For years now I've had a light switch that can be programmed to turn itself on/off on a schedule. The switch is programmed with the date, time, time zone, and lat/long and then you can create a schedule such as, "turn the lights on at sun set". It works pretty well except when 1/ daylight savings time starts or stops (the schedule doesn't adjust itself) or 2/ the power goes out (bye, bye all programming).
This slight annoyance coupled with my desire for a project I could geek out on lead me to look into software-controllable light switches.
In this post I'll explain how I flashed the open source Tasmota firmware onto the Treatlife 3-way wall switch which in the end allowed me to control the lights via a home automation controller.
I’d jump in here and say something about 2020 being a crazy year but we all know it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. I’d also say that we’re going to look back at my big plans for the year however we also know that those got scrapped right after the end of February. I like looking back at a couple of things and then looking forward to what the next year will accomplish. Why? Because retrospectives are boring and putting your planning out there for the world to see is a much more interesting use of your time. The journey you’re taking changes greatly when you change your thinking about the destination.
2020 wasn’t all bad. I finally justified getting a new office chair! All kidding aside, 2020 was a year that challenged everyone greatly when it came to mental health, professional output, and even personal capability. My biggest focus for 2020 was to start putting blog posts out earlier in the week and focus on continuous improvement. I’d say the first was another miss due to the hectic workload, as a lot of my posts still came out on Fridays.
The second point was a Continue reading
Co-hosts Derick and Brandon are joined by the rest of the podcast production team, including Lisa Garvey, Charlie Elliott, and Aditya Chakraborty, to discuss the pitfalls, highlights, and lessons learned from creating a podcast in the disastrous year of 2020.
Connecting the people: The San Francisco Chapter recently received a Beyond the Net Grant from the Internet Society Foundation and will use it to help bring high-quality Internet service to more than 9,000 Native Americans in in a remote area of southern California. The grant will be used to extend wireless service about seven miles further into tribal lands.
Campaign against disinformation: The Netherlands Chapter is working with the artificial intelligence-powered KRINO Project to fight fake news online. KRINO will be able to analyze online content, including political statements, social media posts, and even medical information, but with humans reviewing its recommendations. The AI-based tool is in development, and the chapter’s Make Media Great Again Working Group will help fine tune the tool.
How the Internet works: Recently, two Internet Society chapters have hosted Internet-related training programs for members of the community. The Mali Chapter hosted the first edition of the Mali School of Internet Governance, with 46 people, including lawyers, engineers, law enforcement officers, and students, participating. The goal of the training is to give participants the knowledge and confidence to participate effectively in Internet governance processes and debates at regional, national, and international levels.
Digital literacy: The Panama Chapter Continue reading
I read at least 41 books in 2020. Here are some highlights.
This is the category I’m using for my two overall favorites for the year, although it doesn’t quite fit. I love books like this that tell the stories of historic figures in unusual ways.
This is generally described as a “philosophical novel”, a description which is both accurate and suitably vague, as the novel is difficult to describe. Janna Levin is famous for a lot of things: she’s possibly the most influential living black hole physicist, an author of a number of well-known books, and a well-known science communicator. This was her first book (I think), and doesn’t seem to be particularly well-known despite being an amazing work.
It’s a fictionalized account of the lives of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. The writing is alernately strange and beautiful. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I read this back to back with the previous book, and they will always be connected in my mind although they don’t intersect except for a few biographical years.
The book explores the Continue reading
Computing has become more complex as the digital age has progressed. …
Hybrid Computing Sharpens Its Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the IT sector, there is a constant flow of little changes to hardware and software that culminate in progress. …
The Tectonic Shift To Virtual Distributed Routing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If you missed it, take a look at MikroTik’s video on RouterOS v7 routing performance and changes.
One of the long awaited benefits of RouterOS version 7 is a new routing protocol stack that enables new capabilities and fixes limitations in RouterOSv6 caused by the use of a very old Linux kernel.
The new routing stack in v7 has created quite a buzz in the MikroTik community as lab tests have shown that it’s significantly more efficient in processing large numbers of BGP routes.
The ability to use MikroTik’s new generation of CCR routers with ARM64 to quickly process BGP routes is a blog post all to itself and we’ll tackle that in the future – however, the information below provides a quick look into the performance comparison between ROS v6 and v7.
The new routing stack also paves the way to add a number of features that have been needed for a long time like RPKI and large community support.
Using a lab based on EVE-NG, we’ll take a look at configuration changes and iBGP using the IPv6 AFI with OSPFv3 as the IGP for loopback/next hop reachability. Prior to 7.1beta2, this has been nonfunctional for years Continue reading