OffSetLab

Last year was... peculiar. I only had two posts in 2024, but I can explain. Some big things happened.

1. I got a job,
2. we upsized and had to invest time, money and energy into renovating the new place,
3. I quit that job from the first point.

The year started with lazying about on the New Year's. I got the passport that I applied for in December and it arrived in January. I guess I'm a Paddy now.

Vesna had a surprise party for her birthday and all of our friends gathered to celebrate it. It was a blast, but we hope it is out of the way now. One thing off of the checklist. Sneaking around is not fun.

Ever since October 2023, we were engaged into bidding for a bigger place. Cats really showed us that the apartment we were in was too small. It was a long procedure to secure the mortgage since I was unemployed, the cash flow was weaker and the various explanations of funds were required. Being formal here, I don't understand their money laundering department. If they ask for previous six months of statements, OK, but they are really pushing it when they go back several years wanting to know where the money came from. We never cheated or hacked the system. Not funding any terrorist organizations, but oftentimes I felt like we were being treated like one. The money history is the salary from working an honest job. Sure, they will add up all the balances and reach the same conclusion, but the time they take to resolve the thing is frustrating to say the least. We were giving our data within the same day, and their response would be two weeks later. Crazy stuff. Either ask for everything in the beginning and be done with it, or don't make up rules as you go.

We were deciding what to get for the new apartment, but it was all in the air since we didn't get the keys until 29th of February. Then it was proper planning and measuring.

The new apartment is in the same building, but it's over 50% bigger. It was seemingly very well maintained because it was an owner occupied property, but we hit severe roadblocks in refurbishing it.

Snow fell the beginning of March and we took the cats outside to see the snow for the first time. They were confused, but curious which is fine. It was lovely to see them going around the environment they are equipped to be in, considering their long fur.

As for the job hunt, I got either rejections or folks ignoring the application. I had a couple of interviews, but we didn't click. Looking for a job is bad. Due to the massive layoffs in the IT industry, I was often competing with around three hundred candidates. With the generative AI thrown in the mix, the productivity increases, which means less people are needed to work. The society didn't really keep up with the reduced need for the workforce, generative AI displacing jobs. I can tell for sure that you can throw things at the generative AI prompt, but you need to know if the answers are OK. I'm trying Prompt Driven Development and I have to correct it almost every time. It is an intense autocomplete, after all, but a very, very good one. I can program quicker.

I landed a job within spacetech industry before we got the keys, in February as well, and it seemed like a great thing.

It really helped that I was interested in the area. The projects I did before like Solar Projector (which was parsing AES and DSCOVR data, and I retired it when I moved away from Digital Ocean to the self-hosted solution) or unreleased GIS projects (one for a map of the local graveyard in Croatia, which was a vanilla PostGIS experiment, and the other for the map of agricultural fields made with Sentinel-2) helped here. I knew what I was talking about and had a pretty good hunch of what they would work on.

I would be doing what I liked and in an area that was great. It was going great for a while, not as streamlined as the bioinformatics job before it, but interesting nevertheless and ripe with opportunities to explore that specific area of industry. I was even writing a post detailing how great this development is, but, alas, it didn't last because by late September, it started to go sour and my best intentions of publishing something good got thrown out of the window.

On the first company get-together, it was announced to start the RTO process the following week which made no sense since everyone was remote from a different country. I was a bit sad because except me, nobody pushed back. It started to smell back then and there. Within a few weeks, micromanagement kicked in. Time was wasted several hours a week on unnecessary meetings. The estimates were reasonable, but the expectations were not. We're all seniors and know what we're talking about and how some tasks take time to complete and how some problems are not as easy, or impossible to solve. Something that would take months was expected in days.

It culminated in a communication ban between team members and we were expected to answer directly to the upper management. I said I couldn't work like that. I think others did, too. The communication ban was imposed on planning, checking up, brainstorming, code reviews... You name it. It was particularly hard in a system where each layer depends on another. How is the front-end supposed to implement design that it can't talk about or get the data from the back-end if they don't know how it will look like? I was talked over during that meeting and I tried to convince myself it would blow over the following weekend. Come Monday, I learnt that people started quitting and in the same day, the whole team, then me, too, quit our positions.

