I am using a HomeKit scene to turn on my Hair Light as well as my ATEM Mini Pro and Camera with one click, as enabling my video in my new setup is quite an involved process. Unfortunately I also have to manually turn on the Elgato Key LED lights using the Elgato Control Center status menu. This is a pain. So I thought to myself that I can simplify things by adding a HomeKit automation that whenever the Hair Light turns on / off, to have the Elgato lights follow it. Turns out this was more tricky than I thought...

First I tried to use Apple Script to interact with the Elgato Control Center status icon. This did not work - I could not get it to drop down and simulate button clicks. Next step was to try and see if I could reverse engineer the protocol between the app and the Elgato lights, and talk to them directly. First step was to get their IP addresses. It did not show in my Unifi portal and I could not locate it in pfSense, so I decided to run this on my firewall:

tcpdump -i ix0.8 -vv -nnvvXSs 1514 port 5353 | grep -i Elgato

So the US pipeline that was crippled due to ransomware attacks had the effect that Americans now have to pay more money for gas - so much that they are frantically looking for cheaper prices. A quote:

On average, Americans are paying $3.008 for a gallon of gas, up from $2.985 on Tuesday and $2.927 one week ago, AAA said earlier this week.

So... That translates to CAD 0.964 per litre. Here in Vancouver, BC we have been paying CAD 1.52 or higher for the longest time. Funny how relative things are?

As part of the audio system I am building for my little one, I needed to make a stand so that the equipment do not take up all her valuable desk space. I decided to use walnut for this custom designed stand.

Everything was dimensioned from rough cut stock, planed by hand, ripped on the bandsaw but everything else was cross cut and joined and dimensioned using non electric tools only. The stand is comprised of four stackable parts, allowing for adjustment in the order of the shelves. I finished it with shellac.

In my "recent" review of the BMW M235i, I listed several aspects of the car I loved and several I disliked. After having spent 5000km in the driver seat, I can summarise my experience of the car as a non-track driver as follows:

The car is ugly in white. I hate looking at it because of the colour. I strongly dislike the lane assist function as it is way too aggressive and makes too many mistakes. The navigation system started out working fantastic, however on a recent trip to Calgary I found it totally worthless. It missed a road closure that incurred a 190km detour, however it picked up on 8 non-existing road closures trying to route me on roads that would have increased my journey from 12 hours to 20 hours. Every time I passed one of these "road closures" the car went mad and tried to make me turn back. Once I passed this virtual point of no consequence, the car routed me around the next fake road closure. None of the 8 road closures on its display was correct - there were not even any road work equipment to be seen.

Eventually I turned off traffic info, and the road closures disappeared. However, it still routed me on a road that is 160km longer than the optimal route. And both routes were on standard national grade highways so it was not a "prefer highway" or toll issue. Bottom line - the route I picked to drive took 12 hours, the route it recommended for 80% of the trip would have added 8 hours to my journey.

That said, the car itself is fantastic to drive. I have no real issues with handling, performance, steering etc. I did complain about the wheels following the road too much, but it is a small issue. It is probably one of the best cars I ever drove.

However, when you look at a typical car review, they rate it poorly due to:

I have a permission protected PDF document that I am viewing in Apple's Preview app (its built in PDF reader). The permissions state that I cannot copy content without the password:

However a simple workaround is to right click on the paragraph, then use the "Search with Google" feature. It will open Google in your default browser with all the selected text extracted.