Personal blog of Guy Sie
Dithering is one of those techniques that feels like it belongs in a museum. It peaked in the ’90s, the era of 256-color palettes and early computer graphics, when you needed to trick the eye into seeing colors that your hardware couldn’t actually produce. Now, even our phones have OLED displays that do HDR, and […] The post Dithering is obsolete (except when it isn’t); creating OpenDithering…
Last year I wrote about how I had written an ESPHome configuration for the Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 device to work as a small, color, digital art frame. This year, I wrote about how I had been using Claude Code to help me write Home Assistant code for myself. Those efforts have now combined in […] The post Black and white e-paper photo frame based on Seeed Studio reTerminal E1003 using…
For the past few months, I’ve been dabbling with Claude Code. Not in a “no one needs developers anymore, anyone can build apps now” kind of way. More in a “I have a basic understanding of this, but not enough to turn it into code I can actually use” kind of way. I don’t need […] The post Using Claude Code to write Home Assistant integrations appeared first on Style over Substance .
For the last month, I’ve been experimenting with making a digital art frame based on color epaper. Spectra 6 is the latest color epaper tech available, offering 6 colors (black, white, red, green, blue, yellow) in brighter and more saturated tones then its predecessors. And with these color panels becoming more available and affordable now, […] The post Epaper digital art frame based on Seeed…
In the summer of 2023, we went on an amazing trip through Portugal. We’d already visited Lisbon on a short city trip a few years earlier, and that experience was so good we knew we had to return. This time, we decided to take a full three weeks and see the sights. We were planning […] The post Our favorite places to eat and drink during our Portugal vacation appeared first on Style over Substance…
Back in 2021, we bought a PlayStation 5 (PS5) as our main living room console. Making the most out of this console meant we also had to buy a new TV, as our old TV was not 4K-compatible and did not support HDMI2.1, the new A/V standard required to support all of the PS5’s capabilities. […] The post Using the EZCOO / AVStar HAE118 HDMI2.1 Audio Extractor for PS5/Xbox audio appeared first on Style…
For the past few years, I have been running Home Assistant to make my apartment a smart home. It’s become such a hobby of mine that I’ve even started coding add-ons for it. While there are other popular automation platforms, Home Assistant’s versatility blows the rest out of the water. It connects to everything I […] The post My Home Assistant setup (2023 edition) appeared first on Style over…
The CANARY corrugated cardboard cutter is definitely in my top 10 list of most useful purchases ever. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, we all started shopping online a lot more. The number of cardboard boxes in our house basically quadrupled overnight and cutting them down to size for recycling became like a second job. It turns […] The post CANARY Corrugated Cardboard Cutter appeared first on Style…
My latest purchase for my analog cameras is the TTArtisan light meter, a hotshoe-mounted meter accessory. The market for these shoe-mounted light meters for vintage cameras has become weirdly competitive. They fit on top of a mechanical camera and provide you with the right shutter and aperture settings to take photographs. A decade ago almost […] The post Review of the 2-dial TTArtisan Light…
One of my favorite Lovelace interface cards for Home Assistant is the mini-graph-card by kalkih. It’s the card running most of the graphs in our smart home‘s dashboard. Surprisingly, mini-graph card is actually not included in Home Assistant by default – honestly, it should be, it’s so good – but you can easily install it […] The post Adding night shading to a Home Assistant mini-graph-card chart…
IKEA has released some interesting new products lately, focused on air quality. In this product line, one unit that stands out is the VINDRIKTNING air quality sensor. This cheap (just €9,99) sensor measures the air quality in your home, using a simple traffic light scheme to alert you. Green means the air is fine, orange […] The post DIY: Use an IKEA VINDRIKTNING air quality sensor in Home…
Living in the Netherlands, one of the things I really miss on my Apple Watch is a Buienradar complication. Buienradar, Dutch for rain radar, is a popular site here that uses weather radar images to predict if it’s going to rain in the next few hours. For many people living here, it’s completely normal to […] The post Buienalarm / Buienradar Apple Watch complication using Home Assistant appeared…
My latest creation is a 3D-printed adapter for the Raleno PLV-S104 (Raleno 104) light. The model turns it into a lightbox that you can use for digital camera scanning of your negative film. It also contains a holder compatible with the Valoi 35mm/120 film carriers. Additionally, I’ve provided a blank holder that you can easily […] The post 3D-printable Raleno 104 lightbox adapter for camera film…
The Olympus XA has been my EDC camera this year and I gotta say – it’s a ton of fun. The concept of EDC – Every Day Carry – is that a piece of equipment should be light and compact enough to have with you every day, yet still versatile enough to be useful in […] The post Using the Olympus XA as an everyday carry camera appeared first on Style over Substance .
My camera collection has been growing steadily over the years, but it’s been expanding even faster during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online shopping therapy keeps me sane while I’m cooped up at home, and with easy access to eBay and other auction sites my GAS – photographers jokingly call their addiction gear acquisition syndrome – has […] The post Peak Design quick-connect Leash and Cuff straps…
Last year I started shooting my first 3D-printed camera, a Goodman Zone. It was soon followed by the panoramic pinhole Goodman Scura and the MPWide, a modified Fuji Instax Wide 300. The MPWide is a mod by the talented Mario, otherwise known as MaxWanderlush. He has been releasing a lot of amazing designs lately. His […] The post Shooting the Ligero 3D-printed Mamiya Press camera by MaxWanderlush…
My newest purchase was a bit of a gamble. I bought a $500 Phase One H20 digital back for my Hasselblad 500EL/M medium format camera. Or, simply put, I bought an expensive old gadget for my even older analog camera, making it a digital camera. A gadget that was released in the early ’00s and […] The post How to use a Phase One H20 digital back on a medium format Hasselblad V camera (500EL/M)…
One of my 2020 lockdown projects I’m extremely proud of is HA-meural – a custom integration for the Home Assistant home automation software that lets you control a NETGEAR Meural Canvas digital frame. It’s the result of a few months of work, lots of trial and error, and many hours lost to bad indents. But […] The post How I made HA-meural: a Meural Canvas integration for Home Assistant appeared…
One of the first vintage cameras I ever got was my dad’s old Polaroid SX-70. Like so many family cameras it had disappeared into a closet decades ago and was only found again recently. When he gave it to me, he told me there was another classic camera he wanted to give me – if […] The post My grandfather’s Rolleiflex 2.8D twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera appeared first on Style over Substance .
My newest lens acquisition wasn’t actually originally on my wishlist. I already had a 50mm Summicron lens, though that was the first generation collapsible model known as a Type 1. This lens has lived on my Leica M3 permanently for the past few years, and I have enjoyed the hell out of it. There’s just […] The post Leitz Summicron 50mm f/2 rigid (type 2) lens appeared first on Style over Substance…