Where there is a will, there is a way. April 30, 2023 With my Shelley Energy Monitor showing me what I was generating and what was going to grid, I needed a better way yo visualize it. Google Sheets has a great feature called App Script that allows you to write small progams that will run regularly. After getting back into the coding I was able to whip up a small script to pull the data directly from the device using Shelley's cloud api, and with the data on in one sheet it was easy to create a nice graph. Now I can see in one glance what my energy usage is like and start build a full years worth of data.

We will possess the power of the sun! April 15, 2023 I installed solar panels last year and have been enjoying looking at how much electricity I've been generating. Unfortunately because I don't have a battery or car charger my setup didn't easily tell me how much I used internally or was sending back to the grid. So off to the internet I went to find a solution. After much searching I found the Shelly EM, this small device has two clamps you attach to your fuse board and then it wirelessly transmits the data either locally or to the cloud. With it I can now see what I generate, use internally and send to the grid. The app perfectly serviceable but doesn't do much for presenting the data well so the next challenge is how to automatically get the data into a spreadsheet for better visualization!

I git it working! November 8, 2022 I've been writing this blog for a while with a few different tools. I've been trying to find a simple way to blog from my phone while still owning my data. I managed an ok flow with GitHub Pages, Jekyll and Forestry.io but wanted it to be easier. After lots of searching I discovered GitJournal, an Android git app, which seems to give me everything I need! I'll post a full blog post once I've used it a bit more, but very promising so far!

Creative Problems need Creative Solutions June 10, 2022 How do you record when your heating goes on and off? You can probably buy advanced home heating control systems but what about when you already have a system? I have a wireless thermostat but its don't track the history of my usage. Some options thought of were, hacking my thermostats API's or wiring something directly to the control board. In the end the simplest and easiest solution I found was a wireless temperature alert monitor placed in front of the boilers exhaust pipe! A couple days in an it works like a charm, alerts be when the heat is on and when it turns off. Now all I have to do is figure out how to export the emails to a spreadsheet!

What you see is not what you get May 28, 2021 I've realized an interesting dynamic that has happened in the world of phone media. For a long time phone manufacturers have been pushing higher and higher resolution camera and video. This is breaking the cloud storage model that says it's easier to just give it away for free, given storage is so cheap. Now the likes of Google and What's App are aggressively compressing media that is stored to save space. They claim there is no loss and offer no alternative but even cursory testing on What's App shows different. This is a dark pattern in tech, where they sell high resolution cameras, don't actually store that result in the cloud and when you send it on they also cut corners. They want to charge you to store more photos but not other data cause they know photos are harder to manage, but I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't still cut corners for paying customers!