Posted on 2024-03-30 in misc • Tagged with technical, home automation • 4 min read
We have two, basic, Eufy robovacs in our house. I have them set on a schedule to run (well, it's a little more complicated than that, but let's just go with that), but that's about the only automation I have with them. I decided I wanted to keep track …
Posted on 2023-11-21 in misc • Tagged with technical, home automation • 4 min read
For many years, I have had some form of home automation in my home. I used to have a few x10 devices that I used on my aquarium to control lights. We eventually purchased a security system that had z-wave support, and then we had a few devices connected …
Posted on 2023-02-01 in misc • Tagged with technical, howido • 2 min read
Almost a year ago, I had posted that I had been happily using mutt and davmail for all my mail. I was mostly happy with it, but doing calendar appointments with people, getting HTML emails, and too many people sending me screenshots, I ended up going back to Thunderbird.
Another …
Posted on 2023-01-17 in misc • Tagged with technical, how-to • 1 min read
After running a basic restic backup script that I randomly found on the internet at some point, I decided to make it a bit of my own. Specifically I wanted to get matrix notifications working, but I also added some error checking and a little bit of lock handling …
Posted on 2022-12-28 in misc • 2 min read
When I bought my new Keychron K8 pro keyboard, I was stuck between choosing the "red" or "brown" switches. Based on many things I found around the web, it seemed like the brown ones would suit nicely. When I got my keyboard, I fell in love with the feel of …
Posted on 2022-11-21 in misc • Tagged with technical, rant • 6 min read
It's apparently official, the Teams progressive web app is now available. There is nothing particularly magic about this "release", so everything I have already bitched about is still going to be that same suck fest. But now there will be even new ways to suck, as it will be …
Posted on 2022-11-09 in misc • Tagged with technical, how-to • 4 min read
For many years, I had paid for a CrashPlan home user plan and backed up all my systems with that. It was pretty simple, had a basic "set-it-and-forget-it" kind of thing going for it. 5 years ago, they ended the Home user version and were only offering a small …
Posted on 2022-10-14 in misc • Tagged with technical, how-to • 6 min read
One of the main reasons I wanted the Keycron K8 pro instead of any of the other Keychron options was the QMK firmware. Updating macros, and normal keys using VIA is handy, but doesn't let you do the more complicated things like MOD-TAP which I wanted for my CAPSLOCK key …
Posted on 2022-10-14 in misc • Tagged with rant, technical • 46 min read
Note
I originally wrote this on 2021-03-11. I have kept this up-to-date with my various gripes and frustrations (and even the few things that have been fixed) as I come across them.
I have used instant messaging programs essentially since the world wide web began. I have used IRC …
Posted on 2022-10-10 in misc • 6 min read
I have spent most of my space on this blog bitching about MS stuff. I can (and do) go on forever about that stuff. Instead, today I am going to talk about something that is awesome. And that is my new keyboard.
You can read my life story about keyboards …
Posted on 2022-09-27 in misc • Tagged with rant, technical • 2 min read
Like many Microsoft products, I do not care for OneNote at all. I dislike the text placement box, I hate the organization that is vaguely skeuomorphic and mimics a physical notebook. I just don't like it. But today I am going to present some absolute stupidity. This stupidity may be …
Posted on 2021-11-09 in misc • 4 min read
I have loved Slack and have used it for a very long time. It is the standard by which I judge all other chat platforms. While it's certainly not perfect, it's as close to perfect as any of the options out there, and the mobile client in particular is stellar …
Posted on 2021-11-09 in misc • 1 min read
For the longest time, I had been against "dark" themes on my computer. Much of the time the colors were just not optimized and so many things were hard to see because of that. That was a long time ago, and now dark themes have gotten more love than they …
Posted on 2021-07-26 in misc • 2 min read
I have been toying with IPFS for quite a while. Typically just hosting decentralized file shares for things that I post to reddit. Today I decided "since I am publishing arachnitech.com via pelican, it is already a static site, and could pretty easily be pushed to IPFS. So here's …
Posted on 2021-07-21 in misc • Tagged with howido • 2 min read
For about 7 years, I have managed my dotfiles from my home directory in a github repo and symlinked the files on the system where I wanted to use them. I recently had a catastrophic system upgrade (of my own doing) and had to rebuild a lot of my home …
Posted on 2021-07-21 in misc • Tagged with technical, howido • 4 min read
Email is one of those "necessary evils" in the world. There is pretty much no way around it, though things like Teams tries (and fails because it's a giant POS). Until Teams, Outlook was my most-hated MS creation. I think it is a jumbled mess of crap that complicates email …
Posted on 2021-06-30 in misc • Tagged with notetaking • 1 min read
One of the things I am constantly trying to do better is note taking. I do generally prefer to take notes on paper, but I like the accessiblity of things being digital. I'm also a huge nerd, so end up trying to make digital work. I have tried various things …
Posted on 2021-03-03 in misc • Tagged with update, programming • 1 min read
After playing with the cactus comments a little bit yesterday, I started playing with themes for this site. Since it takes modifying each theme to get the comments to work, I created a little utility to automatically modify pelican themes to use cactus.chat.
All of the details are on …
Posted on 2014-08-07 in misc • Tagged with python • 1 min read
Posted on 2014-07-29 in misc • Tagged with announce • 1 min read