Category: BLOG

Where have you been?

Photo by Bakr Magrabi

Yes, the question is: Where have I been!? During Covid, I was running out of ideas to write about. I switched jobs and I’ve pretty much become lazy about writing.

COVID Aftermath

Why did covid feel like we had been locked down for 5 years? It seemed like so long, but it wasn’t that long. It has only been 3 years since we started going to restaurant drive thru. When I go out, I don’t feel like covid is a concern anymore. I do notice people wearing masks more than I have pre-covid. I have lost the fear about being outside my house and in public places. My only concern is my boy and his nasty habits. I’ve lost count at the number of times he’s put his hands in his mouth after touching hand rails. What the!?

We only had covid once. We have been through many tests and tried taking precautions, since we live with a immunocompromised individual. She didn’t get it that bad when she was sick. I’m hoping that we can continue to keep it away from her.

New Job

I am now working for a local company that is a startup.  Several co-workers all came over, with big dreams to all work together, but that has since died. We are down to two of the six, but we won’t talk about all that drama here.  If this were a private blog, I’d delve into that.

Summer is coming

There are only a few more days left of school. I’m hoping the boy can stay active and happy during this summer. I’ll be working, so I’m leaving it up to the wife to keep him busy and out of trouble this summer. I’m hoping this will be easy!

Is the grass greener on the other side?

Just an interesting thought/question this week? What would you do if you could be doing something else with your life? My passion in life is programming and being creative when I code! There are many things I would love to do in my life, but I know I couldn’t give up my keyboard and being creative. I do find myself dreaming about what I’d love to be doing, mostly when I hear about someone having fun doing things I’m not. The grass is probably NOT greener on the other side, but it would be fun to try it out.

This is just me thinking of things I’d love to be doing, but why I’m not.

Living the van life

One of the things, I would love to try is living in a van equipped with everything I need to live off grid. Driving around the country seeing the world and working remotely. This is probably on the top of my list. I watch several videos a day where people are quitting their jobs (or keeping them), building out a van, and living off grid. They make it look like it would be super fun and doable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do this. I have a son in school and a house full of stuff. We could use one for trips, which would be fun.

Living off grid in a tiny house

Another thing I watch a lot of is living in Tiny Houses. Living off grid, collecting my own water, storing my own energy from the sun. It sounds super awesome, but you have to give up a bunch of luxuries. The luxuries are different than living in a van, but there are some sacrifices. I could work from home (if I could get internet out in the boonies).

We have way too much stuff and like our space, so this is probably not an option. This could be a nice thing to have for a summer getaway or Airbnb?

Survivalist

Hopefully you are seeing the trend here. I’m super impressed by the survivalist that can start with nothing and build a shelter, start a fire, and survive with nothing. Fishing and Camping was one of the things I did as a child, and I think that is something I’d love to do more of now! The reason I don’t do that now is because i’m so lazy! Getting everything ready, finding a camping spot, and a bunch of other excuses keep me from going out. This option wouldn’t work out very well.

I do need to take my boy camping more and experiencing the world more. We went with our neighborhood a few years ago and he still talks about it. It was a super fun time and we survived!

Keep Dreaming

I’m going to keep dreaming, and keep my laptop and keyboard handy. The grass on the other side always looks greener, but who knows if you’ll ever find happiness. I applaud people who cross the grass and find happiness on the other side. If you are searching for something better, good finding it!

Journals

My sister in-law (SIL) passed away several years ago quite suddenly and unexpectedly (NOTE: Not by her own hands). It was pretty rough on the family. She loved her family, movies, her clients, and her students. A beautician by trade and very good one at that. she also taught at a beauty college in her city. When she would come into town, she would cut the families hair. This was a big sacrifice and very much appreciated.

My mother in-law (MIL) recently came across her daughters journals and she tossed them in the garbage, because from what she read, my SIL was very angry and unhappy with her life and where she was in this life. This whole thing sparked a few questions for me.

These are all my opinions and thoughts sparked by this situation. I’m a huge fan of journals and true stories about people.

What story?

