December 21, 2020

Happy Holidays!

Last year I was in Heidelberg for Christmas. I visited family and a few places I remembered from my time there in the Army. The pandemic was a footnote in the news, and I was looking forward to a better year at the new job I had just started a couple of months earlier. 2020 didn’t turn out like I had imagined, but I can’t complain. I was able to continue working, I’m one of those folks that enjoy staying home (nearly) alone, and none of my close friends or family has been hurt by the virus.

December 14, 2020

Crosspost: Using Ansible for Configuration Management

I wrote this for Sensu last year. I had just finished a very large project with Ansible and loved working with it. So naturally the next gig required Salt…. Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool for deploying software and administering remote systems that you can integrate into any existing architecture. It relies on industry-standard security mechanisms and takes full advantage of existing operating system utilities. Ansible uses no agents and works with your existing security infrastructure.

December 13, 2020

New Digs

I moved the site off of Ghost and to a Hugo site hosted on GitHub pages. You may see a few missing images (I guess that would be “not see a few missing images?") and broken pages as I finish cleaning up from moving the content over. Photo by Andres Iga“https://unsplash.com/@andresiga")

December 12, 2020

Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 1: Reading the Device

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

December 7, 2020

Hacking the UCTRONICS Robot Car: Prepping for Hacks

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

December 2, 2020

Hacking a UCTRONICS Robot Car Kit

I picked up a Raspberry Pi based robot last week and started to hack around with it. I am going to write a series of posts documenting putting it together, getting it running, and then replacing the factory code with something a little more hack friendly. There’s a lot of photos here, so please be patient with the page speed. Also, when it comes to photography, I guess you’d say I’m a great programmer.

September 18, 2020

Juxtaposition

Around 850,000 people filed new unemployment claims in the U.S. last week. Apple announced new pricing that will save users money on their music, TV, and video game service. People are still recovering from Hurricane Sally on the Gulf, while others are undoubtedly still recovering from Marco, a storm largely forgotten because it “only” caused damages of about $10 million. That’s a tiny number. Unless of course, your home is included in it and you still don’t have a job because of the pandemic.

September 16, 2020

False Memory

I wrote about cooler temperatures on Monday. Here we are on Wednesday and it feels like Fall. In what still passes for normal to my mind, the weather would stay like this for a couple of weeks, then the temperature would spike up for a week or less in October, and then fall back to autumnal levels. But that doesn’t seem to be how it works in our new climate regime.

September 15, 2020

Down Week

It’s a down week. I have to stay close to home and a computer since I need to be reachable in the event something goes wrong at work. (Or is it “with” work instead of “at”, since there’s no real sense of “at” in these pandemic days?) Being on call makes it a down week since I can’t head out on the bike for my early morning rides. My sore knee is happy with this, although part of me is scheming about trying out running, since that would keep me close enough to home.