Open Source Business Models
Background This is a blog I’ve wanted to write for a long time. In fact, I’ve written and rewritten it several times, leaving it in draft stage every time as I’ve reworked my own...
Shane Stuff! Nothing but Shane-anigans
Top Tips on Working from Home
I’m writing this at the time of a worldwide pandemic of COVID-19. We’re facing rapid spread of the disease and in the hopes of retaining healthy employees, many employers are providing their workforce with...
Baby Naming Project
tl;dr: you can get a new person/car/pet/whatever naming app now at https://github.com/eskibars/lentil-namer As a first-time dad-to-be, one of the things I’ve noticed is that the first thing anyone asks you about your baby is...
Tracking Nearby Ships with SDR, Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Vega Visualizations
Intro A year ago, I moved nearer to Golden Gate Bridge and seeing the ships come in made me wonder how they’re tracked. I had seen websites like this one, and was curious how...
Combining Tasker with Elasticsearch and Kibana for Personal Dashboards
Tasker is probably my favorite Android app. It gives you total control over your device. Not to mention there’s a great community that develops all sorts of interesting tasks/integrations. I was recently on a...
Connecting Domoticz and Elasticsearch
I use Domoticz for my home automation needs. I’ll just start off by saying it has its pros and cons. Pros: It seems to have pretty wide device support It allows for a completely...
Recruiters’ new (spam) tools
Intro I’ve recently been getting a slew of e-mails from recruiters. Horray! Right? Except…no. Don’t get me wrong: we all have jobs and I’m happy to get e-mails from recruiters. The issue is that...
Government debt, GDP growth, and taxes, oh my!
Government debt sounds scary! If debt is bad on an individual basis, shouldn’t we seek to eliminate debt? And “you can’t spend your way out of debt!” Except all of this is a pretty simplistic...
Mini Public Transit Board
First World Problems I live in San Francisco where our coffee is strong, our alcohol is stronger, and our public transit system (Muni) is weak. OK, that’s not entirely fair, but Muni is slow and unreliable:...
Ad-blocking and extra privacy for your devices
The back-story: As one of my friends has stated… The Internet is a scary place without Adblock It’s true. And while I think he was largely referring to the ubiquity and annoying nature of many...
