I recently spoke at a small conference we put on in Detroit. I talked about The Future of the Web, in the context of data ownership, and proprietary vs open platforms. It was the first time I’ve done a talk like this without slides of any kind, so I actually wrote out the whole thing (below). The live version was a little different, as you can hear in the audio (sorry it’s a bit echo-y):
Category: Uncategorized
Classic Training Hike
On Sunday, Erika and I went on a training hike, to start getting into shape for the Fjallraven Classic. This year it’s over 30 miles of backpacking within 3 days, and we’re both a bit nervous about being able to keep up the pace! We went up to White Ranch Park, and ended up hiking about 8 miles (Belcher Hill, Longhorn, Shorthorn, Longhorn, Whippletree, Belcher Hill), with roughly 20lb packs. We went pretty slow, but I think we did OK considering it was our first longer (and loaded) hike of the season. We’ll definitely need to get a few more in between now and the end of June, along with a bunch of basic walking/hiking training as well. The elevation (10,000 ft+) for the Classic is going to be rough, even for us Mile-Highers.
According to Fitbit, I did just over 21,000 steps and burned 4,500 calories. My heart rate peaked up around 140bpm briefly.
Dented Reality on New Dedicated Virtual at Media Temple
I’ve completed the migration of dentedreality.com.au (along with all my other domains, excluding this one) to a new dedicated virtual server with Media Temple. Mad props to them, they’ve been great in helping me handle some pieces of the process, which has gone relatively smoothly. Things I’m looking forward to on the new host include:
- Working with Plesk Onyx
- Trying out Let’s Encrypt 🔐
- PHP 7 😍
- Hopefully consolidating and simplifying some things
This site (beau.blog) is now my main blogging/writing space, with Dented Reality being more of a full archive of my digital footsteps.
Import posts from Jetpack/WordPress.com
I’ve just released version 1.8 of both Keyring, and the Keyring Social Importers. This version includes a new service file, and an accompanying importer, which allows you to import content from a Jetpack-powered WordPress site, using the WordPress.com REST API. That means any site hosted on WordPress.com, or any self-hosted site with the Jetpack plugin installed. There are also a few key fixes for the Twitter and LinkedIn services/importers, so it’s a nice update.
The new importer will pull across the entire content of posts, including tags. Similar to the Instapaper importer, it attempts to avoid duplicate content issues by marking pages as noindex if they come from imported content.
This is another piece of the puzzle required for me to create a complete archive of my digital footprints over on Dented Reality, now that I’m blogging here. This post should be imported over there automatically within an hour.
Note that currently the importer doesn’t sideload any media items (will add that soon) or support geo data (again, I’ll add that when I get a chance).
Check it out, and please use responsibly!
Dabbling in Home Automation and The Internet of Things
Now that I own my own house, and some of the technologies involved are a bit more stable, I’ve gotten into the idea of home automation a bit more. Here’s a quick run down of my current configuration.
At the center of most things, I have a wink hub (first generation). I configure as much as possible through that, since it simplifies interacting with them if they’re all available in one place.
From there, I have 2 Schlage Connect deadbolts (house and garage doors), which are both programmed with the same set of user codes (has to be done manually). It’s nice to be able to control codes from within the wink app, vs using the on-pad controls.
To control lights, we have 3 rooms converted over to Lutron Caseta light switches (so far, I’d like to do a few more). This makes it easy to control an entire circuit (all 3 rooms are controlling either 3 or 6 bulbs, so they’d be expensive to convert using individual smart bulbs). They’re super easy to install, and you don’t need their hub thing if you have the wink, which is compatible. I also have 3 iHome Smartplugs, which plug into an outlet, and then let you plug in any standard lamp/appliance, and control it. I don’t love the Smartplugs, and have had some trouble with them dropping their connections, but when they work they’re fine.
Separately, I also have 2 LIFX bulbs, which can be controlled directly, so they are in a couple of lamps that could otherwise be controlled via Smartplugs (I got these bulbs from their Kickstarter way back).
