberry Pi 3B+

First, download the installation image from here. Then, unzip the image. Connect the SD card you are going to put in your Raspberry Pi, and then write the image to the card. Make sure you get the write device for the of= part. dd will overwrite whatever is there, even if it is your system drive. I …

Arch in Bhyve on FreeNAS to Run Plex

It took some doing to get it working, but I think this is about as efficient a setup as I could have had. I have a server running FreeNAS for backup/storage purposes. FreeNAS has a Plex plugin, but for Plex Pass users, which I am, the FreeBSD operating system on which FreeNAS is build doesn't …

To The Helm – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I had something basic up and running: an Elm front-end talking to a Haskell back-end. The next step is to get some persistence out of the back-end. We need Haskell to talk to a database. The tutorial I was following went with a simple Sqlite interface, but I wanted …

The Arch of Progress

My home laptop is a 5(?) year old Lenovo Yoga 13. I've been running Ubuntu 17.04 on it for the last year. Lately I noticed it was running out of memory on a regular basis and then having major problems. Basically just locking up all the time. The machine only has 4Gb of RAM, and …