Looking at my own life and my personal Journals, I probably write in mine when I have problems and things I want to get off my chest. If you were to read mine, you might think I am an angry or unhappy person. Just like Facebook, you won’t get a full picture of who I am or what I’m about. With Facebook, you get the good/happy things that are going on in life. Journals gives you the bad things in life or the hard ships. Photos on Facebook are probably only the good moment. Photos captured from family members and “moments” may capture how you really are or look? (You may not have time to prep? ) I wonder how you can get the complete pictures of someones life? If we could only merge all this information into one. People have many demons they are fighting and a journal is where they keep them.

Who is mentioned?

I think one of the things that people worry about when reading a journal is if they come across an entry where they mention their name? It is going to be either a good thing or a bad thing they mention about you. Do you want to read something negative written about you? I personally feel that it would be hard to read how someone truly feels about you, especially if they have negative feelings toward me. Unfortunately, there are many people in this world that have negative feelings toward me. I can try and change that, but it is the fact of life. I probably should work on that. 🙂

Unlocking the secrets.

I’ve found Journals, note books with a date and a bit of a story about what i was feeling, that go back to 1993. A few months before I would spend 25 days of my life in a hospital trying to recover from Spinal Meningitis, which is also a point where I wrote a journal of my experience. I was also given a journal in 1995 from a few friends I hung out with. It was a gift from 3 girls and most of the entries in this period of time are about how much I liked these girls, my weight, etc. Not a lot of deep dark secrets. I’ve probably mentioned things I don’t want them to ever read. I might have some secrets in there. Who knows.

What if you come across others secrets? You can’t change anything about them? It may change the way you look at them, but personally I feel like, I would still remember the good things about them. Who knows what you would find out though, it may cast a dark shadow on your memories!

The missing pieces

With all this said, I feel like having these journals with either negative or positive memories, it still gives you a look at their life. You know a little more about them and what they were thinking. I would love to find a journal my parents kept. My father was killed when I was 15 (work place accident) and my mother passed when I was 34 years old (from cancer) and I feel like I don’t know enough about them!

Several years ago, I found some old cleared checks that where my fathers. Unfortunately, having this kind of information doesn’t tell me much about him or what he spent those on, but I remember some of his habits and such, so looking at these I could infer some information. If I wanted to get crazy, I could map out a timeline of where he was? That could be interesting…..I digress…

Conclusion

I know I could go on and on about this, but it’s a very interesting question to ask yourself. Do you want to read a family members journals to find out who they were and what they were about, even if it could cloud your memories? I love looking back at my journals and reading my thoughts. I would be horrified if my wife read them, but when I’m gone it may be useful for her or my boy. Even though, for the last 8 years of his life, he is probably the one I focused on the most 🙂

Week Activities

Fourth of July

The Fourth of July weekend was pretty uneventful with the whole COVID-19. We went and visited my old neighborhood, My boss lives there, and they throw a party called “Cul-de-Sac of Fire” where they have a HUGE BBQ, Bounce Houses, Food Trucks, and Fireworks. There was a bit of a change this year, and they had Fireworks, 1 Food Truck, and Sno-Cone Shack..

We were a little nervous about going, so we picked up some food and ate it in the car and showed up for the Fireworks. We were very nervous about being there, but didn’t talk to hardly anyone. *crossing fingers*

The show was amazing! They had about $5k worth of Fireworks and they went off for almost 45 minutes. It was amazing! (See featured image)

Broken Phone

It’s been a very boring week, except for my phone. I try and go into work once a week to water the plants and check on the servers. This week, we had to do a bid for a new software product we are trying to get, so a few of us were meeting there for that. The lease of our building is almost up and we have a huge space for 6 guys. We are in the process of trying to clean up and find a new place. The fridge is full of food, which half of it is probably left over from people who have quit.

I wanted to take a picture of the food in the fridge, so people could claim their food. If they don’t we are going to dump it. I started taking a picture of the freezer and dropped my phone! It was totally slow motion…..I watched it fall and probably said a couple foul words! After picking up the phone and inspecting it, it looked like I got lucky. Unfortunately, the screen wouldn’t turn on! This is the time I realize, “I am addicted to my phone”.. Wait. I internally admit to the fact that I am addicted to my phone. The whole drive home, I mentally noted how I would miss my phone and the things I provides me. #addiction

Customer Support

I purchased the extended warranty on my phone, which states that It will cover accidental damages. Perfect right? Well.. Of course they need to trouble shoot the phone, because they DO NOT want to pay for it. After spending 30 minutes on the phone with someone she sent me to the claims department, with a claim ID. I thought I was golden. On my way to ordering a fixed phone…. “How would you like to pay for the Deductible?”.. I was sooo annoyed. Not once did the lady ask me for a “Claim ID!” I questioned her and she said I’d have to pay for the deductible. We ended the call, and another chat conversation was started with Google to try and resolve this confusion.

