Unisite Begins

So much for my pledge back in 2021 that I would post more often, ’ey? Ah well. I’ll post when I can!

Anyhow, welcome to my softly-relaunched website, now available at https://robert.ludwick.us. I have merged websites into one - my previous “Linktree”-like site, and my old GitHub Pages site. They both now live here, merged together into what ought to be just one place to access information about me.

It’s Been Awhile

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how some folks do a great job at keeping in touch with others, while most everybody else just simply don’t. I’m in the latter camp. I’ve known for pretty much my entire adult life that I’m piss-poor at keeping in touch with others. I’m not sure how many friendships I’ve had wither on the vine where all they needed was a little bit more of my TLC. It’s not that I don’t want to keep in touch with folks… It’s that I’m busy! I have a lot going on. Heck, it’s not that I don’t care about your anniversary or birthday, I’m just shitty at remembering when it is!

First, We Start At The End

This morning I had the distinct displeasure of taking my 14yr cat, Samantha, to the vet for a “quality of life” discussion. At 10:22am PT, she breathed her last breath; she reached the finish line of a lifelong marathon. She was such a good, sweet cat.

Sam had a pretty healthy life for 13 years. The only concern we ever had for her was her allergy to fish (seriously, that’s a crap allergy for a cat to have, given its ubiquitous use in cat food, etc). Then about a year ago, she had a one-off seizure. She didn’t lose any control of her bodily functions, and at the time we were pretty concerned about it. She never had another one, but I should have realized then that we were starting a countdown clock for her.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Home Programming

With the exception of the AWS DDNS client I had previously worked on, I didn’t have any substantial custom-written software for my home technology. That broke in a big way starting in the second half of 2020. I built a custom script to clear out what I termed to be “phantom” clients from my UniFi Controller. You can read a bit more about that project at the link.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Hello, Home Assistant

In early 2018 I intentionally acquired another Raspberry Pi, despite the fact that I had a Raspberry Pi 2B laying around which I wasn’t using. I got a Raspberry Pi 3B because I wanted something with more horsepower than the 2B to run Home Assistant. I had a few reasons to give Home Assistant (HA) a try:

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Smart Home Beginnings

My initial investment into smart home technology began in the middle of 2014 when my fiancee and I moved in together (henceforth, there’ll be a lot more “we” and “us” in this journey than “I” and “me”). I bought a 2nd Generation Nest Thermostat. I had just moved into a new apartment and management didn’t have a problem with my replacing the thermostat, so long as I swapped back to the original unit upon move-out (which turned out to be just a little over 2 years later). The automatic away functionality of the thermostat was nice, and it’s “learning” features worked relatively well for my use case.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read Part 1!

Downsizing & Reboot

In early 2011 my life changed drastically. I moved from one metropolitan area to another and left behind a substantial amount of belongings and technology… including my cat (never fear, she’s back with me today, and is still the sweetest cat you’d ever meet - that’s not hyperbole). I rented a single bedroom from a homeowner. The only networked devices I took with me were the following:

Prologue

My home network and infrastructure (and by extension, my home lab) has had quite an evolution from whenever my first WiFi network was installed. I don’t quite remember the details all the way back that far, but when I first left my father’s home would be when I setup my first WiFi home network. It was a 1-bedroom apartment, and I was entering my final semester of undergraduate college study.

Have you ever had a relatively calm moment a short time before you intend to head to bed and everything just seems… right? Like things are in balance and you could just sit there in contemplative thought before you turn in to bed and get some much-deserved shut-eye? Well, I have. This is a concept I’ve been trying to define to myself for months now, and I think I finally have a good description of what it feels like. Most importantly, I have a portmanteau term that my wife helped come up with to apply to the feeling. The term is equitide.

I’ve been working lately on chronicling my home network’s journey from its nascent beginnings as nothing more than a WiFi router, cable modem, laptops, and smartphones. As I’ve been working on the more recent timeline of all of our smart home network appliances, I stopped to think about how much time and energy I’ve spent in administering them. Cumulatively, it’s a lot. As recently as last week I had to work on our home alarm’s central hub not reconnecting to the network properly after our ISP had some intermittent outages (rebooting the hub did the trick, by the way).