Crescent City, California.

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Stout Grove, Redwood National and State Parks, California.

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The Falls on Fireplace Creek below Fireplace Bluffs, Yosemite National Park.

I've grown tired of AI/GPT news, but I apparently don't have the self control to just stop visiting Hacker News. So, instead, I installed Sprinkles, which will inject custom JS/CSS into any webpage you want (just like the ol' greasemonkey).

I added this custom script:

// news.ycombinator.com.js
const dimTopics = ['gpt', ' ai ', 'openai', 'copilot'];

for (const el of document.querySelectorAll('.titleline')){
  for (const t of dimTopics){
    if (el.textContent.toLowerCase().includes(t)){
      let titleRow = el.closest('tr');
      let pointsRow = titleRow.nextElementSibling;

      titleRow.remove();
      pointsRow.remove();      
    }
  }
}

et voilà, a more pleasant HN experience.

I expect to add more topics to my list over time.

After much effort (and help from the forums), I was able to get a config working for my backyard weather station.

My station is custom built hardware, and returns a very simple JSON object with its current state when queried.

The json it returns looks like this: {"timestamp":"2022-03-12 09:35:36 -0700", "temperature_c":15.8720368908, "temperature_f":60.56966640344, "humidity":27.009330285, "pressure":965.103717974, "dewpoint_c":-3.0690760974329714, "dewpoint_f":26.47566302462065}

And this is the Home Assistant configuration I needed to use to get the data into HASS:

rest:
  - resource: http://weather.local
    scan_interval: 60
    sensor:
      - name: Weather Station - Temperature
        value_template: '{{ value_json.temperature_f | round(1) }}'
        unit_of_measurement: '°F'
        device_class: temperature
        state_class: measurement
      - name: Weather Station - Humidity
        value_template: '{{ value_json.humidity | round(1) }}'
        unit_of_measurement: '%'
        device_class: humidity
        state_class: measurement
      - name: Weather Station - Pressure
        value_template: '{{ value_json.pressure | round(1) }}'
        unit_of_measurement: 'mbar'
        device_class: atmospheric_pressure
        state_class: measurement
      - name: Weather Station - Dewpoint
        value_template: '{{ value_json.dewpoint_f | round(1) }}'
        unit_of_measurement: '°F'
        device_class: temperature
        state_class: measurement

Home Assistant is very powerful, but goodness is the learning curve steep. Documentation exists, but much of it is not helpful enough. I should probably contribute back some additional examples, at the least.

(Interesting side note: I asked ChatGPT to help me put together a configuration for this setup. It was able to do so, but the result was inefficient and used an older style of REST sensor setup. Human help in the forums led me to this solution.)

I had to play around with the Home Assistant API to figure out how to set the brighness of a dimmable lamp. This is what ended up working.

My lamp was setup with brightness as a Number.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer your_token_goes_here" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"entity_id": "number.my_lamp", "value": 100}' http://homeassistant.local:8123/api/services/number/set_value

It turns out that if you set an environment variable named AWSPROFILE, _all AWS SDKs (including the CLI) will respect that value when looking for credentials for the current command.

Thanks to my brother, Ben, for pointing this out to me. It cleaned up a ton of boilerplate in some Ruby code I've been writing.