Like I said, it could not have been handled better since we tried to clear up the understanding for weeks, but it fell on deaf ears. I wish it didn't end up like that, but there I was. Unemployed again, thinking that this time it would be better. What I talked about earlier still stands. The job market is not yet healthy and while I had some promising interviews, I think the hiring process is utterly broken. After over a decade in the industry, I'd expect I wouldn't need to solve brain teasers like I'm in the university again, where I aced, BTW, but I'm getting tired.

Agency work, telco networks, healthtech, genetic sequencing, spacetech... but the industry is jumping on trends. It was blockchain for a while, but right now it's the generative AI which still creates the technological unemployment, but I should have the upper hand since my university was exactly about that. We'll see if I can catch up. I am already dabbling in the current state of affairs, fancy new libraries and ways of working.

So back to the apartment. We paid a hefty sum and, while the place looked like it was immediately available for moving in, things we couldn't have foreseen started to creep in and we had to renovate. Regarding the whole picture, we decided to remove the wardrobes and install a single built in one. The floors below the removed wardrobes were non-existent. The kitchen was also made up of various units and old appliances that were very worn out. It had to go. We refreshed the balconies, painstakingly removed the remaining old floors and had the resin floor installed in all the rooms. In the kitchen we fought a battle with the tile installer who did such a poor job (no dividers, no levelers) that we wasted time, money and energy. We had to do the tiling ourselves in the end, ripping out the badly installed new tiles in the process. We would not have done it if we hadn't gone online, to Reddit, and asked around if we were the only ones who thought the job was poorly done. I felt so bad about the whole thing, but it was supposed to be a place where we would live in for a while and we wanted it to look decent, if not great.

So the floors were done, the wardrobe got installed and then the walls and woodwork. We got all the walls repainted, fixed up since they're plasterboard and had some acoustic panels installed. In the process we realized how some walls were not perfectly aligned and were off the angles. This is something we can't get to grips with - how a relatively new build can be broken because of poor workmanship. One of the radiators was drooping and we had to have it reinstalled on new hinges where the plumbers broke the water pipe in the process and we ended up airing the place for days over the summer.

We opted for a kitchen (plus installation) from IKEA and I installed the lighting (WLED capable) under elements myself. I'll have to revisit this and write about the building blocks. It's reactive to the other parts of the smart home, mainly in the notification area. The plumbing in the kitchen was also a job that was so badly done that I don't know how qualified people can do such a terrible job. I keep repeating myself, but, sadly, it's how it is. The electricity was not ideal either. We even managed to get our mail stolen, the parcel contained the oven switch for the kitchen. It's no wonder I didn't write anything since this thing consumed so much energy and left us in such a sorry mental state (not to mention the physical exhaustion with cuts and bruises from hammering and hurt spine), but we pushed on.

Eventually we got the place from the keys on 29th of February to the condition where we could move in on October 16th which we did and left the small apartment in a state ready to be fixed up and rented out. Our troubles didn't end since our bathtub broke and we had to have the drain replaced and now there's a gaping hole on the side of it that I need to close up with a panel. We didn't have the will to continue more in 2024, especially with the prospect of having to do the other apartment as well. We went to Croatia to visit families and remind ourselves that Ireland was still a good choice.

What I learned in the process is that it's not a bad thing to do all of those things myself. It's not rocket science, but for someone who didn't know anything, it took time and money to figure things out. I can tile now if nothing. We can tile now. Vesna and I are doing all of these things ourselves and are not shying away from the physical labor even though we're both dealing with software. It's great to have a partner who you can rely on completely, both for physical labor and emotional support. I can't stress this enough and hope she is aware of my thoughts about this.

We live in the new place now with our two cat friends and, while we still have no curtains which is a crazy story with the badly done walls, the bathtub hole is there, the heating acting up somewhat, the shelving not done, the small bathroom is a warehouse, the place looks and feels like home and it can only get better. We plan to install a catio eventually, but that will be a project for another time.

