[dacrib.net]

Open source home automation, now with ruby

Brandon — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:21:23 +0000

I started some work on a new project over the weekend. I had been fiddling with misterhouse for a bit, gotten a few things to work, joined the mailing list, asked a few questions, tried to answer a few, and generally had fun. I decided to try my hand at writing a RESTful open source home automation API to act as an abstraction layer between any of the many home automation protocols, insteon, z-wave, zigbee, IP, … and developers. Introducing cloverleaf. So far it can schedule repeating tasks ‘a-la-cron’, do text to speech conversion from an http request, and toggle a light on or off via insteon. I guess the beauty here is that anything can be done via an http request. The next steps are a working configuration file and parser. Any tips on getting ruby to parse a yaml config and spit out the result within the sinatra framework?

$49 Cubieboard is a raspberry pi competitor.

Brandon — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:21:46 +0000

The $49 Cubieboard is a slightly more expensive, but better suited for duty as an HTPC option to the raspberry pi. It even has an IR receiver built in. Specifications below.

1G ARM cortex-A8 processor, NEON, VFPv3, 512KB L2 cache
Mali400, OpenGL ES GPU
1GB DDR3 @480MHz
HDMI 1080p Output
100M Ethernet
4GB Nand Flash
2 USB Host, 1 MMC slot, 1 SATA, 1 ir
96 extend pin including i2c, spi, lcd, sensors, ..
Running Android, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions
NO WIFI included

via liliputing

List all installed RPMs by size

Brandon — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:40:29 +0000

rpm -q -a --qf "%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n" | sort -k1,1n

ipv6 is starting to see some actual usage

Brandon — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 23:07:54 +0000

brandon-mbpro:~ brandon$ host more.net more.net has address 198.209.253.10 more.net has IPv6 address 2610:e0:1:50:198:209:253:168 more.net mail is handled by 5 smtp.more.net. MARK – this is the 1st time I have seen a hostname resolve to an ipv6 address out in the Continue reading →

Just more grass.

Brandon — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:31:54 +0000

Interactive game and best cell phone plans from BillShrink.com

installing or upgrading a package in OS X from the terminal

Brandon — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:36:13 +0000

I wanted to install Boxee without disturbing my wife on the mac mini, so here is what I did.

1. transfer the disk image to the host
mount the disk image
install the package
unmount the disk image
enjoy

grey:~ brandon$ hdiutil attach boxee-0.9.22.13692.dmg

……………………………………………………………………
grey:~ brandon$ mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/boxee-0.9.22 (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners, mounted by brandon)

grey:~ brandon$ installer -pkg “/Volumes/boxee-0.9.22/boxee-0.9.22.13692.mpkg” -target /
installer: This package requires authentication to install.

grey:~ brandon$ sudo installer -pkg “/Volumes/boxee-0.9.22/boxee-0.9.22.13692.mpkg” -target /
Password:

installer: Package name is Boxee
installer: Upgrading at base path /
installer: The upgrade was successful.

grey:~ brandon$ hdiutil detach boxee-0.9.22.13692.dmg
hdiutil: detach failed – No such file or directory

grey:~ brandon$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/
boxee-0.9.22/ grey/

grey:~ brandon$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/boxee-0.9.22/
“disk1″ unmounted.
“disk1″ ejected.

We all need this.

Brandon — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:34:30 +0000

Only children can hear this sound.

Brandon — Sun, 09 May 2010 02:57:49 +0000

highfreq1

How to set OS X volume from cli.

Brandon — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:14:59 +0000

osascript -e "set Volume 0" osascript -e "set Volume 10"

1. you aren’t limited to integers, 1.5 would also work
2. original article

Sometimes things that are alright just look so wrong.

Brandon — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:59:23 +0000