The Blog of Ian Mercer.
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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.
Photography
My photo collection now has over 150,000 photos taken around the world and close to home. Most recently I've been shooting with a Sony A9. Prior to that most photos were taken with a Canon 5D III
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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
Home Automation Systems as a Graph
Using nodes and links to represent a home and all the devices in it
Showing home status with just a single RGB LED
Multicolored LEDs can convey a lot of information in a small space
A wireless sensor network using Moteino boards
The diminutive Arduino boards include a powerful transmitter/receiver
JSON Patch - a C# implementation
A Quantified House - My Talk to the Seattle Quantified Self Meetup
My talk to the Seattle Quantified Self meetup
Integrating an Android phone into my home automation system
Some new features for my home automation using an Android phone
Before there was the web there was BeebTel
Just thought I should mention that I built a web-like system before the web existed
My first programme [sic]
At the risk of looking seriously old, here's something found on a paper tape
Timelapse video using the GoPro HD Hero
Web site crawler and link checker (free)
The Hoh Rainforest - Olympic National Park
A trip to the Hoh rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, WA
Elliott 803 - An Early Computer
Looking forward to the new year and our new datacenter
Historical note about moving my servers into a datacenter
It's all about disk speed
Why disk speed is the most critical aspect for most modern PCs and servers
Comcast woes and a new monitoring utility
Monitoring a cable modem using its HTML management interface
Core duo desktop machine runs cool
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.