Trips:

• Croatia, to visit families
• France (Tillé), for a small layover
• Hungary (Budapest, Pilisszántó), to visit a friend's birthplace and have some fun in the local waterpark
• Spain (Alicante, El Castell de Guadalest, Benidorm), for a much needed vacation
• UK, Scotland (Glasgow), for a WorldCon, an SF convention
• Croatia again, on my own since I had a dental emergency
• Poland (Poznan), my work trip, Vesna didn't join and I'm sad about it
• France (Tillé), for a long layover and coming back to Ireland to make it to a concert
• Croatia, to visit families
• Latvia (Riga), flight from Dublin for an exploratory visit
• Estonia (Tallinn), for some reason they are very discriminatory, but high tech in the capital
• Finland (Helsinki), meeting up with a friend who is a curator and her partner who were visiting from Croatia
• Croatia, again, winter holidays, had to leave Tenzin and Kida with friends

Domestic travel:

• Donadea forest park with friends
• Co. Galway, for a series of stag events like puzzle solving, obstacle course, whiskey tasting tour
• Greystones, beach visit
• Kilkenny, attending a wedding where I sewed the buttons for suspenders on my trousers and Vesna was a bridesmaid
• Limerick, for a concert
• Donadea forest park with the same pair of friends, redux
• Galway, to visit the cat that the same pair of friends were getting and to see the neighboring castle
• Sigginstown Castle in Co. Wexford, for playing D&D in a castle and make some fond memories of this

Shows:

• Star Wars orchestral concert
• Snow Patrol with support from Kingfishr and Pillow Queens
• Blink 182 (finally happened and was deadly)

Books:

• Permanent Record: A Memoir of a Reluctant Whistleblower, by Edward Snowden

Video games finished:

• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (churning through the DLC, though)

Video games played:

• Overwatch 2 (still)
• Dragon Age 4: Veilguard
• Life is Strange: True Colors
• Hollow Knight
• Subnautica (yes, again, and can't wait for the sequel)

Things we bought:

• a lot of things we needed when renovating
• kitchen appliances (washing machine, induction stove and oven by Bosch for smart home)
• two more cameras for covering our apartment blindspots by Reolink
• a crowbar for ripping out the old floor and wardrobes
• electric sander (before we got into the Einhell ecosystem)
• door stoppers
• Netatmo smart valves for the radiators
• shelves
• multi-tool for ripping out the floors (got into Einhell ecosystem with their battery)
• small foldable trolley that did wonders when moving
• some clothes for the wedding
• kettle, carpet, glasses
• window vacuum cleaner from Einhell
• cat grooming equipment
• tiling equipment including the electric tile cutter that we should really sell
• flooring and Nanoleaf hexagonal lights
• cabinets and wardrobes
• kitchen electricity elements (and the whole kitchen from IKEA)
• loads of cat toys and scratchers
• induction coffee pot
• endoscopic camera (for checking out behind the drywall)
• frother wand
• equipment for LED under the kitchen elements, pliers, wago...
• loads of tools for fixing things up ourselves like drill, jigsaw, vice
• Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ for Vesna's D&D IRL games
• medicine cabinet for the bathroom
• HexClad induction wok and pan protectors
• handheld vacuum cleaner
• PC parts (NZXT case and AIO, Asus Thor PSU)
• hangers, labels, kitchen shelves
• starlight projector
• glass hangers and platters for the drinks cabinet
• mushroom kit (Lion's mane that turned out working well)
• strainers
• some Sonos speakers
• kitchen utensils
• metal stickers and spice holders
• plates, containers, dispensers
• more chargers and cables
• mud race equipment
• some electronics for a small project I'll write about
• Hygge board game

Things we sold:

• a lot of things we didn't need when renovating
• small fridge
• washing machine, pretty much leftovers from the old occupier

Other important events:

• went axe throwing for Vesna's birthday, prepped her a nice surprise party
• ghost bus tour in Dublin (there are still places to see in our city)
• silversmithing course where our friends' group hammered into existence silver fidget rings
• Aurora Borealis crept up all the way from the cold north to us and we took some wonderful photos
• Stella cinemas luxury experience
• friends from Croatia visited and we're sorry it happened while the new place was not done yet, raw concrete floors and all
• another friend visit for a concert
• fixing the PC where it finally turned out that the CPU broke the PSU so it had to be replaced, but the Intel CPU is Intel's 13th gen that has a manufacturing defect and I've lost my faith in them. It works underclocked, but I'll switch to AMD when able
• went to a cocktail-making workshop for my birthday party, also got some ideas, cocktail making is slowly becoming a thing in my life, I like to make some for our friends
• didn't go to Turf warrior mud race but bought wetsuits for it, hopefully they will be used for other activities
• LEGO play, I'll write about it
• generative AI project on cocktail making that is slowly becoming a thing I'll open source
• blog update with some Webmention things, but need to improve a bit. So far nothing visible
• got into our building management board

