My journey playing with Safari’s bookmarks began unexpectedly trying to find an easy way to access Elixir module documentation. I keep a lot of docs stored locally and Elixir’s mix tool makes it easy to download and access. The problem is that I don’t want to always have to type a command in the terminal to launch it and navigating folders in the Finder feels cumbersome. I use bookmarks extensively and would like to simply have a folder of docs accessible in the browser. And so the adventure begins.

A few months ago I moved into a new home which meant having to re-setup all my home automation. One of the things which was going to be problematic was finding a way to control my new home’s existing air-conditioners. I also bit the bullet and opt to go the easy path of buying a couple Sensibo devices but the price was a major turn-off. At my previous home I had setup an ESP2088 as an RF controller to control my fans, doing the same for IR shouldn’t be much more difficult.

While in between jobs I decided to set myself some small goals to remain productive but also be able to deliver them. Usually when I begin a personal project I don’t even think how long it might take me to complete. This has lead me to take on very large projects with little to no chance of being in a usable state yet alone done. This time I took a different approach to only tackle small projects. This lead to actually accomplishing a complete rewrite of datemate and ilc, which I’ll talk about another time.

After several months of running my Dell PowerEdge R420 server a few nuances arose that began to irk me. In an impulsive decision, I decided to replace the behemoth of a home server with a much smaller and almost unnoticable Intel NUC.

I was disappointed when Home Assistant removed the BOM integration. Whilst I don’t fault their reasons, and wish that BOM did provide a proper API, it still was an unfortunate outcome. The default weather integration uses data that’s to generalised thus lacks accuracy. This is typical of all weather applications that don’t source their information from the Bureau directly. Fortunately part of my problem was solved via HACS and bremor’s bureau_of_meteorology plugin, which provides a weather component that sources its data from BOM. The only thing left is to display a radar image on the dashboard. Initially I simply created a Generic Camera with an image URL which sufficed my needs, but the lack of a historical timelapse began to wane on me. This is what was missing and took it upon myself to remedy.