I stumbled upon this stack when reading a trick in James Swain’s book 21st Century Card Magic. The trick was “Just Lucky Eight Card Stack.” Swain mentioned the stack came from Alex Elmsley. Elmsley decsribes the stack in the book Collected Works of Alex Elmsley, Vol 1, in a trick titled “Just Lucky.”
Continue reading “Just Lucky Riffle Stack”Wordle bookmarklet
Do you have trouble remembering words when playing Wordle. I wrote a bookmarklet that examines your guesses and displays a list of words that potentially match for your next guess.
The bookmarklet is at the end of this post. If you don’t know what a bookmarklet is you can use the link above to learn about them.
Continue reading “Wordle bookmarklet”Deleting Devices in Home Assistant
As of the time of this posting there is not an easy way that I have found to delete devices from Home Assistant. Checking on-line it seems like the only way is to edit a core.device_registry file in a hidden folder. Yuck.
Well, OK, if I have to do that I want to make it as simple as possible. So here are the steps that I use:
Continue reading “Deleting Devices in Home Assistant”Artificial Intelligence
Just for fun I asked ChatGPT to write an essay explaining ChatGPT. This is what it produced.
Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence”Condon, Oregon. Photos taken at the White Elephant Ranch.
Barred Owl at Tualitin Hills Nature Park, Beaverton, Oregon
Barred Owl
Moving Home Assistant from a virtual machine to dedicated hardware
I have been running home assistant on a generic Linux virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox system for several years. It has worked pretty well for me, but I recently decided to purchase a mini pc and move home assistant to it.
In part what prompted this was finding a low cost mini PC that looked pretty good. $139.00 for an OUVISLITE Ιntel Celeron J4125 (Up to 2.7GHz), with 8GB DDR4 128GB M.2 SSD Mini Computer, 4K HDMI, Triple Display, Dual WiFi, BT4.2, and HTPC. For that price I figured “what the hell, let’s give it a try”.
Continue reading “Moving Home Assistant from a virtual machine to dedicated hardware”Restoring Home Assistant from Google Drive backup
Normally you restore home assistant to a previous backup using the backups stored locally that are listed under Settings -> System -> Backups. Just click on the backup you want to restore and a window pops up. Simple.
But if you want to restore to a version saved to Google drive you first have to copy the backup file from Google Drive to your local PC and then upload it to Home Assistant. Then the feature to upload a backup file is hidden under the “three dot” menu at the upper right of the backup page.
Open the menu, select “Upload backup”, and find the backup file you copied from Google Drive.
Using Aqara Vibrarion Sensor as Garage Door sensor
I was looking for a tilt sensor to tell me if my garage door was open or closed. The sensor had to work with Home Assistant and the only one I could find that looked simple and cheap was the Aqara Vibration sensor that had a tilt/orientation feature.
Unfortunately the feature was not one of the attributes that Home Assistant showed with the device which sent me down the rabbit hole of googling. Eventually I got it figured out and this article is to share my experiences.
Continue reading “Using Aqara Vibrarion Sensor as Garage Door sensor”Multiple Player Faro Game
This is an update to the Faro Game that I wrote. It allows for up to eight players to play the game. The basic gameplay is similar to the single-player mode with the following exceptions/additions. The instructions for the single-player game are here.
Continue reading “Multiple Player Faro Game”