And that's pretty much it. Eventful year, but let's not repeat it :D

The current Zemismart curtain roller started to act up and I was to do the whole reset with a pin and a button, but my manual was in a box in our storage so I had to retrieve it like Conan the Barbarian. I had to shuffle other boxes and stuff to get to the one I needed. This just made me realize that our physical storage space could use some more love. I thought it would be a great idea to put an NFC tag near the curtain to have a link to the scanned manual instead. Get rid of all the paper forms and have a digital storage of things would free up the space. I already use Syncthing for the photos for the PhotoPrism so I might as well do a self-hosted document storage system to manage general files, too. For that, I opted to use dufs. It's simple and it works. I mounted a folder from my external drive into the configuration of dufs, added the credentials and left it in the local network. After all, I don't need this service exposed to the whole world to see. I added the whole thing into my existing compose file on the Raspberry Pi. It is something like this:

dufs:
  image: sigoden/dufs
  ports:
    - 5000:5000
  volumes:
    - /path/to/host/folder:/data
  command: ["/data", "-A", "-a", "user:pass@/:rw"]

Of course, you'd need to adjust where necessary for your system. With static file serving in place, I scanned the manual and uploaded the resulting file to the dufs.

I did the same for the washer/dryer, but it was easier for it. I found three manuals online and uploaded them in a single folder. I could eventually write the folder URL to the tag instead. One piece of the puzzle was in place. Moving on to the NFC one.

When discussing my solution with friends, they asked a few questions about the NFC itself. I answered them as best as I could:

1. Do the NFC tags require batteries?

   No, they're just a chip and an antenna in a small form. When exposed to the RF field, they emit the data. They do not require batteries which is cool. The reading happens when the reader and the tag are in a close proximity of each other.

2. Could you do the same with QR code if you're scanning with your phone?

   Yes, you could embed the data and this is wonderful. WeChat and Revolut even function with payments reading the QR codes since you only need a camera. Almost all smartphones have a camera, and while majority of phones do have NFC, it's not as ubiquitous as the camera. When you create a tag in Home Assistant, you get a QR code, but can also write it to an NFC chip. I had the QR code for one automation already and I also use one currently for WiFi credential listing in the apartment as well, but in my experience, scanning QR codes requires more work from the user and more time is spent, whereas NFC scanning happens almost instantly.

3. You could call automations by just clicking a shortcut on your phone.

   Yes, I could, and I do for some of the things. Curtain control mostly. But then you have to set up phone shortcuts as well.

4. You can tell your smart speaker to execute an automation, right?

   I can, and I do. A smart speaker leaves a lot to be desired, though, at least the Nest Mini I have. It mishears the command or ignores it for some reason or says it did things, but it didn't... It even asked me to clean my room myself once instead of sending the vacuum cleaner there. Can you imagine?

5. What do your cats have to do with that technology?

   Nothing except having the same acronym. NFC = Near Field Communication, NFC = Norwegian Forest Cat

Last year I bought a box of NFC NTAG 215 tags and started using them in various circumstances. I gave some to friends as well so they can experiment if they wanted to. While reworking the dashboard for the Home Assistant instance, I made the tabs for each room of the apartment and in each room I opened a markdown card describing what NFC tags I had in each room (or in general) and what they were used for.

• on the keychain:

  holds the URL of the OffSetLab

• on the cork board:

  has 7 tags and acts as a dashboard for controlling the lights and sounds for the D&D session

• on the projector:

  toggles projector, speakers, PS4 on/off state and lowers the motorized projector screen (for some reason, HDMI CEC is not powering on all the devices so I have to trigger them each separately)

• on the washing machine (two tags):

  triggers a notification in 8:05 hours from the moment of scanning. This is the exact time the washing machine cotton 40 °C and cupboard dry takes to finish. I might have a smart washing machine one day so I would not be limited to the manual notification of that single program

  contains the link to the folder with manuals for the washer/dryer

• below the kitchen hanging cupboard:

  calls Roborock to clean up the kitchen. This is useful when the surfaces are cleaned up and crumbs thrown on the floor

• on the apartment door:

  WiFi connection information for the apartment. There's a QR code next to it as well. When guests arrive and ask for a WiFi access, this is how they get it

• on the hooded litterbox:

  turns off the notification annoyer to clean the litterboxes

• on the side of the mirror next to the bathtub:

  toggles a scene which dims the lightbulb, changes its colour to warm and turns on the fan

