In my previous post about r1-eye, I described using a jailbroken Rabbit R1 to watch my coffee roasts and send images to Claude Vision for analysis. It worked but there are 2 issues I found when trying to place the camera for the best shot. The first is that there is nothing you can use to mount the r1. I used stacked cardboard boxes which I constantly bumped. The second is the bright orange frame of the r1. The reflection skewed the color of all the images and we had to resort to a cropping mechanism to remove it. ...

As I described in my previous post Automated Coffee Roasting Analysis, I roast coffee at home on a Hottop KN-8828b-2k+. The Hottop has a viewport on the left side facing away from the control panel. When roasting all my focus is on the laptop, which sits on the right side of the roaster. I can’t really see the beans during the roast and can’t visually assess the changes, which is a key criteria of the beans’ development. ...

I roast coffee at home on a Hottop KN-8828B-2K+. This roaster can connect to Artisan for logging and roaster control. When I first bought the roaster I tried using it with Artisan but I fundamentally didn’t understand the roasting process. It was too confusing to know what to change. The software felt very overwhelming. I like to learn on my own and I couldn’t find any source of information that really helped me understand both the process and the software. I wound up defaulting to the automatic program on the Hottop. ...

My family and I go fishing regularly at the White River below Bull Shoals Dam. One of the main topics of conversation is “how many generators are running”, as that impacts where you can go, what the fishing might be like, whether you can get out and wade. To get that information, you call the Army Corps of Engineers and listen to the recording. I thought that was so old-fashioned, why can’t we do that with a bot…just send a text and get the data back through an api. The thing was there was no simple generation count. The data was all in cubic feet per second (CFS)…and down the rabbit hole I went. ...

Like many people I was excited when the Rabbit R1 was announced and quickly bought one. Within minutes I could see it was a fairly useless device as shipped. I put it on the shelf with a vague notion that I would do something with it later. A year later, I tried jailbreaking it, only to brick it. Back on the shelf it would go. As Claude Code became more proficient, I decided to try again. Claude’s eagerness was just the quality I needed to keep at it. I could try anything at all without any complaints from my companion. ...

Following up on my previous post, where I described the framework for how I manage work using Outlook, this post focuses on the technology behind it. I use Outlook Tasks to record all actionable items. I built an Outlook C# VSTO add-in to capture the work. When I am processing my email and find something I need to do, I select that email and click the Add Tasks button in the Outlook ribbon. ...

I was banging my head on this problem for hours. Using langchain and our Azure OpenAI model, I kept getting a Value error: As of openai>=1.0.0, Azure endpoints should be specified via the `azure_endpoint` param not `openai_api_base` (or alias `base_url`). I was not defining openai_api_base anywhere in my code. LLMs were no use but I did find the suggestion on Reddit to check if openai_api_base was an environment variable. Sure enough, I had defined that months ago, never used it, and forgot it. Deleted the variable and problem solved. ...

I wrote that headline to bother my brother, who despises Outlook. This post is not really about Outlook, although it is central to the topic. I really want to write about how I manage work and as a response to Ian Bogost’s article in the Atlantic about the terribleness of email. I adopted David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) process and refined it for many years. I use Outlook as my inbox, with tasks as the central, actionable record. ...

When building my Active Directory search tool, I wanted to launch it from the Windows taskbar. I created a .bat file to activate the python virtual environment and run the program. However, you can’t directly add a .bat file to the taskbar. To get around this you can rename the .bat file extension to .exe, add it to the taskbar, rename the .exe back to .bat, finally edit the properties of the taskbar icon to point back to the renamed .bat file. Why Microsoft? ...

I needed to check Active Directory (AD) to see who was part of a group. I use AD infrequently and keep a list of queries in a text file on my desktop, as I can’t ever remember the syntax. As I opened my list I thought…wait, I don’t ever have to do this again. Let’s write a program to take a natural language prompt and have our LLM figure out the PowerShell commands. Within 30 minutes I had a functional program. It took several small iterations and these are the prompts I used. Unfortunately, I can’t share the program. ...