Lots Of Words

Pictures too, maybe. By Chris DeFlumeri

Local Home Automation, Home Assistant, and Big Garage Door

For the past 10 years or so, I've gone deep into figuring out how to make home automation systems that were informative, highly available, fault-tolerant, secure, and helpful. I started out with the SmartThings platform, which has support for WiFi, Zigbee, and Z-Wave radios, and it met my needs pretty well when we lived in condominiums. I also made use of the Philips Hue lighting automation platform, which is actually Zigbee under the hood, but is also incredibly reliably and user friendly. Howe »

Alive

(still) Last time I updated this blog, it was 5 years ago-ish and I was recently married. It was hosted on a completely different server running bare metal nginx and a bunch of cronjobs. I worked at Tripadvisor, had recently gotten married, and was in the middle of an MBA. Tripadvisor suffered heavily in the pandemic and I left ahead of some "reductions-in-force" I was fairly certain would affect some of my friends and colleagues. I worked briefly at Hubspot but it didn't work for me in a full »

Tracking My Car For The First Time

I tracked my car for the first time at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, as part of the Track Night In America, program on May 24th. It was awesome and you should totally do it. »

And Then Our St. Lucia Trip Came To An End

After 7 days in St. Lucia, we were ready to head back to Boston. On the last day on the island, we largely tried to take it easy. That, and take advantage of the last of the all-inclusive benefits. »

Pigeon Island, Where We Climbed A Steep Hill

Not wanting to spend more money, we decided to climb the big hills right next door to the resort, that we learned were on Pigeon Island. »

We Went On A Speedboat Tour

I want to talk about the stuff we did off resort. We didn’t do much because we spent so much on the all-inclusive package, but we did some! »

All Inclusive Resorts Are Alright

Turns out all-inclusive (at Sandals, at least) works like this: at the bars, just literally order as many of everything you want. At the restaurants, do the same, just give them your room number and last name. That’s it! »

We Went To St. Lucia

Three days after our wedding, we set off for the island of St. Lucia, a place I’d only learned existed on the day we actually booked our honeymoon. »

Motegi MR116s, Pirelli P Zeros, and a Harbor Freight Drill Bit

I've always run all-season tires, since I never really cared about getting peak performance, and the cars I've owned have generally been AWD and low torque, so they performed well enough during the winter. That wasn't the case with my current tires, though. »

Paint, Stripes, and Dyno Tuning

I got the Focus ST paint fixed, striped added, installed a PCV oil catch can, and got a dyno tune from BrenTuning. »