Category: Uncategorized
-
Re-keying every lock in your house all by yourself
A few months ago, I moved into a new house on a couple acres with a few outbuildings. I don’t know why the person who built the place did this, but they put both a deadbolt and a locking door handle on every building door (sheds, barn, coop), including multiple outside doors on the main […]
-
✅ finished my LED strips for lighting stairs
I’ve got a long walkway with five stairs going down it leading to my door and everything is a dull grey Trex-style decking that makes it hard to discern where the steps end, especially at night. I could have put a line of black grip tape on the end of each of the steps but […]
-
Brian Hull’s Disney impressions
I stumbled upon a bunch of videos of a guy named Brian Hull doing incredible voice impressions of disney characters at disney parks. Watch a few: Aside from the bang-on impressions, the bit I love most in these videos is when the person playing a character at the park—let’s be honest, probably an aspiring actor […]
-
Making painless guest wifi with QR codes
You ever go to a friend’s house, need to send a photo to someone, and realize it’d be way faster if you were on their wifi network? Then you ask and the host goes yeah, join my (punny-named) network, and then you ask for the password and it’s like 25 random alphanumeric characters someone has […]
-
Puddle & Pile—the app that predicts when your puppy needs to go—is freaking amazing
Last month, my family got a dog. It was our first ever dog after a lifetime of cat ownership. In the preceding months I asked everyone I know for advice on how to raise my someday dog. At a conference dinner this past summer, my favorite food writer on earth, Helen Rosner mentioned one piece […]
-
Cleaning up my closet/my first networking rack
Here’s the before shot of my home DSL modem attached to a Unifi Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus and a Unifi Security Gateway, then a Unifi 16 port powered switch, a mess of cabling from my wifi points and wireless point to point network, two Raspberry Pis, and then the five internet-of-things hubs I have to […]
-
My first LED project
A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a couple interesting videos on YouTube, namely these two: Both videos blew my mind about what’s possible with cheap off-the-shelf stuff. Thanks to the tech boom and drive for ever cheaper LEDs for all sorts of uses, the gear for building light strips is ridiculously cheap, while the […]
-
Extending Apple’s homekit through Homebridge
I’ve been doing a lot of weekend house projects lately. I started with hours on YouTube watching videos on how to wire up wall switches because I wanted to control more lights on my network. I followed the Wirecutter’s roundup of the best IoT wall switches and jumped on their cheap pick, the Kasa HS200 […]
-
My first hour with Airpods Pro
Off the bat you should know that I have tried in-ear canal headphones a few times over the last couple decades and they’ve never been comfortable or offered such great sound quality that the uncomfortableness was worth it. Instead, headphones that go into and down your ears have always felt like medical equipment to me, […]
-
Don’t restore from backup (for a bit of a detox)
I’m two weeks into owning my iPhone 11 Pro and I have to say two things have jumped out since I’ve started using it. The first is that I didn’t think I’d use the wide angle lens much, but in the past couple weeks, being able to walk around with a phone that shoots similar […]
A Whole Lotta Nothing 