Second try

I was able to contact Google again and clarify that, I did not break the screen and there are no physical damage to the phone. They finally gave me approval to take the phone to the certified repair place (UBreakIFix, which I HIGHLY recommend. They are amazing!) — I dropped the phone off on Wednesday night, and went back in on Thursday at lunch and picked up my fixed phone for $0! The phone works great, but I’m super paranoid about dropping it again.

TemperPi Project

The TemperPi project (“Little Break“) has been working great, but it is in some need of updates. I checked the temperature in the server room last weekend and my jaw hit the floor! The temperature was resting around 72, so I was a little alarmed. For some reason, I have neglected checking the temperature lately, because it usually hovers around 63 or so. We turn the heat up when we aren’t there and apparently the whole building shuts down over the weekend. Our little AC is pumping away over the weekend to keep that room chilly. The building we are in was recently sold. The new owners must be trying to cut costs.

Friday before everything shuts down for the weekend.
Saturday while everything is baking in the sun!
The office returning to normal operation.

Minecraft Fun

I have officially been slacking the last several weeks. We have discovered this game called Minecraft, that has probably heard of. My boy has been playing it a lot. He loves the game, because he can do pretty much anything that he wants. We love how creative it allows him to be.

I actually purchased the game, Java version, about 7 years ago when I heard about it. The first person nature of the view made me sick! I also spent like 5 hours trying to find diamonds one time, and after that it felt like a huge waste of time! It was a fun 5 hours, but what did I accomplish? Just an appreciation for the developer and the awesome game he created.

Discovery again..

As my boy started getting older and bored of the games he was playing, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce him into Minecraft. This is when I discovered you can’t just buy one version of the game. My computer had the Java version, but if you wanted to play it on the iPad, you have to make another purchase. I purchased another copy (ugh! I’m a cheapo) and he didn’t quite understand it. It sat there for several months with no one playing it.

Youtube

Somehow the Minecraft videos started showing up on his Kids YouTube and I think this sparked another interest. He watched this girl who would narrate her adventures. She has this voice that is hard to listen to for very long. Unfortunately, her voice didn’t bother him, just his parents! The boy has been playing everyday for about 2 months!

Funny thing has happened though, minecraft has replaced his Kids YouTube addiction. He hardly ever watches it anymore, so we don’t get the opportunity to listen/watch the girl anymore. (so sad)

Multiplayer

This is where I come into the picture! I thought it would be awesome if we could play together, but we didn’t know how to do it. How we figured this out escapes me, but I downloaded the game on our other iPad. When the game loaded his name showed up under the “Friends” tab. WOOHOO We were stoked to be able to play with each other. If you want to play with someone else, you have to be on the same network and it has to be a Pocket Edition.

We have found out that our wifi has some issues or one of the iPads has a problem with the WiFi, so we are disconnected from the network a lot. This is a huge point of anger in both of us!

Survival vs Creative

Another lesson we had to learn was what Creative and Survival mode was. We found that Creative allowed us to have everything, fly, do what we want, and the big plus: There were no Zombies trying to kill us. We loved this, because we could literally do anything and the boy had a ton of fun!

I made the mistake of trying Survival mode a couple weeks ago. It was super fun not having everything and trying to fight to keep your belongings. The boy wants to switch back to some of the old Creative maps we played in the past, and it isn’t fun anymore. He always wants me to play his little games and I try and comply it’s just not as fun anymore.

Bonding

This has become a crazy addiction and we have wasted a lot of time, but the bonding we have done has been worth it! The boy has had a blast and always wants me to play with him. We talk a lot about the game and discuss ideas we want to try. There have been many How to Videos watched on YouTube. We even spent one day creating a Gold Farm from a YouTube video we watched. This turned out to be a daunting task and an 8 year old isn’t as patient as he should be. We had a hard time creating said Farm.

