Reverse engineering a Bluetooth-only irrigation controller
I have an Orbit B-hyve XD irrigation controller. It's Bluetooth-only — no Wi-Fi hub built in. Every existing integration (Home Assistant, pybhyve…
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Two flags for one boolean, drifted apart
A user of a side-project reported that the "Set up 2FA in mobile app" link in their settings did nothing — and there was no way to move 2FA to a new…
Read →An on-this-day journal feature from 3,000 Day One entries
I exported 3,060 Day One journal entries as JSON, imported them into DynamoDB, and built an "on this day" widget for a home dashboard. Once it was…
Read →qBittorrent's API rate-limits fresh logins
A dashboard tile of mine that aggregates torrent counts across five qBittorrent instances started intermittently returning 403s. The page would refresh…
Read →USB 2.0 Billboard means the cable is charge-only
Plugged an ESP32-class dev board into the Mac. Instead of a serial port, macOS showed it as a USB 2.0 BILLBOARD device from VLI Inc., vendor ID 0x2109…
Read →A BYOS e-ink dashboard that wakes once a day
I wanted a tiny always-on display in my office that showed the day's useful information and lasted a season on a single battery charge. The constraint…
Read →Counting a word across Signal messages with the macOS keychain
I wanted to count how many times I'd used a specific word across all my outgoing Signal messages. Sounded like five lines of SQL. The interesting part…
Read →Disabled the schedule. Got paged anyway.
I disabled a stuck check-in schedule at 09:05. At 09:33 my phone buzzed with "Chester Frazier hasn't responded to their check-in." The schedule was…
Read →A counter clock as the simplest thing that could possibly work
I needed a public webpage that counts time since a fixed instant. Two days, four hours, big number, mobile-friendly. The interesting part wasn't the page…
Read →Disabling Zebra printer Bidi when PowerShell refuses to help
I write deployment scripts for Zebra ZQ521 mobile printers running CPCL. Two of the standard config knobs — disable bidirectional communication and…
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