To control all of the above, I actually have everything configured in both an Amazon Echo, and a Google Home. Redundancy FTW, and it’s fun to experiment with each platform.
Technically, also connected to the wink hub, we have some Nest Outdoor security cameras, which have been really fun to play with. I’ve even hooked up a system to automatically take snapshots, which is interesting for comparing seasonal shade profiles for gardening purposes.
Apart from those power/control/security devices, we’ve also current got an Apple TV, a Chromecast (integrates really nicely with the Google Home), and I use Automatic in my truck.
I’ve played around a bit with configuring shortcuts and “robots” (automations), but really haven’t found many that are that useful to be honest. Probably the best one is one that just turns on our kitchen light when we open the back door (which opens basically into the kitchen). I think one of the biggest problems is that I don’t have a great system for handling “presence”, which needs to take me and Erika into account. Without that, anything I automate based on my presence is likely to just be an annoyance for her if she happens to be at home when I’m not (or vice versa).
Areas that I’d be curious to look into automating would be thermostat control (long story as to why I haven’t done this already), external temperature/precipitation, combined with irrigation, and possibly window coverings.
Spring Plantingpalooza
Last year, Erika and I planted our first ever vegetable garden. We quickly became obsessed with it, and this year we’ve upgraded from 2 beds with approximately 50 square feet, to a total of 6 beds, with over 285 square feet (more than 5x the growing space)! We’re pretty psyched to see what we can produce this year, and will be trying a bunch of new vegetables, in addition to more of the varieties we liked from last year.
Here in Denver (as with most areas that have hard winters), one of the most important dates for growing is our last frost date. Typically for us, that’s May 2nd. Most of our planting needs to be done relative to that date (either before or after, a certain amount of time). We decided that this weekend was when we would get in the bulk of what we’re growing (cooler season crops), so we had a planting party.
Since I’m a bit OCD, I like to plan things out pretty heavily, and figuring out the logistics of when to plant things and where/how is pretty fun. I now have plans in my head for a calendar-generator, where you can tell it where you are, and what you want to plant, and it’ll generate a calendar for you, telling you when to do everything 🙂
In the meantime, I’m manually creating garden maps and planting schedules, which will have to do for this year at least.
I’ll be sure to post some updates once things are growing, and hopefully overflowing their beds.
Recent Social Importer Updates
I’ve been trying to make small improvements to the Keyring Social Importers package (and People & Places) that I maintain, and have made a number of them over the last few weeks. Here are some details of recent updates which you may have missed:
- Improved the labels being used for each taxonomy, so that you don’t get random mentions of “tags” in the WordPress UI.
- Improved the
add_place_to_post()method so that you can add multiple Places to a single Post. - Now exposing both the
peopleandplacestaxonomies via the REST API.
- Added a filter so that you can easily (and globally) disable downloading of full content for Instapaper articles.
- Made it easy to inject custom CSS for a specific importer.
- Added a Nest Camera service and importer. Including recent updates, it will download a snapshot from the specified camera(s) during the hour indicated, auto-tag it using the location of the camera, and also associate it with a Place if People & Places is co-installed.
- The Instagram importer now handles video posts properly, and will download the full video and embed it into your posts. Bundled a reprocessor to fix old posts, which would have previously been handled as image posts.
- Also made the Instagram importer link up People mentioned in captions (not just those who are properly tagged as being in a post).
- Fixed a bug in the Twitter importer which was mangling newlines. Added a reprocessor to fix it in old posts as well.
- Now exposing where a post was imported from in the REST API.
- Added Places support to the TripIt importer, which associates each post with Places for each airport flown through on that trip.
Keyring Social Importers has been updated in the WordPress.org plugin directory (version 1.7, or get it from Github) and you can get the latest version of People & Places from Github (still not an “official” plugin yet).
You can see most of them in action on my site, Dented Reality, which uses them to aggregate most of my online social activity. The People & Places data is not directly exposed yet, but you can see it in the REST API output.
