Refugio Automation
Since getting a small little cabin in the local mountains I have had on the to do list pulling out one of my currently unused Raspbery Pi’s and setting it up and lots of other yet to be determined things for gathering temperature data inside and outside the house. Then last week when chatting with my neighbor Nieves about how soon it would be cold in the mountains as WINTER IS COMING she mentioned that we probably need to get a smart plug to turn on the heater before we came up, as otherwise by the time we left at the end of the weekend the house would just be getting livable. I said yea that was a good idea and was thinking about my Raspberry Pi and having to get WireGuard on it as well so I could get onto the local network to control things… and later in the day I thought, well before doing all that, let me see what is out there. Oh boy was I in for a treat!
Pebble You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
This december it will be 8 years since Pebble Technology went out of business. I still wear and use my Pebble watch daily, and boy o boy, when it dies it is gonna make me lonesome! So before that fateful day comes and I will be too teary-eyed to type about it, I decided to sing the praises of the Pebble Watch.
Summer Moment of Zen 2024
Today I celebrated this year’s moment of summer Zen!
2024 Summer Solstice Project
This year’s summer solstice project was a bit less technology related (although I did write my own hello world OS in assembly[1]) as I made what I call a Sunset Magazine chair, but is more widely known as an Adirondack chair:
Move over WiFi Range Extender, Jupiterstation now is equiped with a Mesh
After lots of complaining from the youngest member of the family and failed attempts at improving things via WiFi extenders, this week I bought a Wireless mesh system from Mercusys system after a coworker sang its praises.
I did not even shop around for other brands or wish wash just searched Amazon and saw lots of different options but figured the potential 867mbps was more than enough for my needs so I went with the Halo H32G AC 1200 system for 64€
Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
This week reminds me a bit of the Airplane! scenes “a bad week to have quit […]” where it starts off with smoking and then escalates from there.
Not sure which came out first, but on the same night I stayed up late reading the Cyber Safety Review Board’s report on their investigation and recommendations on the Microsoft Exchange Online intrusion I stumbled on the opensource xz backdoor attack while trying to find out more about the Microsoft incident.
So given that both events are not really too serious in that the Microsoft report was a hack that happened back in June and the xz thing is actually a positive in that it was a foiled attempt to plant a backdoor, why did this make an airplane bad week to have quit moment? Well, good question, and it comes down to the fact that since staying up late reading the report and then reading about the xz I have not stopped looping back to both events and questioning the bigger implications. Kinda like a movie or book that you watch, and then spend the next few days looking at it from multiple angles, and seeing things from those new angles.
So let’s first give a high level overview of both for those who have not heard about them, then let’s enumerate those new angles and pondering in attempt to organize my thoughts!
Up and Over
I recently flew from Madrid to Los Angles (MAD - LAX) and had the luck to have a window seat and was able to GPS track the flight, something I have had mixed luck with in past attempts:
Holiday Season 2023
I just took the last of the Christmas decoration boxes down to the storage room. A melancholy mood has settled over me as the silly season has officially come to a close. Tomorrow the University students from the Forestry School will come to pick up the tree we have had leased from them for the season, and the last vestiges of Christmas will be completely gone until the end of next November. What better way to combat melancholy with a review of the season?
ReCalendar
As the year comes to a close, I began thinking I need to prepare my reMarkable PDF agenda for 2024. I first discovered the concept from
Vitaliy Kudryk’s latex-yearly-planner then found the amazing website ReCalendar that allows you to build your own personalized calendar PDF for Remarkable tablets. It is how I have been mostly using my reMarkable this year, and the only little complaint I had about the calendar is that it has lines instead of dots:
So, as we are enjoying a loooong holiday weekend here in Spain I thought I would try and prepare a PDF calendar with dots!