weblog about my projects
My household pays a significant amount to back up photos to the cloud. We have both an iCloud+ subscription for 10,99€ monthly and a Dropbox Plus plan for 119€ yearly. That’s about 21€ per month for roughly 600GB of photos and videos. These costs could definitely be optimized by moving to a homelab NAS server. […]
For Christmas, I wanted to create a special homemade toy for my one-year-old daughter. I remembered seeing an article some time ago about someone making a wooden box toy for their niece, which played songs uploaded as MP3 files. I decided to adapt this idea and create a similar toy using 3D printing. The concept […]
We have one indoor thermometer to tell us the temperature inside of our flat. It is actually a secondary function of an alarm clock, which is not particularly beautiful. I’ve decided to create my own, better looking and more accurate thermometer. I thought, how hard can it be? First, I started by ordering a bunch […]
Recently, I have been working on a project for a client of mine connecting to REST APIs of PayPal. I must say that PayPal APIs are not the most developer-friendly and comfortable to work with. I encountered hiccups in webhook configuration, since there are multiple generations of them (“Webhooks”/IPN/PDT) and the documentation is lacking in […]
Who hasn’t had hers/his plants die at home while traveling for a few days? Unfortunately my plants suffered from this fate too. Since I already have my plants connected to the internet via Raspberry Pi, notifying me whenever the soil gets dry, one solution is to have that same event trigger actual plant watering. That’s […]
As it turns out, several people use my Feiertag Alexa skill, which I’ve described in a previous article. Recently I’ve upgraded it to use Amazon’s new device location API. Therefore now immediately after you install the skill through the Alexa app, you get asked, whether you want to share device country and postcode with the […]
I have a couple of pelargonium plants on my balcony and I’m always struggling to determine, when to water them. By chance I also have a Raspberry Pi 3 lying around, so I’ve decided to do a little IoT project, turn the plants into cyborgs and let them tell me, when they need watering. The […]
The topic of AI assistants is recently one of the hottest in technology. With Apple’s Siri and “Ok, Google” now available in every smartphone, Amazon is not behind and has its own Alexa. As Amazon is not a phone maker, the assistant’s main place to live is a special speaker with integrated microphone array known as Echo. […]
Last weekend we got together with Mark and Merten for a hackathon weekend with a goal to make a game. We have succeeded and the result is called Spaong. It’s about two alien robot races, Vulgarians and Profanians, who both hate humans. However a human astronaut seems to have gotten lost in the empty space […]
Expanding on the idea of my previous project MrTweety, I wanted to provide better real-time data and also try out big-data processing software. That’s when I discovered Apache Spark, toolbox used to manage distributed batch processing. My chosen project was not too complex, I was thinking of it being more like a proof of concept. […]