Threads and the Fediverse where the Fediverse is the milky way
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Experimenting with Home Assistant

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

For a long time I wasn’t tempted to play with Home Assistant or the Apple Home app. I don’t have smart light bulbs, or a smart fridge, or a thermostat that I can control remotely. I don’t have solar panels that are feeding a battery. In essence I thought that if I played with Home Assistant I would not be able to do anything. Now I see that this idea was wrong.

Mobile Device Info

With home assistant you can track your phone. You can see graphs of floors climbed and descended, battery level, storage, average active pace, the distance you’ve walked, whether the phone is charging, whether you have one or two sims in the phone, connection type and more. I have only run home assistant for a few hours so I will get a better idea of what home assistant is capable of telling me about my iphone activity. For every device that has the app installed you will get information about location and battery status.

Aranet

I get pressure, temperature, Co2 readings and humidity. I suspect that with the history function on Home assistant I will be able to see history over a period of weeks or months, rather than days.

Forecast

By default Home assistant will provide you with weather based on your location from a centralised source according to the location you give it.

Netatmo Weather Stations

Netatmo is easy to connect to. Within two clicks you have access to Netatmo weather data. If you have just one weather system then this works very well. It’s easy to see weather info for the indoor and outdoor weather modules from the dashboard.

If family or friends are sharing their weather stations with you then you need to figure out which ones are yours, and which are those of others. I had to guess which devices were mine, and create different rooms for the devices of other people. I then made my devices visible and order was restored.

Apple TV

It is easy to turn it off and on again but aside from this there is no control. I couldn’t see how to change channels or apps, or do anything interesting. Turning it on is good, but usually you want to do more than turn on a tv device.

Network Storage

in the settings tab you have the option of using Home Assistant as network attached storage. You have the primary disk on which Home Assistant runs but you also have the option of adding an NFS or Samba disk (CIFS) storage option.

Traccar

Google Map, iCloud, Suunto, Apple, Garmin and others track your location, either for sports, or for other reasons. If you have family sharing enabled on iCloud you can follow people as they move from one location to another. You don’t need to ask “where are you?” because you can check with ease. Of course this works for a person or three, depending on the size of your “family” group.

traccar is an open source alternative that allows you to track people using your own personal computer, rather than cloud services. While you’re out for a walk it will buffer the data locally, and when you get to your home wifi network it will allow you to see where you’ve been, as well as tracks, and more. I will spend more time experimenting with this.

Home Assistant Integrations

If you would like to see what integrations are possible with Home Assistant so far follow the link and you will be able to search for devices and how well they interact with Home Assistant. In some cases it’s a matter of simply logging in to Netatmo for example, after clicking a button. In other cases, such as with traccar you install the app, and use it as a secondary app on the Home Assistant server.

And Finally

Home Assistant provides us with a different user interface for Aranet devices. Instead of having to look at the app we can easily check for information in browser. In theory we could setup a Pi with an Aranet nearby to provide real time co2 monitoring for an office building or other.

One of the key benefits of the Home Assistant App is that once you add Netatmo, traccar, your mobile devices, Aranet and more you have one app available for plenty of information. Instead of having to open the Aranet app or the Netatmo app you can check within seconds. If you want to look at your walking or other history you can also use the same app.

Initially I thought it would be a waste of time for me to experiment with Home Assistant but now that I have I see that there are a number of interesting features to continue experimenting with.

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Switching From MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak
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Switching From MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak

Byrichard

Today I tried Switching from MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak as a webhost. This morning they sent an e-mail to say that we could switch from MySQL to MariaDB automatically so I tried. For the test I:


  • downloaded a new install of wordpress to my local machine and put it in the MAMP htdocs folder under mariadb.
  • I installed MariaDB on port 3310.
  • Using the command line I created a wordpress database.
  • I configured WordPress. Within seconds the website was up and running.
  • When I saw that the interface was that the same and that I had to make no changes I went ahead with Infomaniak.
  • Of course I backed up the MySQL server data, just in case.


Within a matter of minutes of telling Infomaniak to switch from MySQL to MariaDB the migration was finished and the website was up and running again. It was quick and painless. If something did go wrong I could easily step back but I also ensured that the user interface for MariaDB and MySQL were the same. When you’re coding websites from scratch some databases require different lines of code to function. That was my concern, and that’s why I decided to experiment with a small scale trial on my own machine.


How to create a database and tables in MariaDB


To learn about the differences between MariaDB and MySQL.


The plugin I modified for my own use, works on one of my local wordpress installs so I could port it to the website. I still want to experiment with having custom css for those pages without pasting the code as custom html. Custom HTML in WordPress is messy to deal with. I prefer to find a clean solution.

