If you have read my previous posts; you might know I am currently working on a new project to move some services to a self-hosted solution. As part of this, I have been working on dealing with unicode characters in regex.

In relation to this I have found that I am writing the same function repeatedly. The only difference being the number matches being returned. So I decided we need to refactor this.

As part of my project Self Hosted Zapier Alternative; I am having to deal with doing regex searches against the three Japanese written forms, Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.

I am currently in the process of working out how I might replace some of my Zapier services. Why would I want to do this?

1. I use the free tier. (The process only runs once every 15 minutes. It used to be once every 5 mins.) Which means it has become a bit slow in sending the notifications.
2. I want to learn how to use Docker

Once I get a bit further along I will hopefully publish the python code to GitHub and document some of the issues and successes as I move along. Check the Projects page section if you are interested.

The challenge

Living in Japan we generally default to using LINE for our messaging needs. At the time of this writing there is no integration for LINE within Home Assistant. Currently I use PushOver for some of my Home Assistant notifications. I also use Zapier with email to trigger notifications to my family LINE group. You can see how I did this here and here.

I was looking into updating a couple of my perl modules because rt.cpan.org is being sunset early in 2021. As part of this I thought it was time to stop cpan testers from testing my module under Windows since it is currently not really supported.

I was not sure how to go about doing this, so I reached out the good people in the “Perl Programmers” group on FaceBook. I got some great links and suggestions. In order to make this easy for me to find. I am documenting some of them here.

I recently went through the process of upgrading my raspberry Pis from Stretch to Buster. I had previously done this moving from Jessie.

Whilst I had no real issues with task following the guides that I found. I did discover one thing that concerned me, and was missing from the guides.

After upgrading to Buster, my /boot had less than 200kb of free storage.

I did some reading and found that Buster seems to need a lot more space in /boot than for previous releases. Buster itself now defaults to 256M of space for /boot

So I went about solving this issue.

I would suggest that you do these steps before upgrading just to avoid any possible problems.

I have been running Home Assistant for a while. Things are going well. But I have had some issues with presence detection using the standard device_tracker component. Though I live in a small place, being in Tokyo, Home Assistant sometimes stops detecting phones if they are in an area of the apartment a little away from the Home Assistant server. This I suspect is due to the position of the Raspberry Pi and the building material.

As of Mac OS 10.4 crontab has been depreciated but not ended. So its a good idea to know how to use its replacement under Mac OS. Welcome to Launchd.

This will be a short guide on how to use launchd in a simple form to replace a crontab job. In my case I am automating the backup of my Plex server. You can see my previous article here

Launchd has a lot of other features. I will not look at them here.

The Challenge

I wanted to be able to publish a new post that has already been written at a future date, without needing to manually publish the article.

I was researching ways of moving to Hugo for my site generator. I looked at a few options and as part of this I came a cross a workflow in github that allows me to store my site in a private repo and then publish the site to a public repo without too much fuss.