I get a little frustrated with him breaking my stuff from time to time, but I’m learning to let it slide. The fun he is having and the time spent is more valuable than my digital creation 🙂

Downside

The one downside to this game that I don’t like is killing animals. In creative mode, you can create a bunch of animals and then torture them. The idea of survival is to kill those trying to kill you. You also kill animals to use them as resources, etc. My son likes to build cemeteries for his animals that are still alive. He likes to torture the animals. The last thing I want is my boy growing up to think that is fun :). Yes, I worry too much.

Good times

All in all it has been a great game and we have spent a lot of good time playing. I’m looking forward to play many more hours with him and discovering new mini-sections of the map we can explore.

Thanks for reading my boring post, hopefully more exciting posts will come.

Broken phone.

I’m a huge fan of Android phones and specifically google phones. The vanilla android experience is my favorite! Samsung and other manufacturers come up with their own UI experience and I’m not a fan. I can see why they do it, you want to provide an experience for all users and make everyone happy. Maybe I’m just hard to please?

My addiction started with the HTC Dream and continued with the HTC Sensation, Nexus 5, Pixel, and now I have the Pixel 3A XL. I have never been one to drop cash on the latest and greatest phone, so there were several phones that never made it in my pocket. Every phone I’ve had has had manufacturer problems. Including, my Pixel 3a XL, which I’ll get to later.

HTC Dream (2008)

I was super stoked to pick up this phone back in 2008! I used this phone for 4 years and I’m still amazed the keyboard never broke! The dream was to learn how to write Android apps and have my own app in the App store. I’ve helped out on many, but there has never been an app in the app store in my name! Someday? It’s till a dream I carry from year to year.

HTC Sensation (2012)

Another exciting upgrade after 4 years with my first android phone. They got rid of the slide out keyboard, which blew my mind. I had a lot of problems with this phone. The UI looked pretty slick, and I think this is where I feel out of love of the custom UI companies started putting on their phones. The UI was always having problems and the batteries were crap. I have several emails, where I purchased replacement batteries for this device. What a nightmare!?

Nexus 5 (2013) – $399

I decided to purchase this phone from Google directly. The price was a little more expensive (then) I wanted to pay, because I am cheap. This phone was built by LG and had several problems.

This is the first phone I had to ship back to the manufacturer and try and survive without a phone for 7 days! What!? I couldn’t fathom going 2 hours without my phone let alone 166 more hours! The phone was shipped off to LG and I tracked every step of the way, to and from my house! There was some kind of addiction going. I am completely fine with my phone addiction though 🙂

This phone broke another time, while it was out of warranty, and apparently, I loved it so much I purchased another one in 2015 off of eBay. It lasted a whole year, before I ditched it.

Pixel (2016) – $649

Google came out with this awesome phone and I couldn’t resit buying it! Phones were getting super expensive, but I had to pull the trigger! The wife had given me the OK, I think she was tired of hearing me complain about my phone. I purchased the 128 GB model, so there was plenty of space to store all my music and photos for DAYS. The camera was very good and it has the finger print reader, that instantly fell in love with.

Four years had passed since I purchased the Pixel and it was starting to have some problems. It would randomly lock up and no amount of factory resets would seem to fix it.

Pixel 3a XL (2020) – $479

After reading several reviews for the Pixel 4 and fearing another crappy phone, I decided to go with this phone. The price tag was decent and most of the specs were good, except the memory (64gb). It has an awesome camera that I love and the battery life is amazing! (especially, because I don’t play games on my phone) Truth be told, The stereo jack is what finally sold me on it!

The problem

I’ve had this phone for 6 months now and on Friday while having a call with my wife (on speaker phone), the call kept cutting out. I totally blamed her phone, but she could hear me fine and I could hear her through the ear piece. I thought it was pretty strange, but work kept me from playing with the phone. After work, I noticed that the alarms weren’t working (door bell, etc). Further research revealed that there were several other people who had similar problems.

I tried everything the forums said to try with no luck. The next thing to do was contact support and listen to them try and have me repeat them. After chatting with a tech guy for an hour, we decided to do a factory reset on my phone. His words were “I am very confident this will fix the issue”, which, I had 0.00000001% confidence that he was right. Another hour rolls by and my phone finally finishes restoring itself and the problem still existed.

