Author Archives: Jethro Carr

2020-2022 mega update

It seems somewhere along the way I’ve lost my passion/time for updating this blog. I personally blame getting the bike as now I have yet another exciting way to spend rather limited amounts of available time, but it’s probably largely … Continue reading

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eBike life

Back in October 2018, I finally did something I’d been meaning to do for a while and got myself an ebike. Two main reasons for this decision – Firstly the public transport in Wellington is useless so rather than taking … Continue reading

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Automatically restarting GNU/Linux hosts upon hung storage

We recently experienced a weird and frustrating problem with storage reliability on our RabbitMQ cluster running on AWS c5-series EC2 instances with EBS storage and Ubuntu LTS 16.04. One of our three-node RabbitMQ cluster instances will experience an issue that … Continue reading

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Email to Toyota NZ re CarPlay

A few months back I had an email exchange with Toyota, uploading here for prosperity so I can look back a few years later and see how it all plays out. hi Toyota, This message is intended for Neeraj Lala. … Continue reading

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Scaling backend infrastructure to handle millions of phones (Mobile Refresh 2018)

I recently had the pleasure to speak at the 2018 Mobile Refresh conference held here in Wellington and did a talk introducing how we run some parts of the Sailthru Mobile platform, along with recommendations and advice to anyone else … Continue reading

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Introduction to Xiaomi Zigbee IoT/Smart Home devices

I’ve recently been experimenting with Xiaomi Zigbee IoT/Smart Home devices. These devices are super affordable (approx $20-55NZD) and make it very easy and affordable to upgrade a home with useful smart devices. My plan is to do a more detailed … Continue reading

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The Heating Project

Having gone through three Wellington winters in our home, Lisa and I really didn’t want to make it a fourth this year. Whilst our property is fortunate enough to get a lot of sun during the day, it still can’t … Continue reading

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Wellington Home Automation Hackers

I’m slowly setting up more and more Internet-of-Things stuff in my house and because of my interest in this space I’ve started a Wellington Home Automation Hackers meetup that will meet monthly! If you’re in Wellington and are interested in … Continue reading

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Firewall rules for HomeKit with HomeAssistant

I’ve recently been playing with the popular open source home automation software Home Assistant. One of the nice features of this platform is that it can export most of the devices it manages as HomeKit devices for easy use from … Continue reading

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The bathroom fan debacle

I completed this project a while back and had the images saved up for a blog post – somehow almost a year has gone by since then in a blink of an eye. But anyway, enjoy this delayed update about … Continue reading

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