Personal
Smart homes are becoming increasingly popular as technology continues to advance and become more accessible. You can control various devices and appliances in your home through a single app or voice assistant. It can include lights, temperature control, security systems, and more.
You can control these lights through voice commands through platforms like Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. With smart lights, you can easily set the mood in your home by adjusting the color, brightness, and temperature of the lights. You can also automate lighting by setting schedules or creating scenes, such as turning on the lights when you enter a room or dimming them for movie night. The typical sales pitch “Endless Possibilities” does apply here!
I started to transform my house into a Smart Home about a year ago and I’m loving it!
One of the most affordable and customizable options for building a smart home is to use Home Assistant with a Raspberry Pi. Home Assistant is an open-source platform that allows you to integrate and control various smart devices in your home. It is free and can be easily installed on a Raspberry Pi, making it accessible to people with a range of technical skill levels. Home Assistant supports a wide variety of smart lights, including those from popular brands like Philips.
One of the benefits of using Home Assistant with a Raspberry Pi is that it is free of paid service. All smart-device companies offer a paid subscription service to unlock some extra features. The Home Assistant community has hundreds of tips and tutorials to replicate them on your own. This means that you don’t have to worry about recurring subscription fees or being locked into a specific platform.
Unlike paid smart home services, particularly those in other countries, you can be confident that your private information and data are secure and not being monitored or accessed by anyone else. You have full control over your data and devices, and you can be sure that your security cameras, personal information, and other sensitive data are not being shared with any third parties. This level of privacy is crucial in today’s world where data privacy concerns are becoming more widespread. By choosing this DIY smart-home setup, you can enjoy the benefits of a connected home without worrying about the privacy implications of using a paid service.
Node-RED, included as a plugin, allows for even greater customization and automation in your smart home. You can create “flows” that automate various tasks, such as recording security video when motion is detected, sending notifications to your phone, or turning on the lights when you enter a room. This can make your smart home even more intelligent and responsive to your needs, freeing up time and effort that would otherwise be spent on manual tasks. The plugin provides a visual interface for building these automations, making it easy to set up and modify your flows, even if you have little to no programming experience. By incorporating Node-RED into your Home Assistant setup, you can take your smart home to the next level and make it truly your own.
I had to configure an online backup. Raspberry Pi has a history of failing, especially the micro-SD. It gives me peace of mind knowing that even if my Raspberry Pi fails, I can easily restore my Home Assistant setup without any hassle.
Another great feature of a smart home is the ability to leave your keys and wallets behind when you leave the house. With smart locks and phone-based payment systems, you now can control access to your home and pay for purchases with just your phone. It can make life much more convenient, as you won’t need to carry a bulky keychain or wallet everywhere you go. It’s pocket freedom! Simply use your phone to unlock your front or garage door, and pay for your morning coffee – all without ever having to dig through your pockets or purse. The counterpart is the single point of failure: in case I lose my phone (or get robbed), I will have no money and no way to enter my house. :(
I did the right thing to start to automate my home a year back. Building a smart home with Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi is a cost-effective and customizable option for people who want to control their home appliances and devices from one central location. A valid warning: it’s addictive to tweak each device or flow to fit your taste. Just take care of not getting into the rabbit hole!
During the campaign for Congress, I had to transform my social networks into a real sales platform. They all had to be super aligned with the same purpose.
I should have already installed/hired some social media manager, like Hootsuite or Zoho Social (Zoho has been my online service provider for years), as this is no trivial task. There were more than 8 networks. And many of the contents are copies of each other.
In addition to the difficulty of managing the various networks, there is confusion as to what content I would release as official. Canonical. Especially networks that are essentially competitors.
It gets substantially worse with stories like Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. He’s made so many changes to the platform that it’s not impossible to think the company will eventually go broke. Thus, years of content would be thrown away. And the constant changes in rules and permissions?!
To address some of these concerns, I’m trying to centralize the source of information to a system that I have full control over. And nothing better than this site itself to be responsible. Here I do whatever I want, optimize images (one of my concerns is that I’ve never had much discipline in removing the metadata from images), and customize their appearance. This then becomes the official center of what I do.
POSSE is the practice of Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, in other words, publish links or copies on other social networks always citing the source of the content, so that anyone can follow you directly at the source.
Reposting on Twitter and Mastodon is easy as they are usually text and few images. Meta/Facebook sites are more boring because they are richer in content and have no API to automate. Video ones are even more work, as hosting videos in person is quite expensive (I’ve always felt that YouTube does an almost humanitarian job in hosting such a volume of data).
For now, I must keep old content on its source platforms. Gradually I will try to write only here. Eventually start to even export all the old content from these services to have back and put static on the site.
To adapt the site to be the center of the online universe, some changes need to be made:
I also implemented microformats on the site and in the contents, so that any other system that reads the site can extract the main information: the author, title, content, and publication date. Several of this information already appears visually on the site. As humans, we can understand easily, but computers cannot. Therefore, a series of modifications were made so that the contents are also easily understood by machines.
