A few days ago, I started a process that involves very heavy file processing operations that take anywhere from 10 minutes on the low side to 30 minutes on the high side. Wanting to be as efficient as possible and not let the computer sit idle for any meaningful length of time, and since the …
A couple of months ago I decided to move my company’s Asterisk PBX system from one of our physical data-center servers to Amazon’s AWS EC2 Platform. We had been using Trixbox since 2006, but the Community Edition of that product (Trixbox CE) is no longer being developed and is no longer supported. Since I was …
One of my ongoing home automation frustrations is the interface between my Ademco Alarm Panel and the Raspberry Pi I use to monitor the panel’s bus traffic. The problem that I have is a termination of the USB connection between the AD2USB (AlarmDecoder) that taps into the Ademco panel and the Pi itself. This always …
Detecting Failed AD2USB to Raspberry Pi Connections Read More »
I recently upgraded my office by moving to a great new location. As part of the move I added a ton of new space to accommodate our rapid growth and even added a “play area” for the staff so they can burn off some of the frustrations of the “daily grind” with a bit of …
Back in February 2013 I wrote an article entitled “Hacking a Fireplace”. In that article I wrote about how I used an Arduino to create an interface that would allow me to directly control my fireplaces from my home automation system. That solution worked great and I was successful in running two fireplaces from the …
My regular readers know that I have implemented an extensive home automation system that allows full control and automation of everything from doors to lights to fireplaces to full multi-zone temperature management and includes various tracking and reporting functionality. One of the items that I’ve been tracking for years is the level of ink in …
One of the ongoing challenges with changing a web site’s look and feel with client-side scripting is that it oftentimes breaks when the site’s theme is modified. There are a lot of you out there that use my Hack-a-Day Greasemonkey script so I wanted to make my most recent updates available. Just as before, I’m …
I’m a bit of an armchair genealogist and, as time permits, I indulge myself in as much research as I can, often leveraging a myriad of online resources as I pursue my subjects. One of the sites that I frequently use is Findagrave.com. It’s a fantastic resource whose content is provided by folks, like me, …
If you’ve ever tried to subscribe to a public iCloud Calendar from Google Calendar then you have, no doubt, discovered that it doesn’t work. The problem stems from Apple’s use of the robots.txt file on it’s calendar servers to prevent the indexing of public calendar data by index spiders from Google, Yahoo and others. Google …
Adding iCloud Calendar Subscriptions to Google Calendar Read More »
UPDATE – Read Hacking a Fireplace – Revisited for an alternative approach to this hack. I’ve been building my home automation system for years and have achieved extensive lighting, climate, entertainment, security and entry control. Never satisfied, I’m forever pondering potential refinements that would enhance the overall effectiveness and capability of my system. I recently …
