I haven't written anything up about Google stuff in a while, and since this topic came up a few times in as many weeks (including from conversations at BrainStorm K20) I figured it's time to share the solution I've used several times.
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Behind the scenes of Matt Zaske Online is Matt Zaske: automation evangelist, technology grief counselor, developer, systems admin, freelancer, father, moustache aficionado, and jack of all trades.
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Recent Tech-related Blog Posts:
If you've fiddled enough in Home Assistant over time, you might have encountered the situation in which it is useful to trigger off of, or simply display, a calculated value. There are a few different ways this can be accomplished but this post focuses on creating a specific sensor to do both: be used as a trigger value for automation, and also displayed neatly in a dashboard.
This isn't much of a "real" post, and admittedly I needed a filler for this week, but it's been on my list to write about here for a while: Last summer I shut down my three Twitter bots when the Twitter API moved to a ridiculous new access rate structure.
A script snippet I use all the time (and which gets a lot of search traffic) is something I wrote in 2020 about exporting AD computers to CSV with Powershell.
This fall, right after the time change, I found myself often working intensely enough to suddenly notice "it was dark outside" in the late afternoon. Good for productivity, I suppose; not so much otherwise? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I finally gave Advent of Code a shot for 2023! In years past I'd think about/stumble across/remember it a week or two in and automatically 'nope' out of starting.
I've been using OctoPrint to handle nearly all of my 3D printing operations since I moved to it a little over a year ago. It's an absolutely wonderful platform and I can't recommend it enough.
I decided to post a quick follow-up to the original fix I'd implemented about ten months ago.
The $1M question was...
Man, it's embarrassing to see that I haven't published anything really technical (beyond my MMS Miami Beach recap) since the end of July...and before that anything on a regular schedule since April!