I’ve recently started diving into home automation stuff, and of course immediately ran into issues. I purchased a z-wave water sensor and planned to use Home Assistant to monitor the sensor and send me alerts (via pushover) if it detects…
“Smart” Guns – Dangerously Dumb
Recently on NerdAbsurd we discussed “Smart” guns, in which I took up the task of refute the an article on Slate.com written by Farhad Manjoo. When Virginia first sent me a link to the article asking my opinion, I knew I would have more than a…
Mail Checker Minus; Or Why Are You Maintaining a Chrome Extension?
Update Feb 3rd 2011: I am no longer maintaining the Mail Checker Minus extension. I recommend switching over to Jason Savard‘s Checker Plus For Gmail. He’s already done a good bit of work cleaning up code and adding new features.…
Conversation with a Spam Bot
Today, while I was working on the inventory system for the Dallas Makerspace I received a message from an unknown person via AIM. This is not an unusual event for me since I have had the same AIM screen name for over a decade,…
Dallas Makerspace Open House
A while back I became a member of the Dallas Makerspace, which is basically the only hackerspace in the Dallas area. I met a lot of cool people and now I have access to a lot of really cool tools…
Compiling Bitcoin on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)
In case you don’t know, Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency or as the site says a “peer-to-peer network based digital currency”. While most people have been content to use the pre-compiled binaries available, some of us prefer to compile the…