Using WordPress as a Fediverse Instance
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Using WordPress as a Fediverse Instance

Byrichard

User profile as seen on Mastodon.social


Over a period of a few days I have turned my WordPress blog into a fediverse instance. The process took some trial and error. In the end it was quit easy and there are three steps.


Step One: Have a WordPress Instance


The first step is to have a WordPress blog/CMS. You can start with an existing website, that you are willing to have on the fediverse, or you can install the WordPress CMS in another director and use that as a dedicated Fediverse CMS.


Step Two


Go the the plugins tab and add the activityPub plugin. Once this is done your blog will work as a fediverse instance. When someone subscribes to your instance via Calckey they will be able to read entire blog posts within Calckey, as if the blog was written natively. They can also comment but this is one way. You will need to check for comments and replies manually.


Step Three


The third step is to install the webfinger plugin for wordpress. This was the most complicated challenge for me, because webfinger expects to find the .well-known directory in the root of the website rather than the directory where the blog may actually be.


If your blog is in the root then you’re fine, your WordPress blog is now a Fediverse instance.


If you’re like me, and webfinger points to the wrong place then I have a simple solution.


Go to the webfinger lookup url and type your username. It will show you a get https line with where it expects to find your json file. Copy this into the URL bar but type the correct path. You will know you wrote it correctly when you get some JSON data. Copy this data and paste it into a file called webfinger.json.


Create a .well-known directory in the web rooot folder of your site. Add the webfinger.json file to this directory. Go back to the webfinger lookup page and check that your username@domain works correctly. If it returns the right json you’re in. Your blog is now a Fediverse instance


The Complicated Alternative


The advice I give for step three is the advice I would have liked to receive. People suggested that I change the htaccess file, which I tried to do, but without success. If you do attempt to change the htaccess file keep an unmodified backup in case you break something. I wouldn’t recommend experimenting with the htaccess file. The webfinger.json solution is simple and intuitive.


Why Does This Matter


The pre-requisites for installing Mastodon instances require permissions that we might not have on the host we are currently using. This limits what we are able to do. By having WordPress and the ActivityPub plugin and Webfinger we are able to bypass several barriers and get a fediverse instance running within minutes and in theory anyone can do it. Anyone that is familiar with WordPress.


And Finally


On Mastodon blog posts are shown as links to articles. People still have to visit the blog. If and when people comment on the mastodon toot those comments are added to the blog post comments, and vice versa.


With Calckey the blog posts that you write in WordPress display natively in Calckey. It does remove formatting however, so that’s something to work on. People that comment on the calckey post will be visible in the blog posts and vice versa. It’s native integration. It works well.


Now, when we write blog posts, people can see them directly in the fediverse, without having to browse away, especially with Calckey integration. In theory your blog post is not a blog post. It’s a note. This seamless integration should bring new life into blog posts. What I find especially amusing is that my blog already has 2100+ posts, in theory. In practice it has many more. People do not see legacy posts. They only see posts from the moment they start following on Mastodon or Calckey.

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The Paradox of “kicking smartphone addictions”.

Byrichard

It’s amusing that people think of “kicking smartphone addictions”. We now have a decade of experience in the current social media landscape. We have a decade of using smartphones rather than feature phones. In effect we have had a decade to adapt our lives to the age of the ubiquitous smartphone. We can ignore the Blackberry and Nokia ages where phones were for phone calls, playing snake and business rather than pleasure.

People who see smartphones or social media as addictive usually have one thing in common. They have a “partner”. They spend their free time with a specific individual. “It’s about finding balance. I became conscious of what matters to me, in my life. My smartphone is still a part of it, but it’s no longer the boss.” I have never been addicted to the device as such. My passions lie with what I can do with the device. I was passionate about Twitter when it was a social network. I was passionate about facebook when it was a way of keeping up with friends.

If Twitter and facebook become ego-networks for marketers and public relations professionals then the “addictive” aspect of smartphones vanishes. As social media goes from a conversation to a broadcast and a monologue it delivers another opportunity. It gives us the chance to go back to reading books. As we no longer “socialise” with smartphones the “addiction” is gone. We loose nothing by spending time “offline”.

You don’t need to give up the smartphone or any apps. If you’re like me you can pick up an e-book reader and replace Facebook and twitter with reading. If you’re going to passively read an e-book reader is an interesting alternative.