As I use the blog as a tool for longer texts, daydreams, and ideas, I’m thinking of creating specific lists for small texts (tweet/toot) and maybe images (today the site has a tag that points to my posts of photos). So everything would be better indexed and found. Blog and notes. My site manager, Hugo, allows for several approaches. The question is how to do a better implementation.
I’ve tried using some commenting tools before, like Discus and Cactus.chat (super cool concept of using Matrix as a comment source). I don’t have a lot of traffic here, so it wouldn’t matter. But the goal is now bigger: to include comments and reposts of my content made on other sites.
The W3C’s standard (the organization that standardizes the internet) created webmentions, a way to formalize that someone is commenting on someone else’s content. That’s the only way I can maintain a great discussion about the content I’ve posted on any network.
This will take some time as I will need to use some external services that will read my site’s RSS and try to post on social media instead. Essentially using a HootSuite/Zoho Social type solution. Even better if it’s open source. I will investigate the use of n8n.
As soon as I manage to implement more things, I’ll post them here. I want to give the least amount of work to the next ones who are excited to take control of their own digital lives.
brunomassa.com has been always an international site. Almost all posts were written in English. But now that I will venture into politics (more about this in a later post), it’s worth separating Brazilian Portuguese content apart. Mixing posts about programming, gaming, and movies will only confuse followers and voters.
Instead of removing non-related content, I decided to split languages. The Brazilian Portuguese edition will show up more posts about the Brazilian scene. Curiously, most of the old posts written in pt-br were already about politics or football, so they are already fit for the job!
I do not know how to create a hybrid model using Hugo, with most language-independent content intertwined. If I find it, I will enable it in the future. It will be especially useful for hot-pages, those pages that serve as an entry for promotions and special situations. It would not be good to create a hot-page for brunomassa.com/pt-br/hot-page, because it would defeat its purpose of being easy to remember and share. To help even further, I’ve just bought the brmassa.com domain, aligning with other social media usernames.
So, I’m going to start to work towards generating more content about politics and the Brazilian context. This week I plan to make the now-not-much-a-surprise announcement.
This very post is multi-language. Click on the small flags to switch.
Less than a couple of months after I got certified as a Project Manager, I decided to invest in an area that I was not fully confident that I know the stuff: defining cloud architecture. I started to create, develop and manage cloud systems in just the past 5 years or so, and it evolved super rapidly.
So, applying for a such certification would require extra study on my part. There were areas that I definitively do not grasp, such as networking and many Kubernetes corners. I decided to go with my beloved Coursera. I did a couple of free and paid courses there and I love it. Also, it which was the official training platform for Google products and services. Google itself design the courses and its employees that teach them. So there is some comfort.
The course is very practical. They provide a demo but real user to allow students to act in a Google Cloud environment for real. So one interacts, creates, updates, and deletes real things. It’s a major factor. Hands-on baby!
I went to the examination and was much more relaxed. They were as much as professional as the PMI guys but more relaxed and humane. I passed.
I learned a lot for sure. It will help me in future and current projects. Even being Google Cloud-focused, it addressed many of the issues of a generic cloud architect in any provider.
I can assure you I can handle the job. From computing, serverless, storage, and, yes, networking, I’m pretty confident I can design a better pretty cost-efficient solution than before. In the evolving cloud business, as long I keep updated, it’s a new passion that I am so excited about.
After months of studying, I could finally accomplish an old dream: be a certified project manager. I work with projects since the dawn of time. I create personal and professional projects often. Big and small. For myself, with teams, and for the company.
Despite liking dealing with processes, my goal was never to be in a process-driven career. Personally, the part I like the most about processes is their implementation or optimization projects!
And I genuinely try to enhance my abilities, by studying, researching, and training. I’m an agile advocate at my job long before it was a thing. Now they are all project-flying and agile-ing all major parts of the business processes.
But one thing is to know you are good at something. Another thing completely different is to convince someone about it. Here comes the certification program. PMI is the de-facto institution regarding project management. I read their main material many, many years ago and followed their general guidelines ever since. But the certification itself, nope.
Better later than never. I decided to finally apply for the certification exam. Here’s a motivational tip: first apply for an exam then start to study for it. It’s much more effective, psychologically speaking, to have a fixed deadline to be engaged and motivated. Studying for a “to be defined” date is prone to procrastination.
I bought an online course. The instructor was very clear: each exam has its quirks and style. He will exploit PMI’s style to deliver a laser-focused course with the only goal being to facilitate passing the exam. No philosophical discussions. No discussions at all. Just the pure content. Delivered with the precise method.
It was both effective and efficient. It took me just a week of classes and an extra one to review and consolidate the knowledge. PMI requires that one should have not only a previous experience in the field but also a minimum amount of formal education, so the classes could not be shorter even if possible.
I did the online exam. Man, it was equally scary. Some dude had to check our computer screen, I had to turn on the camera all time. And any movement or sound, I was called upon.
The questions were super generic. It’s the downside of being a generic Project Management certification. It was not about construction or software development. So the online course was right. After a couple of hours, exhausted (I had to do it after the business hour, so I was extra tired), I finished.
Days after, the good news: I did it! One old dream checked! And it’s on my Linkedin, of course!
