I feel like over the past year I’ve swapped more broken drives from my NAS than any other bit of gear I own. So seeing how it’s the end of the year, let’s poke around and see how long the drives in my NAS have actually lasted.
I’m starting a graphics based project, and decided to use SDL2 in Windows. This meant setting up a development environment. Here’s some notes on how I set up MSYS2, VS Code and LibSDL2.
I think I’ve managed to make Home assistant tell me how much money the solar power I’m generating would be worth from the grid, and how much running things off solar/battery instead of the grid is saving me.
My workshed is mess, I can barely get into it and I have a bunch of projects that need starting. Let’s fix that…
I’ve got an IBM Model M keyboard and like using it on my PC, but one of its problems is the lack of Windows keys. There’s a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I use almost daily and not having a Windows key makes it annoying. Here’s how I fixed it…
After a week of testing and tweaking, my DIY solar shed upgrade is complete. And it seems to work pretty well!
Last week I bought a solar panel, inverter and some lead acid batteries and set up a solar system in my shed, with the intention of powering my servers. It seems to work pretty well and I have it all integrated into Home Assistant. I’m going to do a load of videos on it and Home Assistant in general.
What do you do when you’re trying to debug code, but your debugging isn’t working, and you need to debug your debugger?
I have aspirations of actually making a game for my Spectrum Next. It’d be nice to turn the learning I’ve done into something more than a bunch of videos.
This is not a blog post about making a game, this is a blog post about keeping notes. A few months ago I created a pretty nice template for a Spectrum Next game. It had a little state machine for different screens, an input handler and some text printing routines for debugging.
I have a load of smart devices in my house that all have ESP8266 microcontrollers inside them. They all work with the Tuya SmartLife app on my phone, and the Tuya integration in HomeAssistant. They also all talk to China to do anything. I’d rather they didn’t. China doesn’t need to know I want to turn my lighting on.
How was 2021 for you? I mean, compared to 2020 it was a big improvement, but that’s a pretty low bar to aim for. Let’s focus more on the projects that I completed and what I learned from them.
