Stories of tech tinkering, experimentation, amateur photography, and other nonsense.
- A house run by computers: making all of your IoT devices play nice with each other
The current state of the Internet-of-Things scene can be sometimes mind-boggling: incompatible ecosystems, an endless reliance on cloud services (that will and have been shut down), and an uncomfortable feeling that you’re not quite in control of what your devices are doing. Then I got Home Assistant, and everything changed. This is a story about how smart-home should and shouldn’t be, along with a… Read more: A house run by computers: making all of your IoT devices play nice with each other - Business in the front, party in the back: optimizing desktop setups for multi-PC applications
I recently started a new job as a network engineer and with it I got my first work laptop: a fairly decent Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and while I am a fan of portability and uncluttered workspaces, I much prefer to use external input devices along with a second monitor, especially if it is where I usually work. Luckily I do have all of these… Read more: Business in the front, party in the back: optimizing desktop setups for multi-PC applications - How 400 lines of code saved me from madness: Using computers to organize high-attendance events
Note to readers: I can’t really show pictures of the event because most participants were underage and I don’t have a release for having them here. This makes pictures look slightly off-topic, but they are the only ones I can actually show. About a year ago, I got myself involved as a logistics officer for an event with an attendance in excess of 400… Read more: How 400 lines of code saved me from madness: Using computers to organize high-attendance events - It’s Free Real Estate: DIY Solar Pool Heating System
More than five years ago, I set out to solve one of the biggest grievances with my home: I had a very very cold pool. Even in the summer it was unbearable to bathe in for more than a few minutes; we even considered filling it up with dirt. Here’s how i fixed it on a tight budget, and what I learned doing it.… Read more: It’s Free Real Estate: DIY Solar Pool Heating System - Building a lab-grade power supply from old computer parts
A bench power supply is a fundamental tool for testing electronics, allowing for flexible power delivery to a range of different devices that could make their way to your bench. As electronics became ubiquitous DC power supplies have become easy to find, building capable devices from scrap electronics becomes a very budget friendly way to expand the capabilities of your setup. I’m not beating… Read more: Building a lab-grade power supply from old computer parts - Personal computers are done and using a 15 year old computer for a week made me realize it
When I started writing the draft for this article back in March, I was spinning up this narrative that old laptops still have uses as writing machines; devices used for distraction-free text composition, especially if you could get a higher-end one with a good keyboard and a decent screen. This was a mostly uncontroversial write-up on my experience using a fifteen year old MacBook… Read more: Personal computers are done and using a 15 year old computer for a week made me realize it - Dirt-Cheap Livestreaming: How to do professional quality streaming on a budget
A couple of years ago I wrote an article on how I cobbled together livestreaming hardware at the very beginning of the pandemic. Finding AV equipment was very difficult, so I did what I could with what I had. Almost three years have passed since then, and in the meantime I built a multi-camera, simulcasting capable, live event oriented livestreaming solution on a shoestring… Read more: Dirt-Cheap Livestreaming: How to do professional quality streaming on a budget - Building a better Elgato Game Capture HD
Back in 2015 I got myself a brand new Elgato Game Capture HD. At the time, it was one of the best capture cards on the consumer market; it has HDMI passthrough, Standard definition inputs with very reasonable analog-to-digital converters, and decent enough support for a range of different setups. Despite its age, I still find it very handy, especially for non-HDMI inputs, but… Read more: Building a better Elgato Game Capture HD - A server at home: childhood fantasy or genuinely useful?
Ever since I was a child, I always dreamed of having the sort of high-speed, low-drag, enterprise-grade equipment in my home network. For me it was like getting the best toy in the store, or having the meanest roller shoes in class (reference which I guess dates me). It was as if getting these devices would open my world (and my Internet Connection) to… Read more: A server at home: childhood fantasy or genuinely useful? - Fast Track C600: Faults and Fixes
A few years ago, one of my high school music teachers came to me with a deal that was too difficult to pass up. He had just replaced his audio interface, and he wanted to get rid of the old one, which was of course faulty. Having known each other for a while, he knew that I was into that sort of thing and… Read more: Fast Track C600: Faults and Fixes