 

Learning Node.JS and Bullet Journaling

Learning Node.JS and Bullet Journaling

Byrichard

For a while I have wanted to learn Angular, Laravel and other frameworks but I felt overwhelmed so I decided to learn JavaScript but then I found that I had gaps in my knowledge too, so I went over to Node.js. Now I feel that I am starting to understand more. I understand the context better. I understand the underlying code better. I have spent enough time studying around the subject that I have gained the contextual understanding not to be completely lost.


With HTML and other technologies you can build and fail, and build again and fail, and eventually you will get what you want. With Javasscript, and to some degree with CSS too, you need to understand what you’re doing to see a result. You need to find code, tinker with it, and get it to do what you want. It takes trial and error, and hours of experimenting in some cases.


That’s why you watch courses. With courses you have it explained to you. You then try to copy the code without inserting errors, and then you debug until you have found all the typos. Plenty of people will say that you’re not meant to just copy code. My aim, in having examples explained to me, is to gain a contextual understanding of how to do things, and how they work. The aim is to become self-sufficient enough to write my own functions and applications.


Bullet Journaling


I have known about Bullet Journalling for years but I have had no or little interest in it because it seemed like an archaic way of keeping track of tasks, projects and more. Yesterday my curiousity was woken again so I have decided to play with the concept. I am using an old notebook that I have had for years. I have until January to see if I like the idea or not. I want to see whether it has a positive effect on how I get on with projects.


I will write more, when I have more experience.

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Why Audiovisual Content That’s Not On-Demand is Dead to Me

Byrichard

I’m online from 10-15hrs  a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.


From a young age I had quite a choice of channels. Some were French, some were Italian and others were German. That’s because it’s Geneva and you get the French tv channels as well as the Swiss national channels. That’s access to about 7 channels over the air in analog form. With Sky digital the number of channels increased from 10-30 and finally to several thousand. Recently Sky started to broadcast a greater range of international content.


The next move was the PVR. The ability to record up to three hundred hours of program content to disk from two receivers at once. If you allow for a backlog to develop then you’ve got a fake video on demand on service. That’s great. It means that when you know which programs you want to watch the machine will take care of it.


A cheap version of this is available online through platforms such as Itunes where it’s powered by RSS feeds. At the beginning you’ve got very little content as you learn more about the technology but over time you end up with over four hundred podcasts in the back catalog. That’s quite a bit of choice.


Youtube, Revver, Myspace, Dailymotion are true video-on-demand services in browser form. Each of these websites allows you to download and watch thousands of short video clips without a dedicated time. That’s great. A housemate wanted to watch some comedy so we went to youtube, downloaded, and watched a selection of programs on demand.


Of course, the next step is Joost like platforms. It’s like a television channel but you can select when it’s convenient to watch the program rather than setting your life around the program.


There are two reasons for this. The first is an increase in capacity. The second is progress in technology.  We went from having four channels to 10 times that number with Freeview and with satellite broadcasting we’ve gone from 20 channels to several thousand. We’ve also gone from one user interface, the television set with five channels to the computer, and unlimited choice. That’s why media content that is not on-demand is almost dead to me.

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Of Casio and Smart Watches

Byrichard

Over the last five and a half years I have tracked every walk that I have been on, and I have tracked about five and a half million steps per year. That’s a lot of steps and a lot of going around in clrcles. Going around in clrcles makes tracking walks with smart watches/gps watches less interesting. That’s probably why I have been distracted by Casio watches.


I haven’t been distracted by the 300-600 CHF watches. I’ve been distracted by the 30-50CHF ones. The simple watches that people of my age wore as children. These are simple, easy to use watches that have batteries that are meant to last for 10 years between battery changes. Compare that to one day for the Apple Watch and 30 days for Suunto and Garmin watches.


There is something cosier about a watch that doesn’t speak with the world, a watch that tells the time, has an alarm or five, one or two time zones, and that familiar beep beep, that is turned off, but could exist, should we want it back.


With this watch you get 10 years of battery life, an alarm clock and you know the time of day. It fits under your shirt sleeve with ease, and you can forget you’re wearing it until you need to know what time with it. For six CHF more you can get this one, with world time, and a timer. Timers are most useful when you’re cooking, to know when to do the next step.


The pandemic affects us in strange ways. I didn’t expect to rekindle my interest in simple casio watches but for some reason the pandemic has. For three years, over this pandemic I have walked in circles, and my interest in that data has waned, so simple watches have re-awoken simpler desires for simpler watches.


Don’t be mistaken though. These are simple, limited watches and I want them to do more, but conversely I like the idea of wearing a watch for as long as I want, without having to recharge it. It doesn’t nag me, unless I tell it to wake me up, or to tell me that 20 minutes have elapsed.

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