Contemplations by Thor /tɔː(r)/

After coming back from our road trip around Yellowstone in 2017, there was only one US state that I had not visited. Alaska would require something else, so we started planning for a motorcycle trip in 2020. This was sort of a birthday gift to myself since I would be 50 years in October that year. The name of the project was obvious: 50-by-50 . I posted my plan on facebook to go in May 2020, well assured that I would achive this goal. I was on another road trip in California with Sissel and the kids in February 2020. We barely made it home before US was closed for travel due to the COVID pandemic. My next trip to the US was in August 2021; I had a National Interest Exception for travelling to the US, but due to the conditions in Alaska at the time it did not make sense to visit from California. It was nevertheless too late for 50-by-50... This year, we decided to finally to the trip in summer. Our deposit on the bikes were still valid and we decided to do the trip in July/August. Our i...

I've been tinkering with smart devices before  but when expanding my cabin automation system I ran into trouble with functionality. By invoking even smarter sofware solutions I found a workaround. At home, I quickly realised that I would need a Philips Hue bridge in order to have full functionality of my bulbs, led strips and smart plugs. Spotify integration and even control from my LGB1 OLED TV was not possible through bluetooth control.  At the cabin, with one bulb and one smart plug, bluetooth control had worked nicely so far. I then got the idea that I wanted to have the outdoor lighting be controlled by suset/sunrise. The cumbersume setup for bluetooth devices was cumbersome as ever: I. used about four hours for four bulbs, but finally they were all discovered by Google Home. There is a known bug in Google Home that "Routines" are missing from iOS apps.  This can be fixed by changing the language of your Apple device to US English. This restored the functionality and...

 Finally got WP server at work so I have played around with Plotly for dynamic plotting: