A friend of mine turned me on to Home Assistant which is a wonderful open source home automation platform. It's privacy forward (a hard requirement for me) and includes energy monitoring. It's got a neat event based system, lots of out of the box integrations and a large community of people making, hacking and helping. But what good is a home automation platform without hardware for home automations?
So one of the first things I got was a wifi ou…
As of today you can read this website without a web server by visiting dat://roborooter.com. If that link doesn't work for you, you'll need a DAT capable browser like Beaker Browser. And in early 2020 you probably don't have a DAT capable browser yet, so go get that. While I've been working in the serverless world a while, this is actually without servers and much more deserving of that name.
The difference between the DAT version of this site an…
"Why is the light in the refrigerator purple? It looks like I'm making a breakfast for zombies!"
I grab the makings for a mushroom cheddar omelet. We're running low on butter. I say "Ok refrigerator" and then wait.. its display shows it's thinking about what I said and then beeps an error tone at me. It writes out "unrecognized command". This time I hit the listen button and say, "We're running low on butter." It shoots back, "Salted or unsalted…
I hung up my phone and started typing. "Jason just called me, ideas for dinner before the movie?" and sent it to Sara. My phone know's a lot about Sara and where she might be. It encrypted the message for her eyes only, indicated that the message will probably be delivered in midtown with a 70% confidence rating. After all it was 4pm on a Thursday, where else would she be?
My office runs a messages hub. It takes messages from nearby devices and p…
I was expressing frustration with moving money around the other day and was asked to share what I knew. This is an incomplete list of ways to move money, and their consequences. Moving money (and in turn getting paid or paying others) is one of the most important yet strangely high-friction things a business has to do. On top of that, most of it is frustrating from a technical standpoint.
I'm not going to cover moving money on behalf of other peo…
