My Top 5 Gadgets of 2022
In the last hours of 2022, I wanted to take a quick moment and celebrate the gadgets that had the most impact on me this year.
Steam Deck
The Steam Deck is PC gaming rig that you can take anywhere. If there’s a better device for 40 year old fathers who like to play some games, I can’t imagine what it would be. The Steam Deck has been amazing and has exposed me to a much larger list of fun games than what I was playing before. (Coincidentally, my spending on games has also ballooned, so well played, Steam.)
Flipper Zero
I’ve already written about my Flipper Zero, so I won’t go through it again, but playing with this little device packed with sensors has been fun. The downside is that I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface! I need to spend more time in their Discord and see what else this thing can do in 2023.
Stream Deck
Not to be confused with the STEAM deck, the Stream Deck is not new in 2022, but it was a new addition in my life and it’s been a joy. Again, I’ve written about it already, but the Stream Deck has been a huge factor in my 2022 goal of automating more of my life.
Bluetooth Rubik’s Cube
I had this idea where I wanted to get a bluetooth enabled Rubik’s cube and pair it to a custom device that will trigger some crazy stuff to happen in my home office when someone solves the cube, so I bought a cheap bluetooth Rubik’s cube from Amazon a month ago. I still want to complete that little project, but I’m having way too much fun timing myself and tracking my Rubik stats on my phone.
Aqara Sensors
A big part of my automation goals in 2022 was really diving in to Home Assistant. I’ve had a Home Assistant server for years now, but I moved all of my automations to it this year and really made it the brains of my home automation. Recently I finally pulled the trigger on a series of Aqara sensors (entry, motion, vibration, leak, etc) and they have worked really well, especially when you factor in the relatively low price point. I wrote about how I hacked an Aqara entry sensor in to a dead bolt lock sensor recently.
See you in 2023!
Related Posts
A Decade of Clojure at Studio71
What is Clojure and why did it fit for Studio71? Clojure is a programming language (a dialect of Lisp) that excels at concurrency and data processing. Clojure runs on top of Java so it’s runs in all of the places Java runs and can use all of the Java libraries already out there (hello, Google and AWS libraries!
Read more
The macOS Privacy Settings Deleted My Backups
The other day I logged in to my NAS to find that all of my backed up media files were gone. No errors, the drives were fine, the directory was there, but the files were gone. Thankfully it wasn’t a freak out moment as I had my originals and my other backups, but it was a mystery.
Read more
Building a Mastodon Client in to my Cyberpunk SSH App
Let me quickly get you up to speed: I wanted to build a website for my hacker projects, but instead of a website I ended up building an SSH app (because I’m weird). Basically, instead of visiting it in your web browser you have to open your terminal, run an SSH command, and then you use text commands to play with the application, read about my projects, etc.
Read more