Code

I can now turn my lights on and off from my phone

Short update to keep this half-working with Linux Kernel 4.19 here

I forget exactly what drove me to do this, probably sheer laziness; I was getting tired of getting out of bed to turn the lights in my bedroom on and off. In the age of the smartphone and internet of things, it seemed obvious to try some sort of internet-enabled solution, just in case I was ever on the other side of the planet and wanted to turn my lights on. Looking around online it seemed that the only out-of-the-box solutions were either prohibitively expensive and/or required bulbs controlled through a wifi-connected RF base station. Besides, doing that kind of thing would really damage what little hacker cred I have to begin with.

In case you haven’t noticed, this page is Powered By Hugo ©️. Hugo is a very nice static website engine, taking your neatly arranged directories full of Markdown files and converting it into a pretty website. I had tried to do something similar with Flask but the process of getting a kind of “dynamically-static” site running where I could just drop in new files was too much of a faff. Then a friend recommended Hugo which, after a couple of days of messing about, seems perfect for my use case. It’s taken me a little bit of time to get configured the way I want and to get nginx to play nicely with it. Along the way I’ve learnt a few lessons: