Humino: Accessing Soil Data With a Telegram Bot

I have written about building an Arduino-based soil monitoring system and how to predict time until next watering with linear regression. Yet, to see these results I had to shutdown the Arduino every morning, remove the SD card it was logging data to, copy that to my computer and run the analysis script. That should be wireless!

So I setup a bot for Telegram messenger that I can ask for the current measurements.

Humino: Predicting when plants will need watering

In the last post I wrote a follow-along to building an Arduino-based soil monitoring system. In this post I want to write about how I used linear regression to predict how much time is left until the plants are dry again.

  Hibiskus        wet (56.40%)
  Walnuss         wet (50.18%)
  Dieffenb B      2 days (53.21%)
  Dieffenb H      3 days (64.22%)
  Yucca           7 days (45.06%)

Edit: After running this for two weeks I found the predictions to be very unreliable and not very useful. Sometimes the sensor values fall continuously and then it works great, but often the influence of sun/warmth on the readings makes them unpredictable.

Humino: Monitor Soil Humidity with an Arduino

Another thing I wanted to have since I was maybe 5 years old? PLANTS with MICROCHIPS! Probably the hardest part about keeping my green friends alive is making sure that they get enough water even when I am busy with other stuff, on vacation, etc etc. Now that there are cheap Arduinos to have it has gotten quite easy to realise this!

Metadata Petting Zoo

Cellphones make available large amounts of personal information about you in public airspace. I propose building a metadata petting zoo to raise awareness for this issue and some possible solutions. This broadcasting of metadata is a necessity for you using your phone. It cannot be disabled until cellphone technology is recreated from the ground up with privacy in mind. It doesn’t require hidden surveillance technology but makes use of the most common network systems such as Wifi, LTE, GSM and Bluetooth.

An Independent Blog using Hugo and Dat

Everyone should have a button on their computer that reads “make a new website”. This is one of the things that the Dat project is working on with the Beaker browser: Making it easy to self-publish content on the web without using centralized infrastructure services from the likes of Google and Amazon. As I create this blog using Hugo, a static site generator, I thought it should be pretty easy to make it available on Dat.

High Modernism

Cal Newport beschreib Silicon Valley’s tiefen Glauben daran, dass man die Menschheit mithilfe von Technologie verbessern kann. Dabei geht es nicht nur darum, Leiden aus der Welt zu schaffen, sondern auch darum, das Gute im Menschen zu vervielfachen. Wenn Menschen Bekanntschaften knüpfen und sich vernetzen um gute Dinge zu tun, dann könne es nur gut sein, wenn man dieses ins Extreme katapultiert und alle Menschen miteinander verbindet. Er bezieht sich dabei auf ein Memo eines Facebook-Ingenieurs, in welchem dieser seine Beobachtung beschreibt, das genau dies Facebooks DNA ist, das undiskrimierende Vernetzen aller Menschen überhaupt.

I read these lines as arguing that the natural state of human interaction is hopelessly irrational and ineffective. Facebook hopes to replace this “fragmented” state of human sociality with something better; something that spans borders and languages; something that offers many more connections; something that can leverage big data and smart AI to direct our relationships in an optimal manner.

This vision is classic High Modernism — merely shifted from city cores and farm fields to the digital realm. It should, therefore, scare the hell out of us.

If you went back in time 15 years, and showed James Scott a draft of Boz’s vision, Scott would almost certainly warn you that an attempt to reshape something as fundamental and messy as human sociality with a “better” technological solution would backfire in unexpected, dark, and painful ways.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/04/11/the-disturbing-high-modernism-of-silicon-valley/

Writing Todo-Lists Helps Sleeping

Bedtime worry, including worrying about incomplete future tasks, is a significant contributor to difficulty falling asleep. Previous research showed that writing about one’s worries can help individuals fall asleep. We investigated whether the temporal focus of bedtime writing—writing a to-do list versus journaling about completed activities—affected sleep onset latency. Fifty-seven healthy young adults (18–30) completed a writing assignment for 5 min prior to overnight polysomnography recording in a controlled sleep laboratory.

Die Kontroversesten Fragen im Wahl-o-Mat

Der Konsens-o-Mat POC von Felix Bolte zeigt, dass der Fragenkatalog des Wahl-o-Mat nicht nur Kontroversen, sondern auch Übereinstimmungen der Parteien zeigen kann. Ich fand das interessant und habe eine Variation des Konzepts gebaut um zu sehen, welche Fragen zur Bundestagswahl 2017 besonders Kontrovers waren und in welchen die Parteien übereinstimmen. Es gibt drei Thesen, in denen alle großen Parteien (Union, SPD, AfD, FDP, Linke und Grüne) übereinstimmen: Kindergeld soll nur an deutsche Familien ausgezahlt werden.