Temperature monitoring solution based on Raspberry Pi

My house is heated by an ancient ground source heat pump that every now and then has had various problems. Being a 40-year-old piece of equipment, it doesn’t have any of the electronics that all the new heat pumps come with. Since getting data about the operation of the pump is always useful when trying… Continue reading Temperature monitoring solution based on Raspberry Pi

Fruit and vegetables

Here’s a handy reference chart telling what the thing we call “fruit” and “vegetables” actually are:

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Categorized as Language

Carcassonne tile counter v3

Better late than never, they say. Someone requested some new features to my Carcassonne tile counter years ago, and I finally managed to do something about it. Here’s the latest version: Carcassonne tile counter version 3. What changed? Quite a few things: – The whole app is now written in frontend Javascript, so there’s no… Continue reading Carcassonne tile counter v3

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EC2 instance creation fails with “InvalidParameterCombination: The parameter groupName cannot be used with the parameter subnet”

For the second time I ran into this same issue. When using RunInstancesCommand from the AWS SDK for Javascript, a certain parameter combination results in a misleading and confusing error message: “InvalidParameterCombination: The parameter groupName cannot be used with the parameter subnet” There is no parameter “groupName” in my request. The problem was that the… Continue reading EC2 instance creation fails with “InvalidParameterCombination: The parameter groupName cannot be used with the parameter subnet”

Finnish public holidays

There are a number of public holidays in Finland, many of which are paid vacation days for most people. Some of these holidays are observed on a certain weekday near a calendar date, such as Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day(Thursday), and Midsummer’s Eve(Friday). Other observed Christian holidays are always observed on the weekend, so… Continue reading Finnish public holidays

Fallout Pip-Boy 2000 Mk.I replica – Part 5: Electronics and software

The Pip-boy project has finally been finished, after a bit of a hiatus. The last things that needed doing were finalizing the electronics, and writing the software. My original plan was to just use a Raspberry Pi to power the whole thing, but it turned out that dealing with the inputs from the physical buttons… Continue reading Fallout Pip-Boy 2000 Mk.I replica – Part 5: Electronics and software

A story of a web server installation

A recent interaction with AWS support reminded me of something that happened to me and a co-worker some years ago in a previous job. The people and companies in the story have been anonymized, but I’m “Eric”. I (“Eric”) worked for the online development team of a large media company (The Company) “somewhere in Europe”.… Continue reading A story of a web server installation

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Fallout Pip-Boy 2000 Mk.I replica – Part 4: Very small details

I’ve noticed before that this build has some issues with scale, but now it’s really hitting home. Some of the details are ridiculously fiddly. Starting with the faux vacuum tubes; Not too bad, just smaller than any real vacuum tubes would be, and even then they aren’t actually fully shown from behind the grill.