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Home Automation: Using powerful logic with the PLEG Plugin for MiOS with...
I’ve been using Vera and Z-wave for a number of years as my home automation solution. As I previously posted, Home Automation: Motion sensors and lights with VERA scenes (micasaverde z-wave), sometimes...
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Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon – South West Road Trip
We hadn’t planned the timing of our visit to Monument Valley, but it turned out to be a perfect day. As the sun went down the valley turned a gentle pink and the full moon rose between the two mittens....
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The Lost Coast, Humboldt, California
We have driven through Northern California on road trips before, but have never made the trek to what is known as the Lost Coast. The Lost Coast is a remote area of Northern California which has...
View ArticleHumans Need Not Apply – Automation’s potentially brutal disruption
CGP Grey has posted a 15 minute video which gives an excellent overview of current and future automation, and the potentially brutal disruption it will have to on our societies. Technological...
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San Diego from a Cessna
I was lucky to join in on a quick flight over San Diego county. We flew west to the ocean, roughly following HW 8, then north along the coast to Carlsbad before heading east to Escondido and then south...
View ArticleChina building islands in the South China Sea
BBC News has a very interesting story about the ongoing territory disputes China and its neighbors are involved in. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes travels to the disputed area on a Filipino fishing boat to get...
View ArticleHyperlapse video of a walk down the IB Pier
I’ve been playing around with the Hyperlapse app from Instagram and took it on a walk down the pier at Imperial Beach: This was hand-held and I didn’t make any efforts to keep the camera steady during...
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Investigating WordPress load and preventing XML-RPC attacks
Investigation The last few days I noticed my site wasn’t performing great and response times had gone up. When I had a change to look further, I could see that CPU usage was high and apache was running...
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Price differences for the USA and Canada: Alcohol
Having lived in the US for over a decade there are quite a few cost of living differences I notice when I return to visit Canada. One of the more obvious differences between the two counties is the...
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Smart Smoke Detection – Using First Alert ZSMOKE with SmartThings home...
As I’ve switched my home automation from Vera to SmartThings I’ve also been expanding my network of z-wave devices at home. Since SmartThings does such a great job with different notification options...
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Smart Leak Detection – Using the Utilitech Water Leak Detector with...
As I’ve been moving all of my home automation projects over to the SmartThings environment, I’m expanding my number of devices and scenarios in order to take full advantage of the easy monitoring and...
View ArticleHyperlapse video of a bike ride through NE Central Park, NY
We were in New York last week and biked around Central Park for several hours. I didn’t have a way to mount my phone, so the following video was all hand held (and one hand driving the bike).
View ArticleSu Casa Es Mi Casa – Vera automation hub hacked
Xipiter has a great write-up on how they hacked the MiCasaVerde Vera quickly and easily: The device has embedded SSH private keys on THE IMMUTABLE sections of the firmware image so we know that all...
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Add Community Created SmartApps to SmartThings
One of the great things about SmartThings is how easy it is to develop for and how active the development community is. Users can create SmartApps for specific scenarios, and then use those SmartApps...
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Smart Sleeping – morning wakeup routines with SmartThings
I’ve been using home automation as type of morning wake-up alarm for several years, but always found the scheduling to be cumbersome. In most home automation systems you need to rely on motion...
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Home Automation dashboard for SmartThings
SmartThings does a lot of things well, but their main failing has been support for larger screens. If you have a tablet, you can run the phone interface, but it doesn’t take advantage of the larger...
View ArticleFixing CrashPlan on Synology after the 3.7.0 update (Synology repairing...
If you recently upgraded to DSM 5.2 and had CrashPlan break, this is likely due to the CrashPlan 4.2.0 update. Please see...
View ArticleFixing CrashPlan 4.2.0 on Synology after DSM 5.2 update
The latest round of updates from CrashPlan (4.3.0) has broken the CrashPlan package on Synology again. Please see http://chrisnelson.ca/2015/07/02/fixing-crashplan-4-3-0-on-synology/ for the newest...
View ArticleFixing CrashPlan 4.3.0 on Synology
CrashPlan Issue For Synology – Fixing the 4.3.0 update Recently CrashPlan updated to version 1427864400430, which broke the CrashPlan package Patters had created for Synology installations again. They...
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Talking to my house – Amazon Alexa (Echo) and SmartThings
Amazon recently competed their Alexa/Echo integration with SmartThings after previously integrating a number of other home automation hubs like Wink and Hue. I jumped on it as soon as it was available...
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