Images can contain metadata. This is useful for things like “when was this photo taken?” or information about the camera, or a text description of what the image contains.

Many cameras (e.g. your iPhone) will include GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. This is useful for things like “where were we when we had that amazing pizza?” or “where was that beautiful sunset??”.

This is much more problematic when the selfie you just shared includes the precise location of your home.

“Do you smell burning?”

“No, doismellburning”

“No, really, what’s that smell??”

Turns out the Raspberry Pi that ran my home automation hub had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible - in a rather hot and fragrant fashion!

Sigal is yet another simple static gallery generator

You give it a directory of photos, it spits out HTML/CSS/JS for a nice static gallery you can point a browser at.

From my smart home user-stories:

For my home, I want a centralised abstracted event hub for connecting sensor/actor devices together, so I can separate “automation logic” from “interfacing code” – even better if the interfacing code is done for me!

Home Assistant handles this nicely.

Previously I’d been wiring things together in a very ad-hoc fashion. My “smart doorbell” had the logic to connect to Slack and SES to send me notifications, my cameras had similar logic replicated, et cetera. Event-handling and automation code lived on each device, and coordinating and managing it all was a pain.

Enter Home Assistant, which acts as a generalised abstraction layer and centralised event-bus between all the things.

You tell it about your devices (“components” - it has support for nearly a thousand), it provides you with a nice interface for manual control, and powerful but easy-to-write “automations” to hook everything together.

I love Docker as a packaging system - almost everything I push to production nowadays is as a Docker image.

Occasionally in the #django IRC channel, the topic of “how to Docker-ise your Django service” comes up. Here’s the Dockerfile I use, taken from My Django Project Template:

Some things I read in 2017, with some brief opinions/recommendations.

All categorisations are approximate at best and will probably cause some kind of contention.

Last year I wrote “My 2016”, inspired by Always Improve, Never Stop, Never Pause, Never Appreciate: things I did; not necessarily “achievements”, but happy and/or notable things.

I’m glad I did, so I’m doing it again. So, in no particular order:

Welshcakes (or welsh cakes) are little fluffy circles of joy, around 1cm thick and 7cm in diameter, made from flour, butter, currants, eggs and milk, plus a little dusted caster sugar.

They’re light enough that you could easily eat an entire six-pack, but substantial enough that just one is a pleasant snack, and perfect any time of day or night.

I’ve used the term Feature Factory at a couple conference talks over the past two years. I started using the term when a software developer friend complained that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.”

In 1984 Robert Jordan started writing The Wheel Of Time, a high-fantasy series intended to span six books.

In September 2007, when Jordan died, 12 books had been published with more still planned.

The series was concluded by Brandon Sanderson with another three books, coming in at around 11,000 pages and 4.5 million words in total.

It’s quite long.