E-Mail

I mainly use Gmail because it has great SPAM filtering and makes my mail available on all my devices. I have been a heavy user of the nmh mail system for decades and a developer on the mh-e front-end for nmh in Emacs. For large volumes of mail (i.e. at work), MH-E was much more efficient.

At home I use postfix configured to send e-mail. For years I used sendmail and wrote custom configurations but I find postfix easier to configure.

Unix/BSD/Linux

My first exposure to Unix was a BSD port on a Gould PowerNode 9000 while at Clarkson University. Back then I was a mainframe guy (VM/CMS) and implementing a terminal program on MS-DOS. Then I installed Mt Xinu on a microVax to build an Internet gateway. Part of the bring-up was booting into single user mode and adding support for the latest disk drives.

When I moved to the Cornell Theory Center I moved headlong into the Unix world, using SunOS (BSD at first and then System V based) and eventually became the owner of the infamous devvax.tn.cornell.edu (a DEC VAX 11/750 running BSD 4.2 and eventually running BSD/OS on an i486). That was back when you built your own copy of gcc, compiling it three times just to be sure it worked. By then my life was totally on Unix/BSD.

I joined BSDi in 1995 to work as a core engineering on BSD/OS. BSD/OS was a commercial derivative of the BSD/386 port. I had a very enjoyable five years at BSDi working on many different facets of the OS. In 2001 Wind River acquired the rights to BSD/OS and hired most of the engineers. BSD/OS lived on for a few years at Wind River as the Platform for Server Appliances.

After BSD/OS Wind River started Wind River Linux, an embedded Linux distribution to complement their VxWorks real-time offering. Eventually I converted all my BSD/OS systems to Linux, first Fedora and then Ubuntu. At one point I had half a dozen systems running Ubuntu, at the time of this writing it's only three: A Ubuntu desktop (which is long due for retirement), a server (Plex, Nextcloud, Gogs, backups, DNS, DHCP), a low power server (running UniFi Controller, M/Monit, DNS, DHCP).

My primary UI these dates is macOS. I have both a personal MacBook Pro 15" and one from work.

Home Automation

I started out my home automation adventures with X-10. The biggest problem was that I wanted to control my house with Linux and I had trouble finding good options. For a while I played with MisterHouse but eventually settled on Insteon with a Universal Devices ISY controller, currently an ISY994i. The ISY devices know a lot about Insteon devices and simplify much of the configuration and setup. Control is local (i.e. not via the cloud) but they are continually improving and adding additional functionality.

Most all lights in my house are on the Insteon network. Most of my control functions are basic, turning off lights on timers, using motion detection for lights in specific rooms, programming one buttons for sequences such as bed time.

I've recently added Z-Wave thermostats to most of the rooms (there is one room that will be hard to wire that I have not gotten to yet). I do some day-night temperature control with those and would like to do some occupancy detection to set the heat.

I wrote a use a Perl interface to the Universal Devices ISY series of devices, Device::ISY. I chose Perl because there were not any easily installed SOAP libraries available on Ubuntu when I started. My assignment of the Device::ISY identifier took quite a while and I got distracted from the project. I need to move it over to Github where other folks can contribute. I personally use it all the time.

I would really love to have some good occupancy detection, maybe with BTLE (via my BTLE fitness tracker).

I currently have a Home Assistant installation running in a Docker container on my server. This is not an idea way to install Home Assistant and I am going to move it to a Raspberry Pi (w/external SATA SSD) soon.

I got very frustrated with the HA Z-Wave installation because every time Home Assitant was restarted the Z-Wave controller function was restarted. So I bought an external Z-Wave controller, the Vera Plus. The downside of this is that the Home Assistant integration is broken with respect to thermostats that have different heating and cooling setpoints. When I migrate my openzwave installation to a Raspberry Pi I'll start using the beta version of openzwave which runs as a separate process and communicates with Home Assistant via MQTT.

IP Telephony

I've long been interested in telephony at one point wanting to buy a Panasonic Hybrid PBX, but was not willing to spend so much money. Now they are relegated to history.

Then IP Telephony happened and I learned about Asterisk. I've went through several iterations of ATA adapters and service providers. I finally settled on an Obihai Obi202 with Google Voice. This is currently not functioning as my Asterisk installation went stale. I plan to install FreePBX on a Raspberry Pi soon.

In the meantime, I just use Google Voice on whatever device is near me.

PiAware

FlightAware hosts a community network of ADS-B receivers that track the location of aircraft around the world. One option for installing these is to use a Raspberry Pi based system called PiAware which uses a Raspberry Pi and USB Dongle with an external antenna to receive the aircraft location information and upload it to the cloud.

To facilitate a good location for the antenna, I installed a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in a weather-tight box on the outside of my house. Power and networking are via a Power-Over-Ethernet connection. This installation uses a LovePi PoE HAT and a Flight Feeder Pro USB stick. Pictures of the installation are available in a Flickr album.