Over the past few weeks I’ve gradually been migrating services from running in LXC containers to Docker
containers. It takes a while to get into the right mindset for Docker - thinking of containers as basically
immutable - especially when you’re coming from a background of running things without containers, or in “full”
VM-like containers. Once you’ve got your head around that, though, it opens up a lot of opportunities: Docker
doesn’t just provide a container platform, it turns software into discrete units with a defined interface.
With all of your software suddenly having a common interface, it becomes trivial to automate a lot of things
that would be tedious or complicated otherwise. You don’t need to manage port forwards because the containers
just declare their ports, for example. You can also apply labels to the application containers, and then query
the labels through Docker’s API.
Monitoring power draw with WeMo Insight Switches
Published on May 2, 2016
A WeMo Insight Switch
I recently picked up a couple of
Belkin’s WeMo Insight Switches to monitor power usage for
my PC and networking equipment. WeMo is Belkin’s home automation brand, and the switches allow you to toggle
power on and off with an app, and monitor power usage.
The WeMo Android app is pretty dismal. It’s slow, doesn’t look great, and crashed about a dozen times during
the setup process for each of my two switches. It also doesn’t provide much information at all about power:
you can see average power draw and current power draw, and that’s basically it.
Belkin has provided an option to e-mail yourself a spreadsheet with historical power data, and can even do it
on a regularly scheduled basis, but that’s not really a nice solution if you want up-to-date power stats. Even
if you were happy with data arriving in batch, having to get hold of an e-mail attachment and parse out a
weirdly formatted spreadsheet doesn’t make for easy automation. It also relies on Belkin supporting the
service indefinitely, which isn’t necessarily going to happen.
Reverse engineering the Sense API
Published on Apr 10, 2016
A Sense unit and its two pillow sensors
Sense is a little device that sits by your bedside and, in conjunction with a little ‘pill’ attached to your
pillow, monitors your sleeping patterns and any environmental conditions that might hamper them. Android and
iOS apps show you your sleep history, and offer suggestions for improvements.
Sense was
Kickstarted
in August 2014, raising over 2.4 million US dollars, and shipped to backers in mid 2015. The campaign blurb
included this snippet:
Building with Sense
You’ll always have access to your data via our API. Take it, play with it, graph it, do whatever you want
with it. It’s yours. That’s important to us.
We enjoy tinkering with and building on-top of other products we like. Sense will let you have that
experience.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you might want to build with Sense, and how you could directly
interact with the hardware, and the data it collects.
Sounds great! But a year after shipping, there’s no sign of an API, and some of us who enjoy tinkering are
getting a bit restless…
