I use home assistant to manage the power on my dumb TV, my dumb air conditioner, and my smart light bulbs. I want to be able to control them with a voice UI, but have been trying to get rid of Alexa and Google devices and replace them with something local.

I had Mycroft AI running for a while but since the company has gone defunct I've been trying to migrate over to OpenVoiceOS. There are definitely growing pains and unfortunately I haven't been able to contribute much to the project. I'm writing this to remind myself what I do to get a Raspberry Pi 4 working.

My team at work used to use PowerMock to verify logging. Generally you don't need to verify logging, but occasionally you have an outage and realize it's important to verify in a unit test that logging is working correctly. Hence we created this utility class that avoids the need for static mocking.

Why is logging so hard? It's because you have a class like so:

Gradle doesn't really expose an option for you to run your build without running tests. We were able to make this work by looking for an environment variable:

Note: I have a couple of Amazon links in here, but these aren't going to track you - I just have them to document the components I used.

I'm trying to get rid of my Amazon FireTV Cube. The last remaining feature I use is saying "Computer, turn off the TV" before I go to bed. I'd like to switch this over to "Hey Mycroft, turn off the TV". This documents my journey.

I'd like to make this into a full-featured post at some point, but for now I'm just writing down the essentials for getting a working ipv4 openvpn setup to work using ipv6. There are two steps:

My team is currently migrating one of our Java codebases from junit 4 to 5, and with it we lost two of our favourite features: mocking static methods with PowerMock, and Theories. I'll leave Theories alone in this post so I can focus on PowerMock.

PowerMock has served us well but has some drawbacks, mainly around its slow performance and arcane errors due to the way PowerMock changes your classloading.

Last December, I needed to do a long drive across Southern Ontario to pick up my girlfriend. This was meant to be a 12 hour round trip by car covering roughly 1000km.

I love thinking about human psychology. In particular, I love thinking about things humans do that are non-obvious, but pervasively drive their behaviour.

I can think of two general principles that drive a great deal of human behaviour, yet are non-obvious.

I'm using this post to hold a link to this good breakdown on unconscious bias from Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-…

Key Points:

I have to start this post with some self-reflection. It's easy to believe that only stupid people get swept up in cults. I heard a few years ago, however, that in fact intelligent people are in fact more likely to join a cult (article, reference).

As a practising Christian, I've therefore spent a lot of time considering whether I'm just another naive cult member.