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Back in 2021, I wired up data from Buienalarm and Buienradar through Node-RED and a big pile of Jinja2 templates to get a rain forecast graph on my Apple Watch: eight Unicode block characters showing the next two hours in 15-minute chunks, glanceable without unlocking the phone. It worked, and I used it every day […] The post Buienwatch, a custom Home Assistant integration for Buienradar and Buienalarm graphs on your Apple Watch appeared first on Style over Substance.
Dithering is one of those techniques that feels like it belongs in a museum. It peaked in the ’90s, the era of 256-color palettes and early computer graphics, when you needed to trick the eye into seeing colors that your hardware couldn’t actually produce. Now, even our phones have OLED displays that do HDR, and […] The post Dithering is obsolete (except when it isn’t); creating OpenDithering appeared first on Style over Substance.
Last year I wrote about how I had written an ESPHome configuration for the Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 device to work as a small, color, digital art frame. This year, I wrote about how I had been using Claude Code to help me write Home Assistant code for myself. Those efforts have now combined in […] The post Black and white epaper photo frame based on Seeed Studio reTerminal E1003 using ESPHome and Home Assistant appeared first on Style over Substance.
For the past few months, I’ve been dabbling with Claude Code. Not in a “no one needs developers anymore, anyone can build apps now” kind of way. More in a “I have a basic understanding of this, but not enough to turn it into code I can actually use” kind of way. I don’t need […] The post Using Claude Code to write Home Assistant integrations appeared first on Style over Substance.
For the last month, I’ve been experimenting with making a digital art frame based on color epaper. Spectra 6 is the latest color epaper tech available, offering 6 colors (black, white, red, green, blue, yellow) in brighter and more saturated tones then its predecessors. And with these color panels becoming more available and affordable now, […] The post Epaper digital art frame based on Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 display and IKEA RÖDALM using ESPHome and Home Assistant appeared first on Style over Substance.
More in technology
The single-board computing market is shifting rapidly, and we are moving into an era of unprecedented possibilities where edge AI, computer vision, real-time control, and rich sensor streams converge locally. Yes, it’s exciting – but even amidst this “explosion” of hardware, an age-old rule holds true: define what you want to build before picking your […] The post What can you build, when AI can interact with the real world? appeared first on Arduino Blog.
Fellow Automattician Job Thomas, down in Cape Town, South Africa, has a lovely story about using Claude and the Beeper MCP to wrangle all the group chats for his daughter’s sports.
We keep reading scary reports of swarms of AI agents breaking into computer systems and doing other untoward and perhaps illegal things. To what degree do these agents influence each other? And is there anything we can learn from human behavior that would help mitigate these problems? That’s the heady backstory behind [episode 46](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology) of [_Traction Heroes_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/). Harry brought a short reading from David McRaney’s [_How Minds Change_](https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasion-ebook/dp/B093R2CP2V/) about the impact of our groups on our thinking and behavior. Here’s the key fragment: > the latest evidence coming out of social science is clear. Humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right. So much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers. We never lack evidence for this: just tune in to the news. People do stupid things to remain in good standing with their milieu _all the time_. (I know I have!) And apparently, so do AIs. (Although as I pointed out in the show, we mustn’t anthropomorphize technology.) But more importantly, knowing about the perils of tribal psychology can help us be more effective when working in groups — and therefore, to gain traction. [_Traction Heroes episode 46: Tribal Psychology_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology)
There's a chance, slim as it might be, that things won't go the way the've gone the last 30 years with digitization the moving to rental models for everyhing.
