In my previous post on this project, I described my initial set-up of my Raspberry Pi. The next step was to interface the RPi (see how nonchalant I've become?) to HomeKit, Apple's mechanism for home automation. There's already software for this written by the RPi user community: Homebridge. Homebridge depends on another package, Node.js, which I see…
About a year ago, I joked that from now on, all console games that I played must have a colon in their name, because the ones I played with a colon were more fun. Then I played God of War, which I enjoyed despite its lack of a colon. Now I come to NieR: Automata. I purchased…
Warning: For the rest of this series of blog posts about this project, I'm going to take a "golly gee-whiz" approach. If you're an experienced Maker, computer programmer, electrician, or human being you may be bored by them. However, please feel free to read on and (a) laugh at my ignorance, and/or (b) warn me that I'm…
I had to have one of my regular blood tests today. After checking in, I sat in the waiting room. Opposite me was a TV tuned to the Fox network. A talk show called Wendy was just starting. Apparently a feature of the show was Wendy going over the recent news, with the studio audience applauding, cheering,…
In what turned to be Part One of an adventure in the Internet of Things, I talked about wanting to control my air conditioner via Apple's Homekit. One option I contemplated was replacing my existing air conditioner. To get some idea of what it would take, I removed the front cover, which I've done every mumblety-mumble years…
I could use some advice from anyone with electrical, appliance, and/or construction experience. I've got an old air conditioner in my apartment. It's the same one I had when I moved in, so it's at least 30 years old. I've also got Apple Homekit set up for other devices in my apartment (light bults and fans). The…
I went to a screening of Incredibles 2 tonight. I walked into the theater about five minutes before the scheduled start. The screen was blank. That's a bit unusual these days, but it was an IMAX screen; I figured that perhaps they didn't have any commercial fluff that was in IMAX format. The starting time of the…
When you step into the middle of a franchise, whether it's written, on screen, or in a video game, you run the risk of not understanding references to past events. Within a couple of minutes of playing God of War, I watched the main character, Kratos, fiddle with his arm wrappings. There was a strong sense of…
I'm a fan of Mystic Vale. It's a deck-crafting game. Unlike a deck-building game, in which you add cards to a starting deck as you play the game, in a deck-crafting game you modify the cards themselves. In Mystic Vale this is done by inserting mostly-transparent cards into the plastic sleeves of the cards of your deck.…
A couple of days ago my friends saw a series of posts on Facebook. As a couple of people guessed, this had to do a fictional race called The Silence from the TV series Doctor Who. In the show, the chief property of The Silence is that you forgot about them the instant you looked away. The…