The support guy emailed me back and told me I had two options:

  1. Mail my phone in and wait 7-10 business days
  2. Go to a local dealer, uBreakiFix, and get it fixed. (On Google)

I complained how inconvenient both options were, but they don’t care. The closest store was 40 minutes away, and it would take 3-4 hours to fix. COVID-19 made this process worse, since I couldn’t hang out up in Sandy while they fixed it. Driving home and driving back up was the only option. They fixed the phone though and they were SUPER awesome! They had to switch out the loud speaker. Watch this Teardown if you want to see what the innards look like.

Reunited

I have my phone back and completely restored with only a few mishaps (I lost my place on my audio books!! GRR!!!!!!!!), but nothing too serious.

I’m definitely going to keep buying my phones from Google. They will probably keep breaking, and talking to support will drive me absolutely bonkers, but I refuse to switch to Samsung or an iPhone!

Future

I’m looking forward to the Pixel 4 an 4a, but I will not switch to them early. Google seems to have a bad track record for getting it right the first time around.

My dream of writing an app will continue and maybe 2020 is the year I’ll complete one?

(credits: Image by Jonathan Sautter from Pixabay)

Updates

Masks

I’m getting pretty tired of this quarantine and the new normal. We are all trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, but there are things I’m seriously missing from this new normal.

Smiles

Human interactions are pretty tough now, specifically non-verbal communication. Lip reading is almost impossible now! I’m a big lip reader, because I’m going def in on ear. We have to pretty much yell at each other now. You see someone in the store and I often smile at them instead of saying “HI” or something.

Going out to eat

Social eating is pretty hard now too. We loved getting together with friends at a restaurant and just chatting for hours! To get around the restaurant restrictions, our friends meet us in a parking lot or a pavilion at a local church to chat. We keep our distance and bring food from our favorite restaurant. The boy usually just plays, getting energy out. It’s nice to get out and see some friends.

Friends

This is lumped with the “Going out to Eat”. It’s hard to meet up and go visit someone or invite them over. My boy is seriously missing his friends. We see a lot of kids playing with each other around here, but we have been keeping our boy in to protect my wife from anything. It’s rough on him. This is probably going to go down as the most boring summer of all time! We are probably being overly protective, but We want to error on the side of caution.

Little Break update

About a month ago, I wrote about my temperature sensor PI that I put together. It has been running pretty good. We had a power outage a couple weeks ago and the servers shut off (We have UPS issues). The AC Went off, but all the machines were off too. It didn’t help much in this situation, but hopefully it will help in the future. An interesting thing has happened this weekend with the temperatures going up and the building being unoccupied. As you can see in the image, the heat as climbed up from the average of 66.

I’m assuming that the heat in the building is making it harder to keep the room cold? The temperature seems to be consistent. I’m going to look at adding the temperature outside to the DB. We’ll see what that produces. I also need to do the average of the last 3-4 days, to see how the trend is.

Power Outage

We have a little problem at work where we have a ton of VMs that aren’t used very often. Some VMs are forgotten about. Like I mentioned before, We had a power outage a couple weeks ago. So solve this problem, I found a pretty cool NPM package called, PING and threw together a quick application/dashboard that allows us to check and see if our servers are up. It has a long way to go. I read in the machine names in a DB and ping them every 2 hours. This weekend, I added a PING button to allow the user to manually ping the site.

There are a few changes I want to add, such as: Adding notes, Archiving a machine, adding machines, etc. I’ve always wanted to write something like SiteUpTime – it would be pretty easy to do something similar for cheap if you wanted to?

Other stuff

I’ve been busy with work and a lot of other random stuff, like my boys birthday! He was severely spoiled on his birthday. We have had a lot of fun building and playing a lot of Minecraft! 🙂

(featured image Image by 💛 Passt gut auf euch auf und bleibt gesund! 💛 from Pixabay)

Another Pi story

In 2015, my friend told me about the Open Sprinkler project that allows you to attach a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2 to a controller for your Sprinklers. I was onboard when I heard about this. The ability to control my sprinklers from my phone just sounded awesome! (Here is a link to the APP if you are interested) Before this switch, I had to run to the garage, put the system in test mode, then RUN back to the zone to watch it. Very annoying!