• on the blue box in the storage:

  sends a notification to the phone that scanned it with a list of items in the box (I should change this to a proper link to a list)

• on the window

  contains the link to the manual for the roller curtain motor

Vesna particularly loves the physical dashboard with NFC tags I made for our D&D sessions. They start playing ambiental music from Spotify playlists on the speakers and manipulate the lights as well as one that turns off everything that was running for the session. I started up the Inkscape, added one inch diameter circle, only border, no fill and placed the icon from Material Design Icons inside it. I printed it on the sticky paper and cut it out to be on the NFC tag. Then I put the tags onto the hexagonal cork board and gave it to Vesna to play with the dashboard since she's our resident dungeon mistress (not that kind, you perverts).

Setting up the NFC tags is quite easy:

1. Take an NFC tag and have it ready
2. Open Home Assistant app on your NFC enabled phone
3. In Home Assistant, open the hamburger menu, pick Tags, click Add Tag, name it and press create and write (you don't have to enter tag ID)
4. Press the robot head icon for the created tag, this creates the automation that triggers When a tag is scanned
5. Create the automation according to your needs

Alternatively to the Home Assistant app, you can use NFC Tools app, go to Write -> Add a record, pick a type of the record and follow the instructions. This is useful for having the tag with other data like links, WiFi credentials, automating phone behaviour with Tasker... in essence, things that are not exclusive to Home Assistant.

Automations in the house are either:

• togglers whose action is Conditionally execute an action and default to another action which is using a simple IF-THEN-ELSE construct to check for a certain device state (off or on) and execute a script. This enables me to activate things or deactivate them

• use the same thing as above, but check which device triggered it. IF part is: Test if template renders a value equal to true:

  {{ trigger.event.data.device_id == "my device app id taken from device's URL" }}
  

  THEN is Call a service: 'Notifications: Send a notification via mobile_app' (depending on the device, I have two actions for two devices here so it's going to two different mobile_app instances). No ELSE.

• directly Call a service (usually execute a script or send a command to a device) or Delay for, then Call a service (in the case of the washing machine tag)

Annoyer silencing is a bit complex, so I'll explain it as best as I can with an example for my litter box cleaning routine. It comprises of one helper and three automations to accomplish the entire workflow:

1. Under Settings, Devices and services, there is a Helpers tab. I use the toggle type which is esentially an input boolean. It can be either true or false. I called it "Litterbox Cleaned".

2. I have an automation that triggers every half an hour, three times. It's active in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. Annoying, right? I call it "Litter Boxes Notification". It checks if the "Litterbox Cleaned" is Off, and only then does actions that are:

   1. Call a service 'Notifications: Send a notification via mobile_app' with the message: "Clean the litter boxes." and data:

      actions:
        - action: SILENCE
          title: Silence
      

      This means that the notification on the phone will have a button that can be pressed and the specified action triggers.

   2. Text-to-speech (TTS) 'Say a TTS message with cloud' (I edit this one in YAML because I use a template to give some personality to the responses):

      service: tts.cloud_say
      metadata: {}
      data:
        cache: false
        entity_id: media_player.my_nest_speaker
        message: >-
          {{ ["Clean the litter boxes.", "Please clean the litter boxes.", "Clean the fucking litter boxes.", "Roses are red, violets are blue, clean the damn litter boxes, so I don't bother you.", "Did you clean the litter boxes?"] | random }}
      

3. Manual interventions are then another automation that I call "Tag Litterbox 1 is scanned" and it has two triggers:

   1. When a tag is scanned (the one I physically put on the litter box)

   2. When mobile_app_notification_action event is fired. Event data is action: SILENCE which means I pressed the silence button on the notification from the step 2.1.

      And two actions:

      1. Call a service 'Input boolean: Turn on' on Litterbox Cleaned

      2. Call a service 'Notifications: Send a notification via mobile_app' (I edit this one in YAML because I use a template to timestamp the silencing):

         service: notify.mobile_app_fp3
         data:
           message: Litterboxes cleaned at {{ now().strftime("%-I:%M %p (%d-%m-%y)") }}.
         

4. The last automation I call "Turn Off Litterbox Input" and it triggers on the time as well, five minutes after the last notification in the series. The automation from step 2 triggers on 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, and this one triggers on 11:05. It has the action Call a service 'Input boolean: Turn off' on Litterbox Cleaned. This makes the helper have a value of false and it's idempotent so there's no worry if it's already off. This action primes the annoyer for the next series of annoying that will start in the afternoon (again, automation from step 2).

