One of the things my Home Automation app needs to do is run forever. But I don’t want the screen to burn in either. I can allow the phone to lock the screen but at that time my app isn’t running. I could run some background tasks but there is no way to wake up the app and dismiss the lock screen automatically. Therefore I want an app which runs all the time but has some kind of build in screensaver.

As I described before I am working on a little project to use some Lumia 640s in the house to control the home automation. Besides figuring out how to configure and roll out the devices, and figuring out how exactly I am going to put them in the walls, I also have a laundry list of items I need to figure out for the app on the device. Instead of waiting before everything is done I thought it might be useful to take you along the ride.

When we bought the house we learned it had a fairly new Bryant furnace installed. The previous owner upgraded from an electric furnace a few years ago. When we had an HVAC guy over for an AC quote he mentioned it was a good two stage furnace, better than the one we had in Bothell. Ok, I didn’ really think about until a recent discussion with some colleagues at Microsoft.

Some people use Windows Mobile devices without a SIM. I use it to test different things during my job and also on my developer devices at home. I just started a little project where I want to use the Lumia 640 as a control device and these devices will never get a SIM. So this pesky little warning prevents the device from automatically starting up and run my control software.

The other day I was chatting with Morten Nielsen on twitter about some ideas for home automation. I want to be able to control lights, temperature etc in some rooms in my home. Ideally that would be done with some kind of easy to use touch screen device. The Raspberry Pi came to mind. There are some screens you can attach to it. It’s low power and pretty easy to put inside the drywall and make the screen look nice on top of that.

Microsoft introduced a new plugin for WordPress. This plugin lets you use OneNote pages as input for your posts. That’s pretty convenient. You can write and scribble in OneNote every time you want and once you’re finished you can just move that page over to WordPress with a single click. To make this work you need to install the OneNote published plugin in your WordPress blog. After you have installed it you need to configure the plugin according the instructions (you need to create an application so WordPress can access your OneNote files which are stored in your OneDrive) After this you can add a post in WordPress and select one of the pages from OneNote.

Using SmartThings lets you automate most of the stuff in your house. Leaving the house automatically turns of all the lights and heating, but only when all of us leave the house. When one of us returns in the house, the lights go back on and the heating is on as well. The last few weeks my mom was visiting and when both me and my wife left the house she got stuck in the dark because both presence sensors connected to our keys were gone and the rule in SmartThings is when everybody leaves the house switch everything off.

A while ago my desktop at home started to acting up. So I decided I wanted it to replace it with something new. I was looking for something small yet powerful and it needs to be silent!. My colleague Galileo recommended the Intel NUC. So after some searching and reading reviews I decided it looked good and would fulfill my requirements. It needs to be silent, powerful enough to use Visual Studio, enough memory, enough disk space.

I just found out you can use a video instead of an image as your account picture in Windows (works with Windows 8.1 and up). Pretty neat effect. Post by Matthijs Hoekstra. So this is how you set it up. Go to your start screen, click on your name, choose ‘change account picture’ Instead of browsing for a picture you click on camera. In the camera screen make sure you switch to vide mode.

When I ordered my Raspberry Pi 2 I also ordered a little enclosure called the Pibow Coupe. Since the layout of the Pi 2 is the same I assumed every case would fit. Unfortunately that was not the case for this specific enclosure. But with a little help of my Dremel I managed to adjust it a little bit and it now fits perfectly. When you build the case around your Pi board they little layers are numbered.