These are sandwiches… that rotate… in 3-D. You will need a pair of Red/Blue 3d glasses to view these GIFs properly. Credit for the original GIFs: Rotating Sandwiches

Due to technical difficulties, I’m postponing my Anaglyph series. In the meantime, I want to discuss how I built my whole-home audio system (mostly) from scratch. A few years ago, multi-room and whole-home audio was limited to wealthy homeowners and DIY audio enthusiasts. However, the rise of Sonos and the ever-decreasing price of embedded computers have transformed multi-room audio from a status symbol to a common feature in wireless speakers and AV receivers.

I don’t usually associate my home networking setup with the words “simple,” “flexible,” or “easy.” However, that changed when I lost internet access for an extended period. Last Thursday, I came home from a round of golf to find my internet access gone. I had assumed this was due to a mistake with my ISP’s scheduled maintenance that they were performing that day. As a software engineer, I understand how simple maintenance tasks can turn into unexpected outages; I decided to get some sleep and deal with it the next day.

Before writing up the first two parts, I wanted to post a few samples since I’ve already created a proof-of-concept anaglyph generator for part 3 of my 3-D series. Like most anaglyph generators, my program combines a left and right image into a 3-D anaglyph. Unlike other anaglyph generators, my program can take a video from a 360 photo booth (or any other arc shot) and turn that into a 3-D video.

Now that I am searching for jobs, now is an excellent time to update you on the personal projects I have worked on for the past few months. These posts will provide insight into my thought processes and odd collection of skills and interests. First on the docket is my sporadic, multi-year journey into DIY 3D pictures and videos. Unlike traditional 3D media that uses two synchronized cameras, I am attempting to use just one camera.

Like Alec from Technology Connections, I’ve been trying to find the perfect set of LED lights to hang outside for Christmas. We have independently been attempting to find colored LED strands that don’t look like RGB gamer puke. Almost all colored LED strands use monochromatic diodes and only have colored sleeves for decoration. This creates a garish, headache-inducing blob of light with a harsh blue cast. The solution to this problem is simple, obvious, and cheap, but none of the large companies seem to care.

It has been a week since I have been running Home Assistant and I have some thoughts. So far, it has been a good experience with a few issues that aren’t technically Home Assistant’s fault. My most frustrating issue is that most of my Aqara Zigbee devices stop connecting to the Zigbee hub. It appears that any Aqara end device connected to the hub works as expected, but Aqara devices that try to use my Sylvania smart plug as a router stop working after an hour or two.

Now that I own my own home, I have decided to make a second effort at setting up a smart home. Like the last time, I have decided to go with Home Assistant as my platform of choice. Unlike last time, I hope to create automations that are actually useful. To simplify the overall setup, I’m using the Home Assistant Yellow and a Raspberry Pi CM4 (4GB model) to host Home Assistant.

Due to reliability issues with Cloudflare Tunnel, I have decided to take the boring route and host my webpage on Github Pages. Right now, the biggest hurdle I’m facing in self-hosting is my own reluctance to pay for a publicly facing IP address for my house. While I’m confident my pfsense firewall will prevent anything nefarious from getting in, I’m not comfortable with the privacy impacts of that setup. I’ve explored using a cloud-based VM and VPN to tunnel incomming requests, but my ISP’s peering agreements make that solution suboptimal.

Last week, I attempted to join the fediverse by self-hosting Pleroma. It did not go well. One of Pleroma’s recently added features is hosting the server on a different domain than is displayed in the username. Unfortunately, that feature is only available in the development branch and isn’t in a stable release. Foolishly, I forked Pleroma and attempted to merge that feature into the stable branch. After a few minutes, I thought my changes were correct and compiled the software.