Sean Blanchfield · Page 2
Real Time Device Power Meter for Home Assistant
I created a nice real-time power meter with device-level info to display on my Home Assistant dashboard. This shows the current overall power usage in the house, along…
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Mounting NAS Shares for Frigate in Home Assistant OS
I recently switched my Network Video Recorder (NVR) from Synology Surveillance Station to Frigate, and will never look back. It turns out people say " Frigate is awesome…
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Real-Time Picture-in-Picture Camera Feeds on your TV with Home Assistant
I've found a way to get a RTSP camera feed to display in a picture-in-picture popup on my TV, without interrupting any other viewing that might be going…
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Improving the Ezviz DB1 doorbell
I am preparing to replace my Nest doorbell with the Ezviz DB1. But first of all, it desperately needed facelift. This wonderful device has two asthetic issues I…
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Docker Swarm Lowers the Shields
Today I learned that Docker automatically does extremely wreckless and dangerous things to the firewall on every node in a docker swarm, which leaves various swarm services wide…
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Virtual Energy Meters with PowerCalc
In my last post I described how I optimised my home heating with Home Assistant and then created virtual energy sensors to monitor my estimated gas usage from…
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Automating Heating with Home Assistant
I’ve been on a mission to use Home Assistant to optimize my home heating, with the dual goals of reducing gas usage and increasing comfort. It’s worked out…
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Virtual Gas Meters in Home Assistant
Unfortunately, we do not have smart gas meters in Ireland. However, I realised that I could use Home Assistant to create virtual gas meters, which provide a good…
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Automating the HY367 / HY368 Smart Radiator Actuator in Home Assistant
The HY367 and HY368 Smart Radiator Actuators are relatively cheap smart thermostatic valves that you can attach to the radiators in your house, effectively turning each room into…
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The road to native ES6 SPAs
TL;DR . In this post I go on a major rant against the Javascript/Babel/Webpack/Node development stack, and then talk about the problems I'm facing in my attempt to…
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Reaction to Budget 2015
Having led the #StartupIreland pre-budget submission (see here , here , here and here , I was extremely disappointed by Budget 2015. Not only did the government fail…
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Reforming R&D Tax Credits
In this fourth (and final) post in my series covering the budget recommendations that I coordinated at StartupIreland , I'm talking about our recommendations for the R&D tax…
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Employee Ownership Schemes in Ireland
In this third post in my series covering the budget recommendations that I coordinated at StartupIreland , I'm republishing our rundown on the current problems encountered by Irish…
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Looking to the UK - Entrepreneurial Incentives
In this second post in my series covering the budget recommendations that I coordinated at StartupIreland , I cover our recommendations to reform Ireland's myriad of incentive schemes…
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Equal Income Tax for Entrepreneurs
I was honoured to lead the pre-budget submission project for #StartupIreland . Our goal this year was to identify a number of "low-hanging fruit" budget measures that could…
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Easy Startup Dashboards
At PageFair we’ve repurposed all our spare monitors as cheap real-time business dashboards. Here's how you can do the same ( especially if you’re in Dublin ).
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The Scale Investor
I’ve written before about the venture chasm - the widening gulf between the founders and the funds, a gap that continues to widen as technology startups figure out…
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Trademark Phishing Scam
We recently filed a trademark application for our company, PageFair . This morning I received (by snail mail) this official-looking invoice from the "European Patent and Trademark Register"…
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5 Ways Employees Need to Think Like Investors
Are you thinking of taking a job in a startup? If so, this post is for you. Every employee in a startup is making an investment, but rarely…
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Awkward Bedfellows: Xero and AIB
In PageFair I'm striving to automate as much admin as possible. This means figuring out for once and for all how best to handle startup accountancy in Ireland,…
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How Capital Gains Tax Strangles Irish Startups
The budget is coming early this year, and rumour has it that Minister Noonan will once again increase the Capital Gains Tax. CGT has been increased four times…
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Ditching the Pitch
The seventeenth century polymath Blaise Pascal famously quipped that he was sorry for the length of his letter - he didn’t have time to write a shorter one.…
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The Venture Chasm
The technology sector is buzzing and we’re hearing more about venture capitalists than any time since the dot-com bubble. With part of your pension and some of your…
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Speaking at TEDx
I gave a talk on intellectual property at TEDx at Goodenough College in London in February 2013. I focused on patents, how they have fallen out of step…
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Scale Front featured in the Irish Times
Pamela Newenham wrote a great piece on us in the Irish Times today, 22nd November 2012, featuring one of our products, TechTeams , before going on to discuss…
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4G to Empower Indigenous Digital Industry
Although both our economy and our people are depressed, there was a ray of light in this week’s auction of the part of the radio spectrum necessary for…
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Make an Impact: Start a Startup
I gave the keynote speech at the Python Ireland Conference on October 14th 2012. I proposed that Dublin is one of the world's best emerging startup hubs, uniquely…
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The Talented 38: Ireland’s top technology and startup leaders
Dylan Collins and I put our heads together to make a list of Irish people under forty who are leading the startup and technology scene. Watch these names…
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Work Permits and the Knowledge Economy
The "knowledge economy" is a powerful vision of Ireland's future, one that sidesteps the disadvantage of being a nondescript mid-Atlantic island with a pitiful domestic market, while playing…
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Interview at Architalks#7
I gave a quick interview at Archipelago's Archietalk#7 at the Sugar Club on Tuesday 7th. Despite two pints of guinness I managed to be more or less coherent…
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