A Month Without Cable TV

Nick Momrik2 Comments

It’s been a month since I cancelled Charter Spectrum TV service. Go back and read that post if you want details on the services I’m using now. I haven’t missed the service at all and Playstation Vue continues to impress me. In fact, I didn’t even notice I wasn’t picking up ABC on my antenna until I went to schedule TV show series recordings last week. I still need to adjust the antenna placement. I get ABC On Demand through Playstation Vue, so I’m not missing out on my shows.

I have noticed a pretty big habit change without Charter. I rarely sit down and watch random TV anymore. I’ve spent the extra time working on home projects, learning things from YouTube videos (mostly about electronics), or getting to bed earlier.

A Record Streak

Nick Momrik4 Comments

screen-shot-2017-01-26-at-9-17-37-pm This post makes 79 days in a row, breaking my old streak, which was set on April 13th, 2009. When I took notice of the posting streak and decided to keep going, I was worried I’d run out of things to publish within a couple of weeks. I haven’t had any issues though. These things have really helped:

  1. I quickly made the decision not to get caught up in the length of posts. Sharing a video or a simple link would be just fine some days.
  2. Whenever an idea strikes, I try to get an early title and some quick notes saved as a draft post in WordPress. I usually have at least 5 drafts in progress and had 10 at one point. Some of the drafts are waiting for a specific date or event while others just need to be completed.
  3. In Apple’s Reminders app, I have a repeating daily reminder. I don’t mark it as completed until I have published or scheduled the post for the day.
    post-to-blog-reminder.png
    The notification on my iPhone as well as my computers doesn’t let me forget.
  4. Speaking of scheduled posts, I usually have at least 1-2 posts set for the upcoming days. I tend to move them around when I want to publish something right away, but it helps to keep the process stress free.

I don’t follow my blog stats closely, but I’m curious if the increased activity has caused the decline in visits and visitors. I would expect the numbers to move in the other direction.

stats-during-posting-streak.png

Home Assistant Pi

Nick MomrikLeave a comment

With all of the Raspberry Pis I have (now up to 6 after adding “flapper”), I wanted to get a bunch of data in Home Assistant (yes, I’m still working on a larger home automation post) and have an easy way to reboot or shutdown each computer.

I wrote a little app which runs as a service on each Pi. Here’s an example of what shows up in Home Assistant.

home-assistant-pi-groups.png

The Python app and sample Home Assistant configurations are in my home-assistant-pi project on GitHub. Of course it’s all Open Source.