January 2025 – addshore

mwcli (a MediaWiki focused command line tool targeting developers) over the years

January 25, 2025 by addshore

mcwli includes the third of so generation of “developer environments” that I have made for MediaWiki over the years. You can see the backstory in this earlier post.

Since the early days of 2022, there has been optional metric collection included within the mwcli tool.

This metric collection simply collects what command you run, and when you run it (without any parameters or inputs) so that the data can be aggregated, and the various commands usage can be graphed.

Each command run includes something like:

Command	docker mediawiki exec
DateTime	2025-01-07T12:45:18.213Z
Version	0.25.1

I used to have live (ish) graphs in the Wikimedia Superset installation, however, the queries there appear to fail now. So I took some time to export the dataset as a CSV, and shove it around a bit in a Python notebook.

Smart Home: 1.5 years of Aqara Temperature and Humidity Sensors

January 6, 2025 by addshore

As one of the initial steps in my smart home journey back in November 2023, I purchased a set of 12 Aqara Temperature and Humidity Sensors for £101 (approximately £8 each) from Aliexpress. Today, this same set is available for around £89, or £7.40 each.

This was the start of my Zigbee experiments, and you can read more about the initial setup in my first post talking about my initial setup and home assistant dashboarding.

Since then, my Zigbee mesh has continued to expand with a bunch of powered devices, and I have had to start my first round of battery changes on the Aqara sensors. There have also been some power cuts leading to my hub turning off, many home assistant restarts and upgrades, and I feel that I have some more to share.

To this date I have still only permanently fixed one of these sensors in any way, most of them are just resting in nice out-of-the-way places, or on top of door frames.

2024 Year Review

January 4, 2025 by addshore

A very different year when compared to 2023 (where I spent most of the year on a boat).

I’m back working full-time, and primarily in a closed source space (currently) at Lightbug. I’m primarily cloud focused, but have been moving closer and closer to the firmware and hardware month by month. I’m looking forward to releasing some new things this year, including something with an ESP on board!

It’s been the first year that I have stepped back from Wikimedia since starting as a volunteer, and then also working there full-time, and that has been a refreshing break.

Within the Wikimedia world, my primarily volunteer focuses have been and will continue to be:

The future of the Wikibase ecosystem
- I wrote a whole series of posts about how the existing entity system works
- Spent some time working on wikibase.world, highlighting ecosystem connections
- Watching wikibase.cloud from the distance
mwcli (which really needs a new name)

Smart Home: Automated zonal lights with Aqara FP2, Samotech Zigbee Dimmers, and Node-Red

January 4, 2025 by addshore

At some point in 2024 I bought an Aqara FP2 human presence sensor to try and automate the lights in my main open-plan living space. I have been running the installation for nearly a year, now have plans for the future and want to take this opportunity to do a quick write-up on how I have things configured, and how they have been working.

The room

Firstly, a little introduction to the space that I’m playing with…

It’s a kitchen, dinning, living space, with a main single entrance door, as well as large opening bifold doors to the back (both highlighted with red lines). The main flow of people in and out is indicated by the orange arrow on the right, which comes through the main single entrance door.