§ I got a couple of new smart home devices this week, mostly because of some leftover Amazon credit. First, the Eve Room. Temperature and humidity monitoring is cool but what I was really interested in was the indoor air quality sensor. I completely anticipated being freaked out by how bad my air quality is. Especially since, throughout the winter, we keep our windows closed most of the time. To my complete surprise, however, our air quality is pretty good! Sure, there is a noticeable spike in VOCs when I am cooking dinner but it quickly settles back down to a reasonable level. While this whole experience has all been a bit anti-climactic, it’s all good news, I suppose.

I also got an Eve Motion sensor and set it up to automatically turn on the lights whenever I enter my back door entryway. This was more convenient then I was expecting and now I am trying to scope out other locations in my house where a motion sensor would be a useful addition.

§ Thanks to remembering there is an easy mode, I finally finished the Last of Us video game. I thought it was good but not amazing. There were a few stand out scenes, though, my favorite probably being Ellie hunting a deer in a snow covered forest.

§ I started messing around with the Adafruit Circuit Playground — it is a fun little microcontroller! It has a bunch of good stuff built-in: buttons, sensors, RGB LEDs, a speaker and microphone, etc; most importantly, though, it has pins so you can hook up your own standard input and output components.

You are supposed to be able to be able to program it using the Arduino IDE, however I have not been able to get that to work yet. The main coding interface is a browser-based MakeCode environment with its own cute little simulated Circuit Playground device. I, as usual, quickly got frustrated with the limitations inherent to block coding before I realized that you can freely switch between vanilla JavaScript and blocks in MakeCode — that has been a really nice feature, in practice.

I think I’m going to try integrating these into some of my classes soon. I feel like they have the potential to be a great stepping stone before starting with Arduinos.

§ Links

§ Recipes

  • Gluten free empanadas
    • I tried making these with my leftover carnitas. Honestly, my expectations weren’t high to begin with. Flaky, light gluten free baking is really difficult. With that said, this really didn’t work out well. They were mostly just dry and crumbly. It was worth a try though!
  • Japanese cheesecake
    • This was a disaster, aesthetically speaking; it instantly fell apart as soon as I took it out of the oven. It tasted great, though! Plus, it used up a ton of quail eggs that have been piling up throughout the past couple of weeks.