February 2016

Home Control

rmiles7721February 26, 2016Home Automation

Finally finished the move of my home automation software off of my PC on to it’s own server (actually an unused laptop.) For a while I had it running on one of my Raspberry Pi’s but unfortunately with all of the logic and events it really bogged things down. Not only that but not all of the different pieces I use are compatible with Linux (at least not without great effort and workarounds.) That freed up the Pi to be turned into an emulator anyway. I’ll post some pics of that later.

Currently the HA system tracks house occupancy, turns on and off lights based on motion, occupancy (including vacation), time of day, etc. I get emails and pics if there’s motion and the house is unoccupied. Eventually I’ll add streaming video into the mix so that I can check up on things.

I am able, through and Alexa skill, to control everything through the Amazon Echo that I can control through my HA software, even though it’s not one of the “listed or included” systems. I am also running a remote Alexa instance on my PC that gives me voice control from my bedroom as well. Later this week I’ll be adding an unused Kinect in my living room into the mix. The mic’s on the kinect are much better than my pc or the Echo so that will be nice. On my todo list is to write my own skill so that I can just use a local server and not worry about having to parse everything through Amazon.

Slowly but surely I am replacing all of my 15 year old X10 hardware with Z-Wave devices. I have played around with Wemo and Zigbee, along with a Wink hub, and have a few things in use but Z-Wave by far has been more reliable. One of the downfalls of Zigbee is that people (the wife and kids) have a tendency to turn off the lamps via the lamp toggle and that disables any sort of control or monitoring of the device. As I add voice control that should help. I’ll also mention that I have added control of the Hue bridge to Homeseer (my HA software) as well.

Once I have added a few more pieces I’ll post a couple of videos to youtube explaining some of what I am doing with all this junk.

Another fun day in the ER

rmiles7721February 13, 2016Site News

So the eldest daughter and I are at the hospital currently. Anna passed out/had a seizure at work a couple of hours ago.

She seems OK and in pretty good spirits right now. Just got back from a CT scan, it’ll be a while before the doctor gets the results back I’m sure.

They called me around noon, I had just dropped some equipment off at one of my stores in Carrollton. Made it to villa rica in about 8 minutes. Lucky I didn’t get pulled over.

An Awesome Web Host…and More

rmiles7721February 12, 2016Site News

Thanks to my provider, Livingdot, for getting php upgraded on my server and helping to lock down some of my security issues that I had. Probably I would have caught some of them if the sites hadn’t pretty much lain dormant for the last five years aside from occasional updates. I’ve been with Livingdot for…I don’t know, ten or twelve years now and they never disappoint. I probably should add an affiliate link but I don’t remember it or even if I signed up for that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I managed to recover quite a bit of the posts and some of the graphics from my sites. I have decided to just have all of my URLs direct folks here and just run the one blog. As little as I am writing nowadays I am better off focusing on the one site.

I will occasionally continue to do sponsored reviews, although as I was always pretty honest in what I thought about products, so never did get too many bids lol. Also, unless traffic picks up immensely and I have to increase my hosting costs there will be no ads. I won’t say never though as at one point a few years back the traffic was pretty high and I had to pay extra for bandwidth every month.

Don’t know how many crime posts I’ll be putting online but the urge does occasionally strike….so maybe lol.

Haven’t connected the site back to Titter yet (as far as automatically posting links) but I will probably do that very soon.

I have had to temporarily disconnect my Home Automation server and guest account. I was running a beta version of HomeSeer (the linux variant) and it kept giving guests access to light controls even though I specifically blocked those devices. Decided to move back to one of the extra windows laptops and I inadvertently unplugged my Raspberry Pi, corrupting the SD card in the process, making the data inaccesible. Not a happy camper at this point as that means recreating all of my events, devices, scripts, etc. Fuck me. Anyway, It’ll be back online in the next 24 hours or so.

Tutorials

rmiles7721February 10, 2016BBSing

The BBS tutorials are back online! I managed to recover them as well as the pics that were with most of them. In addition I’ve started trying to figure out why my telnet applets aren’t working anymore. May have them fixed tonight. Or not. Lol.

Correction, I have gotten ftelnet working. Never could get flashterm working since Google has basically removed all support for it from Chrome.

Another Update on the Site

rmiles7721February 9, 2016BBSing, Blogging

So I’ve managed to set up apache, mysql and wordpress on my machine here. I had to manually edit some of the recovered sql files and was able to import a couple thousand more lost posts and several thousand comments.

Still missing quite a bit but I think that’s all I’ll be able to recover. Ugh. Have to remember to make occasional backups from here on out. After 15 years of blogging and not being hacked I got lazy.

Anyway, the BBS is still up. Most of the links on the pages don’t work and flashterm is down until I get around to working on it but you can still access the BBS via telnet at bbs.shadowscope.com, port 23 as usual. If you already have a bbs account you can get to the web version at bbs.shadowscope.com:82

Only thing you can really do currently there is to check netmail and echomail conferences but I’ll get the ftelnet applet working again as I mentioned above.

If you are looking for mug shots on the posts I recovered from Sick Crimes, most of the posts are there but no media. Sorry about that.