The Beacons of Minas Tiener: fun home automation project for your chemotherapy pleasure.

It’s no secret that (to use one the infamous term) I’m double tapping lymphatic cancer these days. More details here, but what’s relevant for this blog is that high dose steroid treatment (which is a part of the chemo, and unfortunately didn’t make me look like The Rock) comes with funny side effects like insomnia, and in my case, a hyperactive, albeit rhapsodic, brain on the “good days”. So I dusted off a couple of old and neglected nerd side projects (like unclouding my RSS), and picked up some new ones, like this one, The Tinerebox. Continue reading The Beacons of Minas Tiener: fun home automation project for your chemotherapy pleasure.

Tl;dr I unclouded my RSSs (RSS’s? RSS’? RSSes?)

How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.

Ben Wolf of Old Reader fame wrote this back in November 2013. (And I found it in this Wired article, credit where credit is due.) It was true then in 2013, it was true in 2018 when I started writing this blog post (LOL), and it is true now. More amazingly, that 2013 slug still works! Anyhow, today I want to write a bit about RSS so time to dust off this draft! Continue reading Tl;dr I unclouded my RSSs (RSS’s? RSS’? RSSes?)

One thing (the Chrome-ocalypse) led to another (a fully reformed Kodi setup).

I have a gen2 Chromecast, and like so many others, I refuse to upgrade it to a 99USD AI enabled Google Gemini device just to enable the family to watch their Netflix. So inevitably, I also fell in the blast radius of the Chrome-ocalypse, the negligence-triggered breaking of gen2 devices by Google. I think actually by now, my Chromecast could even be up again, and even if it isn’t (it wasn’t when I last checked, yesterday evening), Google confirmed that eventually it will.

But this actually gave me the necessary nudge to finally clean up my Kodi config to enable Youtube and Netflix on it, and… well, one thing kinda led to another. Continue reading One thing (the Chrome-ocalypse) led to another (a fully reformed Kodi setup).