This year, I was fortunate enough to attend The Things Conference in Amsterdam – a conference dedicated to the development and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN technology. The conference follows a two-day, single-track format of keynotes, workshops, podcast recordings and round table discussions. The conference focuses on| James Ridgway
Using precise methods for counting the frequency of events in a data stream becomes infeasible with large volumes. Precise counting methods at scale often require a significant amount of memory to maintain exact counts over a large data set. In contrast, Count-Min Sketch (CMS) offers a probabilistic solution that provides| James Ridgway
Throughout the house, nearly every single light is controlled by a Shelly. Last year, we installed a UniFi G4 Video Doorbell, and whilst we were having this fitted, it made sense to replace some of the outside light fittings and install some Shelly Duo GU10 RGBW bulbs. Out of the| James Ridgway
Querying large datasets can often be challenging, especially when performance is a key concern. Achieving performance at scale often comes with an element of trade-off in how a system is designed to achieve the desired functionality and performance at scale. A bloom filter is one example of a probabilistic data| James Ridgway
I have a handful of helpers in my Home Assistant setup that track the basic state of a few things. For example, we have a simple "guest mode" boolean that will turn on or off certain automatons when we have guests, and for my bin reminder automation, I use a| James Ridgway
When I first got my UniFi G4 Doorbell, I originally set up Home Assistant to announce, "There is someone at the door," using Amazon Alexa. More recently, I have transitioned to playing a chime sound on Alexa when someone rings the doorbell. In this blog post, I outline how Home| James Ridgway
Putting in place a successful monitoring solution goes far beyond just picking an appropriate tool (such as Icinga, Nagios, Zabbix, etc). The success and effectiveness of monitoring systems rely on how the tools are used and the culture and behaviour of the team that is responsible for monitoring a given| James Ridgway