I use Nabu Casa cloud connection for the convenience of accessing the instance outside my network, to integrate with voice assistants easily and to financially support Home Assistant development. I think this is a good thing. With it, I'm able to have tts.cloud_say, but you could also use tts.google_translate_say if you have a different setup.

This was a long overdue article (and it's long, too) so I hope it's useful for whomever is reading this, but it will be useful to me so I remember how I did stuff. Poking around the Home Assistant is not a scary experience and it can be very fun.

The year started like usual. Recap writing and checking out the New Year's resolutions. We quickly tried to get back into the routine that we sorely missed for a month, but as it turned out, 2023 was great in the first half, however, very bad in the second one. My writing halved due to the general lethargy since I got laid off and some other things got to occupy our life at the same time. Considering those, this year should see us wrap up some things we set in motion and propel us into new directions. Aside from being laid off, getting the cats and the citizenship are the most important events. Here's the recap:

Trips:

• Luxembourg (Luxembourg proper, a weekend getaway to see the city, we were pleasantly surprised because it was really beautiful)
• Croatia (Zagreb and Slavonija as usual, to see our families)
• Spain (Madrid layover and sleepover)
• Panama (Panama City and the Canal itself, monkey islands in the Canal)
• Mexico (Cancún, Tulum, Yucatán riviera, Chichén Itzá)
• USA (Florida, Orlando, Universal Studios amusement park - a jumping off point to the next set of countries below)
• US Virgin Islands (St. Thomas, basically this is a USA territory, not a standalone country)
• Antigua and Barbuda (St. John's)
• Sint Maarten (Philipsburg, this is a part of the Netherlands)
• Collectivity of Saint Martin (Marigot, this is a part of France, the previous one and this one are both on the same island: Saint Martin)
• Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (San Juan, another USA overseas territory and they're not sure how to resolve the political situation, I think there was a referendum on them wishing to become a new state)
• Dominican Republic (San Felipe de Puerto Plata)
• USA (Orlando, Florida, again, since it was a round trip across the Caribbean, but this time we saw the Kennedy Space Center)
• USA (New York for work)
• UK (London for a day trip)
• Spain (Málaga, a day long layover, Spain is really wonderful)
• Croatia (Slavonija and Zagreb to see families and friends)

Domestic travel:

• Great Sugar Loaf (again, climbing this 501m mountain)
• Portadown (pizza and pottery course)
• Killarney (citizenship ceremony)
• Leixlip (kayak course)
• Belfast (for a trip with friends)
• Kircubbin (family expansion)
• Celbridge (friends got a place there so we visit frequently)
• Enniskerry (a friend has a place there so we visited)
• Glendalough (again, with another set of family members)

Shows:

• No concerts, Blink 182 got postponed, but they released a new album
• Stand up comedy show with Reginald D. Hunter

Books:

• Walkaway - Cory Doctorow
• Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
• After Meat - Karthik Sekar
• Obligate Carnivore - Jed Gillen
• Manufacturing Consent - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Things we bought:

• LEGO sets (we were gifted Bonsai Tree and quickly complemented it with Flower Bouquet and Horizon Forbidden West: Tallneck)
• A charging gadget for USB devices (we're getting low on sockets in the apartment so having a charging hub was a life saver)
• More climbing equipment (shoes and harnesses)
• SteamDeck
• SteamDeck dock
• Insect net for the balcony
• Some fitness equipment for training the fingers for climbing
• Some cable organizing solutions and boxes
• FireAngel smoke alarm to replace the old broken one (also thinking about the automation of it)
• NFC tags for improving the automation at home (annoying notifications and NFC scans to silence them, calling vacuum to the kitchen, WiFi credentials, activating scenes, delaying notification for stupid devices like washing machine)
• Paper shredder (because we got sick and tired of figuring out how to anonymize the incoming mail for recycling)
• Netatmo weather station (that has since shown us that the air quality can get bad in the apartment)
• Bathroom cupboard
• Tons of pet related equipment including smart fountain and feeders by Petkit
• A set of Ikea KALLAX frames (to replace what we sold)
• Additional KALLAX inserts
• A small handheld vacuum cleaner
• Aqara FP2 presence sensor (for zone automation, but it's currently underutilized)
• Another dehumidifier model to complement the existing one in another room (they run for a couple of hours each day with smart outlets controlling them)
• Graphics card (the old one is giving up on us, and it was the last component to buy since the whole PC died last winter. That said, not sure the new one works as expected)
• Picture frames (we attended a fluorescent painting course)
• More cocktail equipment
• Fake elven ears for a Halloween costume :)
• Raspberry PI 5 (but it is not established yet)
• A bluetooth mouse for the SteamDeck
• A set of wireless headphones (because Kida keeps eating the wired ones)

