Posts

Litter Robot 3 Web App

The Litter Robot is a great piece of equipment. The best part is I don't have to scoop poop. Unfortunately, the only way to view the Litter Robot status is via the mobile app, Whisker does not have a web portal. However, I found out Home Assistant supported Litter Robot, and that used an undocumented Whisker API. I decided to start building a web application with a Spring Boot back end and React front end to proxy requests to this API. I only have one Litter Robot 3, so I initially coded everything to support only this use case. However, I realized that other people with more cats may have multiple robots, so I changed how the UI worked to support multiple Litter Robot 3s for a single user. The web app is currently designed to be run on a trusted local network, on a home server or Raspberry Pi. I hope this is useful for others, as it has been useful for me. 😀 github.com/skylerwlewis/LitterRobot3WebApp

Rebalancing Mutual Funds

I want to talk about mutual funds today. Let's say that you want you want to have 20% of your money in fund ABC and 80% of your money in fund XYZ. Great. You have $1,000 to invest, and you put $200 in ABC and $800 in XYZ and call it a day. However, after a few months (or even a few days), your ABC investment is now worth $300 and your XYZ investment is worth $750. You wanted a 20%-80% split, and now you have 28.6%- 71.4% instead. Fear not. You can rebalance! This means you can choose to either: Sell $90 of ABC and buy $90 of XYZ. This will bring you back to 20%-80% ($210 & $840). Buy a higher amount of XYZ the next time you invest to bring it closer to your 80% target. Option 1 can be more straightforward, but if this account is not a tax-advantaged retirement account, this may result in having to pay capital gains tax. Option 2 requires some more calculating, but avoids sells that could result in taxable gains. I ran into this problem with accounts I manage myself, and I chose...

DIY Dynamic DNS Using Netlify API

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I don't really need to send many calls back to my network at my house when I am away, but when I want to show someone the progress we are making on the family Minecraft Christmas village, it is nice to be able to call to a Mapcrafter server at my house. This is the current family Minecraft Christmas Village. The image is generated by Mapcrafter using this group of Bash scripts. Now I don't have a business internet line at my house, so my IP can change theoretically at any time. I have looked at a  few services offering Dynamic DNS, however, some didn't fit my needs. Also they all cost money, and my preference would be to not spend any money if I don't have to. I found some projects on Github that communicate with the Netlify API using an access token to update the domain entry dynamically, however, I wanted to try to make something simpler than other projects I tried . Since I've been playing with my Plex Media Server, I've been on a Bash script kick, so ...