Monthly Archives: April 2018

Just finished watching The Post. It was a great film, but I kept expecting it to break into a Mr. Show sketch.

This is the second time my 2016 MBP (with 10.13.4) has stopped responding to the Caps Lock key. The LED toggles, so the switch is functional, but the OS just ignores the current mode. TYPING WITH CAPS LOCK STUCK IS GARBAGE.

homebridge-camera-rpi

With the recently released homebridge-nest-cam plugin, my old Dropcam has new life in HomeKit. This, combined with Steve Troughton-Smith’s tweets about the Pi Zero W, has sparked a desire to setup additional HomeKit cameras.

I ordered a Pi Zero W Camera Pack, and set about following Wojtek Pietrusiewicz’s instructions for configuring it with homebridge-camera-rpi.

It was easy to get the Pi connected to the network, but I ran into trouble when I needed to install ffmpeg. I couldn’t get it working, and based on some comments, I think it may be fairly difficult to install. I’m speculating that something changed between the Rasbian Stretch image of November 2017 and the image of March 2018.

Instead, I used the pre-built image of homebridge-camera-rpi. After using Etcher to flash the image onto my microSD card, the only modifications I made were to the /wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf file to add my network SSID and passkey, and to tweak the settings of the plugin in /homebridge-camera-rpi.conf.json.

With that, I was able to see the Pi on the network (via Lanscan), and add it in the Home app.

Home App Screenshot

Every time I see “Shared Links” in the macOS System Preferences Extensions Pane, I get excited, and then remember that this was ripped out of Safari. 😞

Looks like iOS 11.3 fixes one of my Music.app gripes — opening a playlist, playing a song, and tapping on the song’s album name to see the album would take you back to the playlist view. Now you have a choice of Artist, Album, or Playlist view.