Things we sold:

• Ikea MALM small chest
• Ikea MALM big chest
• Fit Bounce trampoline (we're sad this is gone, but we needed some space, considering)

Other important events:

• Sequenced our DNA
• Got laid off
• Became an Irish citizen, did the ceremony, got the cert, got the passport
• Had a massive amount of vaccines due to travel, then Covid vaccine again
• Saw a lot of places and touched a Moon rock
• Finished a kayaking course so we can kayak with confidence
• Threw away all the boxes of the devices whose warranty expired
• Expanded our small family to include Tenzin and Kida and bought a whole lot of cat stuff
• Did all the necessary things at the vet for Tenzin and Kida but we kinda need to get checked ourselves this year
• Automated cat drinking and feeding solutions
• Overhauled Home Assistant instance
• Went to a drink&paint course
• Finished Subnautica again
• Sold things we were not using
• Taught cats some tricks
• Assembled cat trees
• Sister and her family finally visited
• Changed wheels on my office chair
• Upped my cocktail game with a book on D&D cocktails gifted by a friend
• Joined IndieWeb community and slowly reworking the web with HTMX and webmentions
• Cats had to be spayed and neutered so it was a number of sleepless nights
• Halloween costume party
• Little birthday party in an old arcade machines pub
• Added Homer into the Raspberry to have a visible list of all our Docker containers
• Planted flowers around the neighborhood, waiting for Spring to see the results

Every time I try writing something I end up in a state resembling a writer's block. Days pass and when I sit down to write an article, I quickly realize I don't have anything to report. In actuality I have loads of things to report, but no point in writing about them since they're not complete yet. I'm either busy wrapping things up for weeks or resigned to waiting for things beyond my control to resolve. Another cold period approaches and it is not helping either.

Still, I need to write about something, else I'll slow down so much I am afraid I'll be going in reverse. While I won't write about the things that are not yet completed, I'll write about one thing that definitely is. Our small family is not two, but four now. Twins Kida and Tenzin have joined our little club and are taking away our sleep, our time, our sanity, but bringing in some joy, calm and are keeping us from obsessing over meaningless things.

Getting a household ready for cats is not a trivial task. To fit our overall smart-home project, we opted to immediately introduce some smart gadgets - the ones we could afford and fit into our small apartment. We now have two automated food dispensers (dry only), a smart water fountain (they're interested in drinking the running water) and a single cat flap door.

The flap door we needed for Kida as she's a fussy eater - slower than her brother, who started to steal her food, and she also prefers to have audience and encouragement while she does it (we've since learnt that she's what's referred to as "affection eater").

He has no such trouble. He's growing way faster than her and is over five kg now. A true gentle giant. At the time of this writing, they're currently just over seven months old. Time is flying, though.

Aside from providing food and water logistics, we've set up two litter boxes in the hallway, which we'd love to replace with an automatic one, but that's both expensive and impractically large at this point.

Vesna bought every toy from every top list of cat toys and then some, we've set up a number of nooks where they can curl into for a nap, as well as two cat trees that they can climb, perch from and observe us from a height. Most of the time they sleep on the windowsill or above and below our bed.

They also have very distinct personalities. Tenzin is quick to sneak a cuddle or two, or three, and is friendly with everyone (which terrifies Vesna as if he ever escaped, nobody would ever return the glorious affectionate furball that he is). Kida is very skittish, but loves to explore and play, and vocalizes it frequently. She's not super into being cuddled, but will follow us from one room to another. We're working on it.

We also took the time to teach them some tricks. Their repertoire consists of responding to their name, sitting, giving high five, fist bump and low five, giving handshake, a hug, jumping over a leg or an arm, nose bumping and the list continues to grow. Right now we're teaching them to react to "no" - basically turning their attention from the illicit activity to us and using positive reinforcement when it works.

