Cup of Tau

Having had some success using AI to develop software, firmware and as a delegated sysadmin, I was curious to see what it could do with hardware. My weapon-of-choice for this is OpenAI’s Codex CLI but I also use other models, including Anthropic’s Claude models, to do similar things at work.

What are navigation marks?

As you (probably) know by now, I like boats. Seas and rivers use various navigation marks to help keep sailors safe and pointing in the right direction, and their shapes and lights are standardized by an international body called IALA.

I found a couple of old POTS phones in a cupboard and thought it would be fun for my kids to play with them. The house no longer has a POTS service, so I ordered a Grandstream HT802 adaptor and fell into the PBX rabbit hole. I now have a hybrid POTS/VoIP internal telephone system running from a FreePBX server.

My kids now have Cisco 7942 VoIP phones on their desks. I remember these as swanky corporate wealth signifiers from 20 years ago, proudly displayed on the desks of people sitting on Herman Miller Aeron chairs. Now I bulk-buy them for $10 apiece on eBay.

AI coding tools have been fantastically useful for working through my long backlog of vaguely planned projects that I never found the time or energy to finish. This post tells the story of how I used them to build a project that had previously felt insurmountable simply because I never had enough time.

I built a self-contained, solar-powered tide gauge that reports water level, water temperature, and battery status to my Home Assistant server once a minute. It does this over a LoRa connection to The Things Network (TTN) base station in my loft.

Lots of news these days about the parlous state of the global economy, so I've done my bit to keep it going by buying some unnecessary c**p on Amazon. Specifically, I've got some of these:

That is a Meross MSS510 "smart" light switch, which I've integrated with my Apple Homekit ecosystem so I can shout at Siri to turn the lights on and off in my kitchen (the "A7" label refers to the breaker number in my distribution board - yeah yeah, I know).

My wife got an unexpected call on her mobile:

I've been waiting for one of these "tech support scams" for ages but, needless to say they never call when you're ready. This one is particularly amusing because we have Virgin cable, which is completely independent of the BT local loop. Trying to keep a straight face, I strung him along while I fired up a Windows virtual machine and started my recording. This is what happened.

I run my own mail server, for various reasons outside the scope of this article.

Is it "secure"?

The standard (and hated) answer an Infosec professional will give to most questions is:

"It depends"

Most Infosec people

Here's a trivial table to explain why:

I saw a mouse!

Where?

There... on the stair!

Where on the stair?

Right there!

The Amsterdam-themed conversation between me and my wife the other night.

One of the problems with living in a cheaply-converted Victorian flat is the vast number of gaps and holes in the fabric of the building. These ingress points are especially attractive to our rodent friends as the nights start to draw in.

We're 15 weeks into house-arrest! I'm lucky to have a job that I can (mostly) do from home. A large part of this job involves shouting at people on video conferences and, since I tend to pace around when I get animated, I use a wireless Bluetooth headset for my calls. It beats making banana loaf.

I've tried a few types: the "lorry driver" in-ear model, the "call-centre" with boom microphone, all the way up to the full over-ear noise-cancelling jobs. This isn't a review of headsets, although it's worth mentioning that the Bose noise cancelling headphones work so well that I feel like I've gone deaf and end up shouting even louder. My wife, working from home 3m away from me, doesn't like that very much.

I like messing about in (and with) boats. Boats are full of gadgets.

Proper sailors know how to read the wind and tide. They chart their course across oceans using nothing but Dead Reckoning between fixes from stellar and solar observations.

Most people who charter boats on holiday are not proper sailors.

The British climate. You're thinking rain, right?

Thanks to the Gulf Stream, it's less-obvious just how ridiculously far north we are.  London, at 51°30′N, is the same latitude as the southern part of Hudson Bay (James Bay). That's 2° above Vancouver, 7° above Montreal and a full 12° north of New York City. Edinburgh shares the 55th parallel with Moscow.

Our high latitude means we have a lot of seasonal variation in our daylight hours. Around summer solstice the sun rises at 04:40. In January the lazy git doesn't get out of bed until after 08:00.

Just in case you thought this was becoming yet another "100 uses for a Raspberry Pi" blog, here's something more prosaic from the "hold my beer and watch this" school of engineering.

I live in a flat which was refurbished some time ago by a budget-conscious flipper. One of his/her "design" decisions was moving the kitchen to the middle of the flat. To accomplish this, (s)he extended the sink drain with 7m of horizontal 40mm PVC pipe. As you'd imagine, this doesn't work very well. I buy a lot of drain unblocker.

Some high-end cars come with GPS trackers that report their position in case of theft (until the thieves put your car inside a refrigerated truck or metal shipping container on its way to its new "owner" abroad). These usually come with a monthly subscription of around £/$/€25, which seems like rather a lot when a mobile phone contract is often much less. What about making your own version that will last a lifetime, for less than the cost of four months' subscription on a commercial version? In fact, it can do a lot more than that too!

Summer has officially arrived in London: Force 8 winds and a month's worth of rain in a weekend. In the finest British traditions of boundless meteorological optimism, I need (FSVO "need") to build a computer-based system to make those rare sunny moments even better. In Spring 2017 I built one named Apollo.

We are fortunate to have access to a small rooftop with a couple of chairs, our boiler and our water tank. The boiler cupboard has a 230V supply. The roof is lead-lined.