Purchase

I purchased a kit from Ray’s Hobby – Ray’s hobby use to sell them on his site, but it has since been moved to Open Sprinkler. I purchased this one (Mine being the Open Sprinkler OSPI v1.4), they have upgraded things since then. They now support the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 which are much better! The kit comes with a board, extension, that your PI plugs into (see image). Plugging the Pi into the board is a bit scary to me. I’m always worried i’m going to break something. This thing has been running smoothly until just recently. This thing was flawless, it would come back to life each year and I wouldn’t have to worry.

2020 Resurection

I turned on my secondary water two weeks ago and wanted to start watering my lawn. The OSPI was no where to be found on the network! Nothing came back when hitting the static IP that was setup for it. I brought the bridge, that was providing a wired connection to the device, into the house to debug. After researching how to configure this CISCO WAP device, my friend set it up the first time around, I was able to determine that it was working correctly.

The fear of taking the Pi off the expansion board was high, but there was nothing to lose, so I just went for it! The Pi has a DVI port and a couple USB slots, so debugging the board is super easy. I plugged it into the Pi and booted it up and I received a ton of errors. The memory card was BAD! Apparently, backing up the card wasn’t a high priority in my mind! It should have been!

The friend who told me about his, was the first one I called to see if he had any information about building a new card. He said he could copy his and see if that would work. He has an old Pi with a MiniSD card and mine has a MiniSD to MicroSD expansion board on it.

I have to explain something. Since the SD card was built 5 years ago, I was expecting to have all sorts of problems updating to the new version of the software and firmware.

Attempt 1

With my friends MiniSD copy, I took out the expansion board and tried to boot from the MiniSD….NO luck! My Pi wouldn’t even read the card and boot. One of my windows 10 machines could read the card, but none of the others. I only had a 32 gb MicroSD and his was a 16gb MiniSD. Finding a free piece of software to take a direct copy of the 16gb to 32gb card was difficult, so I gave up.

Atempt 2

I had wasted a couple days wit this Mini to Micro SD problem and decided to just try rebuilding a Micro SD card with the newest version of Raspbian and OSPI Firmware. The guides are pretty straight forward and easy to understand, so building a new copy was very easy. I got the software all installed and built and ready to be plugged into the expansion board and give it a try.

The system booted up perfectly and joined the network without any issues. I was super anxious to actually try each zone, but they worked perfectly! Nothing better than having things work the first time around. The worry I had was unwarranted! The only problem I had was with the timezone. The timezone was set up correctly, but the web site (APP) would show EST time. After about 10 tweaks and reboots, it resolved itself.

Dead Grass.

My grass is still trying to recover from the lack of water. The brown spots are starting to turn green. The hardest part for me is figuring out how much to water and when to water. Fertilization is another problem of mine, I never know when to do it, so I pay someone for that.

Should you buy it?

This really isn’t a review of the OSPI, just my joy in owning one and trying to revive it. I would definitely suggest looking into Open Sprinkler and getting one set up! The old way of running to the garage to adjust the timer and the run-once times is a joke! (or I’m just super lazy)

You’ll notice a link to OpenThings when you are on the OpenSprinkler site. They have a broken link to a Garage Door opener that I’m SUPER interested in. I’ve always wanted to get one, so I can easily check my garage door when I’m laying in my bed wondering if I left the garage door open. I have another friend who built his own with an Arduino and Python. I haven’t dared go down that route yet. #dreams

Little break

I took a little break last week. There was no real reason other than I was busy coding! There are times when I really get involved in something and I can’t stop coding. This was one of those times! Working from home and a little side project has been keeping me busy, but there is another project I’ve been working on for fun.

Story

A bit ago, I wrote about our building maintenance worker shutting off our AC unit and the servers were about to melt down when my boss went in to clean. We haven’t had an incident sense, but there is no one in the office to keep an eye on the server. How would we know if the server was melting down? …Hmm. I decided to try and build a temperature sensor for the server room.

The Project

I am a huge fan of the Raspberry PI and have done several projects. The Parking Lot Project is one of them. This time, I took a Raspberry PI and a USB Temperature Sensor and hooked them up into a makeshift temperature monitor for our server room. The system will send out an email when the temperature reaches “warning” temperature and an “emergency” temperature. Let me tell you about the setup. I’m not going to tell you everything I’ve done and show code. If you want that, I can share it.

