Weekend Fun & Thoughts
2021-04-10 10:51PM CST

This weekend my wife and I invited family over to our apartment. There
was a wine festival today right next to where we live which we all
wanted to check out. They arrived just after noon and after getting
them unpacked we headed out the front entrance of our building and right
into the festival to find some food. There was a great crowd and the
perfect weather coupled with everyone's desire to get back to social
events I think made for a great crowd. It was really nice to see people
out and about and back to normal. We did lots of walking, tasting, and
enjoying each other's company. We capped it off with dinner at a walking
distance restaurant and a movie. I'm writting this from the couch in the
living room while my wife is toying with her phone on the air matress
next to me. Everyone is wiped but it has been a great and enjoyable
escape. Both my wife and I have been getting pretty stressed at work
here lately so an enjoyable weekend like this one helps to recharge.

I've been toying with the idea of smart home stuff lately. I'm deeply
conflicted on this because on one hand I think automatically you are
giving up privacy or control for convienence but on the other hand all
the neat gadgets and automations are really interesting to the inner
geek. I have some limited experience with this as our apartment recently
switched us over to smart locks and some other things. The difference
with those though is that I don't have any control over the hub they
provided. I tinkered around a bit previously with homebridge as we got
one of those cheapo cameras for Christmas from a friend and I wanted to
at least try it out before putting it in a drawer. I dug out a pi (I
need to write an entry on these, I love them and use one for my router
and another as a home server), got homebridge configured, and got the
camera working. I even got the motion detecting stuff working and setup
on my wife's phone so she could check in on the pups when away. I think
it lasted 2 days before I just disconnected everything and scraped the
idea becuase I just didn't like having a camera pointed at is inside the
apartment. I know I have the aptitude to be able to set things up
properly from a security standpoint and I'm sure I could configure a
subnet or something so the devices aren't even really connected to the
internet but I just really can't get over how intrusive these devices
are. Honestly I think smart home stuff is going to be something cool I
think about from time to time but never do anything with.

Speaking of pis, I use a pi4 as my openWRT home router and ran into
something interesting on Friday. We pay for a VPN and I have all our
devices configured but I wanted to finally take the plunge and have the
router itself be connected to the VPN so that all devices are now
covered. I went to install openVPN (Wireguard is supported by my VPN
provider but only through their apps and not available for manual
configuration yet) and turns out the rpi4 doesn't have a stable release
yet. Because I'm using a snapshot release that is several months old,
the kernal is 'out of date' and I couldn't install openVPN. I monkeyed
around and got the router updated to the newest snapshot (my wife loves
when I'm tinkering and the connection is going up and down) but ran into
some configuration roadblocks. Probably for the best, I read openVPN has
some high overhead and I need to make sure the pi can handle the load
before I just dump the entire network over to it.

I enjoy writing these entries even if they don't have a point. I thought
the other day about how all the writing I do is just at work and just on
technical documents. I don't really write down my thoughts. Maybe this
can be the place.