Home Assistant xAI Grok conversation agent

Home Assistant's year of the voice was an important milestone in a lot of ways. I recently purchased 3 of the Home Assistant Voice devices that have some reasonable specifications and I think are the missing piece to easily controlling Home Assistant with your voice. In this guide

Amplify GraphQL API Key Expired?

When developing an app on AWS Amplify I created an API key that expired in 7 days and ended up coming back to the project later to find the API key had expired. These are the steps to delete the key and recreate a new one. You may want to

Home Assistant Behind a Synology Reverse Proxy

Documentation: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/http#use_x_forwarded_for When using a reverse proxy with Home Assistant, you will need to enable the use_x_forwarded_for and trusted_proxies options in the configuration.yaml. Requests from reverse proxies will be blocked if these options are not set.

HUZZAH ESP8266 Feather / NeoPixel FeatherWing / HTTP Webserver / HTTPS API Requests / JSON Requests and Responses

There is a lot going on the the title of this post and there has been a lot of talk lately about the Internet of Things. I have always had a fascination with electronics and while growing up took every chance I could to disassemble something to see how it

Creating a GIF from QuickTime Screen Recording in macOS

Creating a GIF from QuickTime Screen Recording in macOS

SmartThings are Groovy

One of the initial features I wanted was some way for the home and I to communicate. The Google Home seemed to allow bi-directional communication in the sense that I could speak commands and it could be a speaker to broadcast notifications or report other home metrics or SIRENS.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Google Cloud AutoML Vision

Lately I've been on a ancient history kick and while daydreaming about visiting Egypt in person I was curious to find out that only small percentage of hieroglyphics have been translated.

Customizing the AWS EKS Cluster Worker Node Group Template

I realized the cluster was using the maximum number of worker nodes (NodeAutoScalingGroupMaxSize) specified in the CloudFormation template. After contacting support they informed me there is a setting in the template to control the desired capacity (DesiredCapacity).

Useful MongoDB Commands

I had the hardest time finding examples of how to connect to MongoDB via the command line and via a connection string in code. So I've compiled some helpful MongoDB commands here. For creating a database, creating a user, and connecting to the database.

Using react-select with redux-form

While building an app for work I ran into a scenario that required a drop down box that is searchable and since we are using reactjs with material-ui, redux, and redux-form I have a few tools under my belt to get the job done however I still ran into a

Creating a new Kubectl config context

In a previous post I discussed how to view and change the configuration context that kubectl is currently using. In this post I'll be going over how to create two new context configurations that point to a different kubernetes clusters and point to a specific namespace. In my

Importing AWS RDS PEM Certificate to Java Keystore using KeyStore Explorer

Download the AWS RDS Certificate Bundle https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem Install KeyStore Explorer After installing you will need to run KeyStore Explorer as root or run as administrator on Windows. $ sudo /Applications/KeyStore\ Explorer.app/Contents/MacOS/KeyStore\ Explorer Click Open an existing KeyStore Choose the keystore

docker

AWS RDS SSL import inside Dockerfile

TLDR; Here is my Dockerfile FROM openjdk:8-jdk MAINTAINER Brayton # create a temp dir in which to work RUN OLDDIR="$PWD" RUN mkdir /tmp/rds-ca && cd /tmp/rds-ca # download the AWS RDS SSL bundle RUN wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem # split the bundle

bitnami ip

Replace IP with domain name in URL of Bitnami Ghost Deployment

After getting my blog running using Google Cloud Platform cloud launcher option with the Bitnami Ghost prebuilt image I noticed the URL in my browser shows the IP address of the VM instead of showing the domain name I expected to see. After some research I found this is a

kubernetes

Changing Kubernetes kubectl Environments

Recently, I setup a new Kubernetes environment and ran into the scenario of needing to switch between multiple kubernetes (k8s) environments. To manage a k8s environment you must use the kubectl command and when you have multiple k8s environments you must point kubectl to the environment you which to manage.

smart glasses

Reading Glasses

While reading on my iPad this weekend it struck me that in the future we will refer to "Reading Glasses" in a different way than we have in the past. I envision a pair of spectacles that would project the same type of notifications we receive on our

macos

Partitioning a USB drive on the cli in macOS

I found myself having difficulty using macOS Disk Utility to accomplish creating 2 partitions on a USB drive. For some reason my Partition button is greyed out. WARNING: If you follow these instructions you will lose all of the data on the device you specify in the command. Proceed with

ghost

"Welcome to Ghost".....How did this happen?

Now that I've got the blog online my first post will be about how I got the blog online. The Cloud AWS vs GCP The cloud is making deploying servers incredibly easy even for folks just getting started. Amazon and Google both provide great cloud services and both