Blast From The Past

After my first few cooks with the Mini-WSM, I quickly came to the conclusion that I did not want to be tied to this thing for an entire cook. So I set about with incremental changes and then one giant “make the robots do it” leap. The first step was to get the data from

In the fall of 2020 I had a spare Raspberry Pi 3 kicking around and no project for it. Can’t have that! After doing some searching I came upon something that scratched a number of itches for me: signal snooping, freedom of information, and neat party tricks. I built an ADS-B receiver & feeder to

Right before the COVID clampdown during the winter of ’19-’20, I picked up a smoking habit. Like many late 30s/early 40s, I started getting the itch to pick up smoking meat as a hobby. My wife and I had gone on a “mini-moon” after our wedding in October ’19 (planning on our “real” one the

A project that I had intended to complete before my wedding that for better or worse was delayed until pandemic times. What to do when a cooler has sentimental attachment, still performs its basic function well, but is starting to show its age for the portability bits? Like any sane person, you turn it into

Can’t say it any better than the reddit post I made on the project, so I’ll just copy it here for posterity: With the new season started and u/jayblackedout‘s nhl_goal event working, I pulled the trigger on a project I’ve wanted to do for a while and add a goal light to my HA setup. The original idea

A cousin of mine played soccer overseas in the Finnish leagues for a bit of time and fortunately the games at the top 3 levels were all streamed by various services over there. I had his login and one subscription to Surfshark VPN later, I had a way to region shift and follow my relative’s

Around the time I did this project, Ring cameras were starting to become A Thing but there were a few things that kept me from getting one: I didn’t want to enter the Amazon ecosystem, I didn’t want something that would send video to Amazon’s cloud, approval was unclear in my condo HOA, and I

There was a time, believe it or not, where one would want to know whether or not the Chicago White Sox were currently playing. In the halcyon days of 2019, I sought out to do just that as a sensor that I could trigger off of in Home Assistant. Since HA includes REST API as

In 2017, Airplay 2 wasn’t yet A Thing and multi-send hadn’t been added yet to iOS. However, I still wanted to be able to have synced audio nodes around my condo (I was spoiled from my time working in pro audio). I had a spare Android tablet that I installed AllStream onto, an Airport Express

Back in the winter of 2014-2015, I wanted to build my own Kegbot. I had been watching the project on Github as it progressed and obsessed over the various builds for how I would implement my own. While it would live in the garage, I didn’t want to dedicate a full size fridge or chest