I haven’t touched my site since 2021 and figure it deserves something eaiser to serve than Drupal. Not like I need the CMS to make publishing easier. Hugo worked good for kerry.christmas so I think I’m going to give that a try. Perhaps It will motivate me to write content here more often.

I struggled following a great guide to get Home assistant’s energy to work as I already have an SDR at 915M and rtl_433 running to capture weather station data without Cloud API delay. The solution there is great and purpose built. I’m just difficult. These are my notes.

Below is my rtl_433.conf:

device        :00000857 #Could be different for you(000001)
frequency     915M
output mqtt://homeassistant.local:1883,user=USERNAME,pass=PASSWORD
convert si
  protocol 149 # ERT Standard Consumption Message (SCM)

Then in homeassistant I had:

Ok after finding some errors in my code(Missing ~~ after a question on the general exam and that I wrote the Regex without an ancor so it saw the question as an answer) I’ve completed the parser. I need to edit the code to make it easier to run yourself possibly code to python so I can cross compile it to a GUI.

Here are the Extra Flash Cards

So it was easier than I thought to alter the parser for the General set after I had the Technician Class working. I will update the parser code soon on GitHub. Below are the flash cards for the General Exam. I haven’t spent much time reviewing so send me a note if there is an error.

2011 General Flash Cards

If you downloaded this before please 2:30PM Nov 26 2014 please re-download there were some parsing errors.

I’m working on writing a parser to parse the questions into flashcards, random printable quizzes and ittertave quizzes. The questions come from the TXT files from NCVEC. You will need the images separate from the cards.

Click here to get a copy of the flash cards

You will need to cut it into strips and fold in half for flashcards. I do have a duplex version but my duplexer wasn’t high enough quality to make the lines match up.

I started my IPv6 journey via Hurricane Electric’s tunnelbroker.net service. It was an amazing journey they delegated me a /64 and /48 and provided instructions to get it setup on every operating system. Then the Chicago router filled and I didn’t want to hop off my ISP’s network to get to the tunnel so I started prodding my ISPs.

AT&T was the first to at least back up the settings found on the online forums. It took me being hung up on twice(without the expected call backs) before I got to Don a Tier 2 Technical Lead. He understood my plight for IPv6 and understood that helping me would benefit us both as they wouldn’t be wasting transit to external carriers. He couldn’t help me right then, but promised to get back to me with something. He did call back with the settings the next week. He verified what I had understood from the online forums.

I became interested in VPS.NET when they sponsored DrupalCon Chicago last March.  It was nice to know they were adding a node so geographically close to me, and fun to watch how many exhibits they could get the VPS.NET robot into. I have had mine on my desk(unless the office cats knock it off) as a reminder to check back for deals and remind me if the need arose.

I’ve started writing a bot that attaches to my Mythbackend. I’m calling it mythbot. It allows me to check on my recording status through commands like tuners, upcoming, jobs, info. It’s written in php and uses xmpphp. XMPPHP does have performance problems. It needs a one liner to fix performance problems.

Update: The code is now hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/toddejohnson/mythbot

Power went out in the neighborhood and I’m finally getting to use my generator for the first time this year. Its great seeing an investment put to use.

I have decided to switch my website to use drupal.  I decided this so that I could use a very stable and well supported CMS to maintain my web site.  Also I am starting to develop some drupal modules and this gives me a place to production test some of them.