BelchertownWeather.com website theme for weewx

May 15, 2019 - Comments - 3 min read

Check out the weewx theme for Belchertown here, and you can download it here. Features include Real-time streaming updates on the front page Extensive graphing system with full customized control Light and Dark Mode with automatic switching based on sunset and sunrise Forecast data updated every hour Information on your closest Earthquake Weather records for the current year, and for all time. Responsive design. Mobile and iPad landscape ready! I've been an avid user of weewx. It's a weather archive software for personal weather stations. It's great to be able to archive this data without relying on cloud companies who may shut down at a moments notice. [Read More...]

Redirecting Weather Station Data from ObserverIP

January 18, 2016 - Comments - 14 min read

I have an Ambient Weather WS-1200-IP weather station. It's a great unit and very easy to use and setup! There is an outdoor unit which does temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, UV and solar radiation. There's also an indoor unit which has a barometer sensor. The 2 sensors talk to an ObserverIP unit. This unit plugs directly into your router and has a little webpage that you configure your wunderground.com username with. Once you click save, it instantly starts uploading data to wunderground.com. Couldn't be easier to start sharing your weather station data! Except. I want that data. I want to archive it on my own system. I want to be able to report off it. [Read More...]

Switching to Jekyll

March 29, 2020 - Comments - 2 min read

I've been pretty invested in WordPress for the last 10 years. I've created themes, plugins and even submitted a couple small patches to the WordPress core. However within the last year or so my focus has changed and I've been using static html website generators instead. Static html brings speed and security to a website since there's no database or anything to be compromised. There's a lot of options available now for commenting systems, pingbacks, etc. for static sites too. This has made the switch over even easier for me. [Read More...]

How to setup your own MQTT Broker

September 18, 2018 - Comments - 11 min read

I wrote this MQTT tutorial to help me out in the future, but hopefully it helps someone else along the way! For the last few years I've been running a custom weather website. This website, in conjunction with weewx, allowed me to have a website which updated itself every 10 seconds. But this bothered me. 10 seconds was far too slow for my liking! Earlier this year (2018) I started using Home Assistant for home automation (goodbye old unreliable cloud-based automation!) and they opened me up to MQTT. It was great to be able to get data from tiny Arduino sensors around the house — but I knew I could do more with it. [Read More...]

Nest Thermostat Push Notifications

September 7, 2017 - Comments - 8 min read

I have 2 Nest thermostats in my house. They're great! No doubt they have saved me money since the first day. The one thing that's bothered me though is the lack of push notifications. Perhaps it's overkill but I like to know what my thermostat is doing such as changing setpoint and operation mode. One of my thermostats is in my hallway and it'll go into Eco mode if I don't walk by it frequently enough. Having a push notice tell me that it's in Eco mode now will enable me to open the app and get it back to heating or cooling. I couldn't find a way to get these types of status notifications in the Nest app. [Read More...]

mailx – Send automated Linux email with gmail

August 29, 2017 - Comments - 2 min read

When something on my Linux servers needs to send email (WordPress, Nagios, cron scripts, etc), I use mailx. With the spam filters everyone has a lot of my automated emails haven't been reaching their destination. I've done the SPF rules and making sure my forward matches my reverse DNS lookups; even have done DKIM. Can't seem to find a reliable option with sending email from the command line without it getting flagged for spam. The fix was for me to use mailx with a gmail Account profile. This way any email sent from the system will get sent through the gmail servers. Since I host my email domain with GSuite, this was an easy win. I [Read More...]