Second Drobo Update
The new Drobo came quicker than expected and it's been working well ever since, so it's creeping higher up my recommendation list as the easiest storage solution you can buy.
The Blog of Ian Mercer.
Related Stories
Time Series Data Compression
This new technique to compress the time series data collected by my home automation system seems to be working really well.
Ian Mercer
Digital Twins are never identical
Digital Twin are an online representation of a real world object, a copy of its properties in the digital world and a way to send updated and commands to it. In effect I've been making them for years but now they have a trendy name.
Ian Mercer
Why smarthomes are hard
Why automated learning is hard for a smart home. The perils of over-fitting, under-fitting and how the general unpredictable nature of life makes it hard to build a system that learns your behavior.
Ian Mercer
Collinearity test for sensor data compression
One way to reduce the volume of sensor data is to remove redundant points. In a system with timestamped data recorded on an irregular interval we can achieve this by removing co-linear points.
Ian Mercer
Logistic function - convert values to probabilities
Another super useful function for handling sensor data and converting to probabilities is the logistic function 1/(1+e^-x). Using this you can easily map values onto a 0.0-1.0 probability range.
Ian Mercer
ATAN curve for probabilities
In a home automation system we often want to convert a measurement into a probability. The ATAN curve is one of my favorite curves for this as it's easy to map overything onto a 0.0-1.0 range.
Ian Mercer
Home Construction Advice
Several years ago we did a major remodel. I did all of the finish electrical myself and supervised all of the rough-in electrical. I also put in all of the electrical system and water in our barn. I have opinions ...
Ian Mercer
T-Mobile home internet
I'm testing a T-Mobile Home Internet device as a backup to XFinity and a way to offload half our monthly traffic to avoid the XFinity 1.2TB cap
Ian Mercer
Home Automation Systems as a Graph
Using nodes and links to represent a home and all the devices in it
Ian Mercer
Showing home status with just a single RGB LED
Multicolored LEDs can convey a lot of information in a small space
Ian Mercer
A wireless sensor network using Moteino boards
The diminutive Arduino boards include a powerful transmitter/receiver
Ian Mercer
JSON Patch - a C# implementation
Ian Mercer
A Quantified House - My Talk to the Seattle Quantified Self Meetup
My talk to the Seattle Quantified Self meetup
Ian Mercer
Integrating an Android phone into my home automation system
Some new features for my home automation using an Android phone
Ian Mercer
Before there was the web there was BeebTel
Just thought I should mention that I built a web-like system before the web existed
Ian Mercer
My first programme [sic]
At the risk of looking seriously old, here's something found on a paper tape
Ian Mercer
Web site crawler and link checker (free)
Ian Mercer
Elliott 803 - An Early Computer
Ian Mercer
Looking forward to the new year and our new datacenter
Historical note about moving my servers into a datacenter
Ian Mercer
It's all about disk speed
Why disk speed is the most critical aspect for most modern PCs and servers
Ian Mercer
Comcast woes and a new monitoring utility
Monitoring a cable modem using its HTML management interface
Ian Mercer
Core duo desktop machine runs cool
Ian Mercer
Preparing for death
A friend died last year, it wasn't unexpected. He left a lot for his friends to cleanup. Maybe these notes can help someone else prepare better.
Ian Mercer