When weather permits, we try to take them for a walk on a leash, although that can prove to be challenging with them either trying to dash after something (Tenzin) or getting scared of strangers and freezing in place (Kida). It sure makes our lives less boring, and hopefully theirs more interesting.

The challenge ahead of us will also be switching them to a vegan diet. Their digestion can react temporarily, but we've done our research and it shouldn't cause long term issues. There are several brands that offer balanced food options for cats in the vegan department, but none of them are going into specialized territory like "kitten only", or "sterilized kitten" foods. Top that with what they had in the previous household, we are taking it slow.

They were also fixed relatively recently and they recovered nicely. Her procedure did involve some sleepless nights on our part, spent streaming relaxing cat music, but it mostly worked on Vesna. Luckily, that milestone is behind us now.

They've changed our lives profoundly in a very short time and we love them unconditionally, but I do sometimes wish they could learn how to work so Vesna and I are not the sole breadwinners in the family, or at least to cast some useful spells in the spellcaster's familiar vein.

In short, genealogy is the study of family history. Aside from studying birth records, historical lists and articles and other available sources, relatively recently popular method of studying family history is DNA analysis, to see how related people within a DNA database are. There are two biggest consumer focused companies out there for humans: Ancestry, which is mostly focused on North America and MyHeritage, which is mostly focused on Europe.

My uncle started doing genealogy on MyHeritage and I was kinda fed up myself with not knowing all the cousins, their spouses, children. I also wanted to have my DNA sequenced. After all, I used to work in such a company, but eventually I opted to first enter the data in Ancestry because their DNA database of humans is the biggest there is at the moment, they offer traits display, as well as ancestry, and there's an option to export the data from them and import it into MyHeritage. It took some manual work to export the data from Ancestry, with usual disclaimers, of course, then import it to MyHeritage and wait for them to analyze it.

DNA is assembled by combining some parts in the DNA strain of the individual with the reference genome. Humans are mostly the same so there are no big differences between us regarding genetics.

All of the calculations are done by finding similarities of the submitted DNA with the rest of the DNA samples in the database.

The ancestry analysis is done by comparing the number of DNA subsequences of the individual with the sampled population grouped by their place of living. It is a static picture of things. People migrated and there's considerable room for getting it wrong, but there is truth to it, especially because ancestry can be distinguished way back throughout generations.

The traits display is there to see things like free vs attached earlobes, alcohol flush, sprinter gene and so on. Ancestry got almost all of my traits correct. Traits are usually determined by finding genetic similarities of a user within the DNA database that is marked up by user submitted answers.

More interesting is the PRS (Polygenic Risk Score) that can determine predisposition to various traits. Diseases being a very interesting part of it. Cancers and such. Of course, we're talking about statistical probability, which is definitely not the singular cause, but a possible contributing factor. For instance, just because one might be an alcoholic, genetically speaking, if they're not drinking, it can hardly be the case. PRS are also most viable in the populations with European ancestry, since they're the most researched group, but can fail in other groups. Take it with a grain of salt if you're checking things out for health. Ancestry does not give out PRS related to health. If one wants that, they should sequence their genome with 23andMe instead.

DNA analysis, as expected, depends largely on the sample size, as well as other factors, like epigenetics, additive genetic effects, etc. It is an interesting area of study.

It took about a month to get the results. The kit gets ordered, sent, then it's activated, sample is collected via saliva, stabilizing fluid is added to it and it's mailed back. It's a long wait then. They need to receive the sample, extract the DNA and run analysis on it. It depends on the lab and the amount of work they have. Import/export to another service (from Ancestry to MyHeritage in our case) was a matter of days and a bit of manual work.

As for my ancestry, I didn't get swapped at birth. The DNA matches it produced are correct, from both sides of the family (calculated by chromosomes because this is how inheritance works), but the ancestry is different from what I was expecting. My family is Slavic, to be precise: West and South Slavs. In Ancestry.com instead of Czechia, it got a lot of Southern Poland. It also threw out some similarities in their model with Germanic Europe, Baltic, Sweden and Denmark, then a bit of Norway. MyHeritage used a different model because it has different groups and has different samples. They placed my ancestry correctly in Czechia, but also found some similarities with Greek and Italian groups, Scandinavian, Iberian and Finnish. Apparently the families migrated from the north towards the south of Europe. Can't really blame them. My path was going back and a bit west. I'm in Ireland now and I love the climate here. I even got the citizenship just a few days ago ☘ Something to mess up the static image of ancestry once again :)