I came here to write software and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of software.
My 11 year old is working her way through fractions and decimals and the concepts and the interrelationships (such as fractions as divisions) are steadily settling in her mind. She still struggles with operations on negative numbers though and I can see why. The square roots of negative number is still where my personal intuition [ ]
There is a suspiciously vocal movement online telling us all to rewrite the programs that run our toasters in this language called Rust. Even Joe Biden told is to rewrite it in rust but we know he has good days and bad days, so I decided that, as far as Rust was concerned, to trust [ ]
Over the years we ve built up a collection of movies and shows on DVD. I fondly remember grabbing old DVDs from a bargain bin near the university for a few dollars each. I d like to be able to watch these shows on our home theater or on our laptops. I hooked up a DVD player [ ]
Jellyfin is an open source media server that can be run on your Synology NAS to turn it into a media server for movies and music you have. Installing From Synocommunity add Clicking Open on Jellyfin will take you to the server page, which is on port 8096 by default Folder permissions In DSM (the [ ]
For many years I had backed up our documents and photos on a DS216J, a Network Attached Store a low powered computer that allows networked access to disk storage and a bit more. When one of our google photos account filled up I started to look at Synology Photos to see if I could [ ]
I spent $14 for a 8 GB memory stick for my NAS (A Synology DS224+), bringing the total installed memory to 10 GB. When I peek at the RAM usage I see the barchart shown above. My RAM utilization is a mere 6% (~600MB) and yet I only have 600MB free. Did I buy too [ ]
Flatpaks are a neat idea for Linux users like me who are concerned about security but are not so knowledgeable. Applications installed as a Flatpak run from inside a sandbox and get controlled access to the filesystem, network and other processes. I installed Firefox as a Flatpak but ran into two annoyances: printing is annoying [ ]
Not directly related to controlling the mini-splits, but useful if you were, say, thinking about a world domination plan integrated controls which intelligently switch heating between oil heat and electric. Our tax paper money funds NOAA which runs weather.gov which provides a delightful API to get the forecast. You use the points API to get [ ]
I m developing code to run on the ESP32 and am using the FreeRTOS variant that is part of the ESP32 official SDK (IDF). I find it well documented and pretty easy to use. I wrote up some code that spun up three tasks. I did some partial tests that worked fine. Then I made some [ ]
I wrote a simple program to use a ESP32 development board to record the IR signals from my mini-split remote. I was expecting a trace like that described in this reverse engineering article, but my signal looks different. The start of the trace does not look like the trace shown by the people who did [ ]