  • Raspberry PI 3
  • Case – This is probably my favorite case that I’ve used so far.
  • Raspbian OS
  • USB Temperature Sensor
  • NodeJS
  • Python & Pyteams – Used to post the current IP Address to Microsoft Teams when the system boots up, so I can find the IP address. Very important
  • Temper-Python – Used to read the sensor.
  • Smart Plug – This is also key when the server stops working and you have to reboot it from home.
  • Sqlite – I’m currently just writing the logs to a local DB. I really want to change this
Before placing it in the server

Grabbing the temperature

I wrote a little tool, in Node, that calls “temper-poll” every 15 minutes to read the temperature with a cron job. This is a super simple script that grabs the temperature and inserts it into the DB along with the time. I really want to change this and sync the dates with a server. What if the server shuts down? If I can see the temperature trend, it may give me an idea of why the server is down. (Was it climbing to it’s death?)

Web View

The next piece was the fun part. I am not a UI guy, but I like to play one sometimes. In recent interviews at the HackerX events, they are always looking for a Full Stack individual. (see “Out of My Shell” post) I think that is where I had the most fun on this. I decided to deviate from what i’m use to,Bootstrap, and go with Semantic-UI and Jade. It’s been a bit of a learning curve.

What you see in the image is a week of tweaking. I’m still not happy with what I have but it is ok. I’m sure I break a lot of UI rules, but it is functional.

Last week I decided to add an “Average” temperature line that, I was hoping would tell me how the current temperature relates to the average. The average is hard to show when the air conditioning is kicking on at random times and the heat outside, etc. (that’s my guess) As of this writing, the temperature has been the same for 7 hours. It is making me nervous. It’s hard to see but the temperature is 65.9 for the last several hours.

What is next?

This has been a fun little project that has kept me a little busy. It’s a super simple concept, but it’s a bit hard to debug remote and keep it up. The smart plug helps. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking this a bit here and there. A few things I want to do.

  • Figure out why the temperature has been the same.
  • Sync the temperatures to an offsite DB

This has been pretty fun. I hope it doesn’t fail me when the air conditioner goes out.

How has your family grown during this time of staying home and being together?

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This is a question I thought of this week while I was sitting in my office bored of work. I am an avid Facebook user and love all the things going on, where people are sharing stories and pictures about their life. It seems easier to complain about being stuck inside and how we aren’t getting along with your kids.  I’m going to be the first one to admit that this is rough! It isn’t easy to home-school your kids and to be stuck inside 24/7. I’m going to ramble a bit about my answer.

Busy Life

Being able to go to work, run to the store, go play with friends, go to church are things we would do daily. We were always on the go. I enjoyed going out on the weekends to visit Home Depot when I was bored. For the first time ever, I went 5 days without leaving my house. (I did go to the mailbox), and it was crazy for me. I was fine with it after a few days.

Planning

Our little family seems to be getting along so much better. We have learned how to better plan our meals, so we don’t have to go to the store for two weeks. We still forget stuff or need a thing or two, but we’ve tried to work around those things.

Space

We have learned how to appreciate each others space too. The boy seems to enjoy playing with LEGOs by himself for hours. I go and check on him and play with him from time to time, but he tends to push me away. “What are you doing here?” hmm. Rejection. 🙂 He doesn’t want me to interrupt his 3-4 projects he has going on at once. 🙂

I have been listening to books and I’ve found myself taking some personal time to listen to these books. It has been great and addicting! My wife loves her games and she gets a lot of time in when we are sleeping 🙂 *read: NIGHT OWL*

Family Time

I am failing as a parent, my boy had never played “go fish” until last week and we started playing it at night before bed time and he loves it. We are playing more games together.  My wife and I had fun playing a few games, that I kept messing up!   There is one game we are still working on though. My boy loves Roblox and that seems to bring more contention into his life than enjoyment. It’s rough to get him off, but we are working on it. If he isn’t playing a hard challenging game, then he does alright.

Church

Church time spent on our home is getting easier and we are trying to have more lessons and singing, even though it’s not very good. The boy has the attention span of a good fish, but that is getting better. It is always a fight to get him to come down and even get dressed.

Find the good

We aren’t perfect and we are trying to make the best of this situation where we are stuck inside the house together. Who knows when this is going to let up? I hope we won’t be stuck inside all summer long! The economy has to bounce back, or we are all going to be in trouble.

Please take a step back and look at the positive things in your life.