Last year, I setup a Christmas lights show at my house. I started with some basic light sequences just to learn. I wrote a post on the basics. This year, I upped the ante and added more lights and starting making sequences linked to music.

I have one light controller running Falcon Controller/FPP, a Kulp K8-B controller. How do I get sound out? I looked at options for getting sound out to a speaker. For my first pass, I decided to push it to a Sonos Move speaker since I had one.

This is a continuation of my previous post where I talked about the challenges of using serverless/Function as a Service (FaaS) compute systems for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs. It sat in my drafts folder for a long time, so I just decided to publish it as is.

I used to work at AWS, and predictably we used a lot of AWS cloud services. In many cases, when an engineer looks for a service platform, they’ll often go directly to AWS Lambda because “it’s Serverless” with the justification that it’s simple and alternatives are too complex and not worth considering.

Previously, if you wanted to subscribe to changes from this blog, you’d have to subscribe to the RSS feed, but as of today you can also subscribe to it in your preferred Fediverse client, like Mastodon. Note this is considered Beta quality. If you have any issues, let me know.

What is the Fediverse? It’s a protocol for federated (meaning many independently operated) social networks, kind of like email. Under the hood, it uses a protocol called ActivityPub to define the interactions between different servers.

There’s a number of big implementations of this, like Mastodon, that I could have used. However, I wanted to see if it was possible to integrate directly into my static website generator, Hugo and generate all the content directly out of the posts I already write without having to maintain another program and expose another domain name for people to remember (e.g. blog@mastodon.technowizardry.net.)

This post walks through the work I did to make this work.

I’ve been playing with Nix and NixOS a lot more lately. I installed NixOS on one of my servers, I installed the Nix CLI on my laptop, I tried to use Nix to build a Docker image, I use Nix flakes.

This post was written from the perspective of a person new to Nix, but experienced with other computer languages. Thus, it’s probable that I might be doing something wrong or maybe complaining about something that’s obvious to you. However, these are issues that others may face.

It was also written over several months as I gathered issues, so even looking back, I see mistakes.

For several years, I had 2x Unifi U6 Lite Access Points and they worked great. I had a special Wi-Fi network for my phones and laptops with a number of settings enabled but then I upgrade to the U7 Lite and immediately started having issues where my phone would disconnect. I got frustrated enough to break out my handy tool box to figure what was going wrong.