Posts
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Why Smart Thermostats Still Struggle — and How Room-Level Sensing Finally Fixed My Home
Most residential forced-air HVAC systems struggle with uneven heating and cooling — not because of bad equipment, but because they lack the sensing and control needed to adapt to real-world conditions inside a home.
After years of dealing with hot and cold rooms in a home with two-zone forced-air HVAC system, I built a custom room-sensing thermostat controller to address the root causes with a budget-friendly cost structure. After ten months of daily use, the home has been noticeably more comfortable, with only a modest increase in energy usage.
This post explains why most thermostat designs fall short and what worked better in practice.
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Home Assistant: Lessons Learned
My first 3 months of using Home Assistant (HA) on a Raspberry Pi 5 were unreliable: frequent database corruption, failed boots and data loss. After researching and addressing the root causes, Home Assistant has now been stable and running smoothly for 6+ months.
Below are my experience-based tips that may help you build a stable Home Assistant platform.
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Using CDN to improve file uploads
For one of my client projects, I explored different ways to increase upload speeds for large files uploaded from a desktop computer to AWS S3. The desktop computer was located in a different country, halfway around the world, with a throttled/restrictive outbound internet connection to the S3 storage located in the US region. One approach is doing parallel uploads but the focus was on how to get a faster connection.
I discovered 3 ways to architect file uploads to AWS S3:
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Writing a Git Commit Message
This is a summary of Chris Beams’ post on “How to Write a Git Commit Message” for the purpose of being my quick reference. (As Chris mentions: “This has all been said before” - see his references.)
Guidelines
- Separate subject from body with a blank line
- Limit the subject line to 50 characters, with hard limit at 72
- Capitalize the subject line
- Do not end the subject line with a period
- Use the imperative mood in the subject line
- Wrap the body at 72 characters
- Use the body to explain what and why vs. how
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ActiveRecord vs Sequel Performance
I ran some benchmarking tests to evaluate the performance difference, if any, between ActiveRecord and Sequel ORM’s - two common ORM’s in the Ruby world. I measured two sets of benchmarks: speed, and memory consumed. In addition, each set was measured against two different databases: SQLite3, and PostgreSQL. The results are summarized below.
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Cleaning Xcode files
This is a summary from the following articles on recovering disk space from Xcode:
- Xcode users can free up space on your Mac by Ajith Nayak
- How To Recover Disk Space From Xcode by Sascha Holesch
1. Derived Data
Location:
Read more~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/
Purpose: Contains data about the projects which includes index, build output, debug/release built targets, and logs. Data can be recreated. -
Hello Universe!
puts "Hello Universe!"Stay tuned… 😃
Message posted 8 years and 3 months ago