Over the past few months I’ve been changing out the light in our apartment for some of the plain white Philips Hue lamps. On the whole I’ve been pretty impressed. Using apps like Yonomi I was able to set up a kids bedtime routine, where with the click of a single button, the main lamp in the kids room turns off, the side lamp dims to 1% and the Sonos starts playing lullabies at 15% volume. ...

Since the Google Chromecast was first introduced I’ve loved the device. It just feels like the fight way to control the TV, you use the rich interface on your phone to find what you want to watch and then with the press of a button it’s on your TV. Having only played briefly with Apple TV, and it’s silly little remote control, Chromecast just feels right. There were some issues with the original Chromecast where streaming would occasionally buffer. With Netflix it was fine, but Plex did have quite a few issues, even with the WiFi access point in the same room. Ensuring that the WiFi connection to the Chromecast was not encrypted by Plex did help (as the Chromecast only has limited processing power), but there were still issues. ...

I should start this off by saying I love both my QNAP NAS and the online backup service provided by CrashPlan. When I found that there were packages that could be installed on the NAS which would automatically backup to the cloud it seemed like the perfect solution. At home I make sure all photos get copied to the NAS, then the CrashPlan process does it’s magic and makes sure that they are all backedup. ...

It has taken me a long time to get around to finally setting up the Raspberty Pi’s I received over Christmas. Supprisingly, it was very simple to setup the Pi, once over coming my only real issue. I had some old 4GB SD cards lying around, which I wanted to use. However, it would appear that the official Raspbian download I was working with needed an 8Gb card to install. At this point I sarted looking for an alternative and found minibian, a cutdown version of the Raspbian distribution without the GUI components. ...

Years ago I installed WhatsApp on my phone. When I opened it up for the first time, I was asked if I wanted to upload my entire contact list onto their servers. I was unsure if I should really do this, as the contact data is not mine to give away. There is no way I could choose which of the contacts I wanted to share with WhatsApp, and in the end decided I would rather just delete the application. ...

So guess what some nice people got me for Christmas? Now I need to start some new projects. I think that first on the list will be moving this website from an old laptop.

I am not sure what keeps drawing me back. I want to blog, start a little, then have no time for it, so give up again. So here is another attempt at setting up a @withknown server at home to see if I can keep going for more than 5 minutes. I already appear to be having some issues with dyndns, which does not appear to propagate my address out to everyone. But that is something to work on later.

On 30th September I attended the Agile Leadership Day 20151 conference, held at GDI in Rüschlikon2. During the day there were a number of half hour sessions happening in one of four tracks3 and visitors to the conference were able to choose which of the sessions they wanted to attend. The second session I attended was hosted by Paul Boekhout4 of Trapeze GmbH5, and described in the abstract as: Paul Boekhout is Head of Control Centre Development at Trapeze GmbH in Neuhausen am Rheinfall and leading the transition to Agile Development. Drawing on his experience in change and transition management in an agile context, he introduced Agile Scrum in the Technical Development department. This transformation is an ongoing journey with various obstacles along the way. Scaling Scrum to 20 teams while developing new products brings new challenges for the organization - the (line)management, teams and customers. ...

On 30th September I attended the Agile Leadership Day 20151 conference, held at GDI in Rüschlikon2. During the day there were a number of half hour sessions happening in one of four tracks3 and visitors to the conference were able to choose which of the sessions they wanted to attend. This first session I attended was hosted by Melissa Lang4 of Xing Barcelona, whose abstract for the talk read: The Xing Barcelona office is currently home to 3 development teams comprised of people from all over the world. We are predominantly developers, and also have test engineers, agile project managers, user experience and visual design specialists. In the past two years the number of employees at Xing’s Barcelona office has nearly doubled in size. ...