Python on Rusty Bower

Automating a Smart Bird Feeder's Photo Archive with Kubernetes and Immich

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Bird Buddy smart feeder takes a photo every time a bird visits. Over a few months, that adds up to thousands of images — all sitting in Bird Buddy’s cloud app with no good way to search, organize, or back them up. I wanted them in Immich, my self-hosted photo library, organized by species and properly timestamped.

Unit-Testing Home Automations That Run in Kubernetes

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Home automations are code that controls physical things. When they break, the consequences aren’t a 500 error — they’re a garage door that won’t close in a snowstorm, or window shades that open at 3 AM, or a tablet that charges to 100% and stays plugged in for months until the battery swells.

Fixing 10,000 Upside-Down Scanned Slides with a Local Vision LLM

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My grandfather had about 10,000 35mm slides. I rented a SlideSnap X1 and spent a weekend feeding them through — 33 boxes worth, organized into folders by box. The scanner itself was great, but when you’re pushing through thousands of slides in a weekend, some inevitably go in upside down or backwards. No metadata, no EXIF orientation flags — just thousands of JPEGs, some right-side up, some not, sitting on a NAS.

Finding Fraud in $1 Trillion of Medicaid Data with DuckDB

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

CMS recently published provider-level Medicaid spending data from T-MSIS — every fee-for-service, managed care, and CHIP claim from 2018 through 2024, aggregated by billing provider, procedure code, and month. 227 million rows. $1.09 trillion in payments. I wanted to see what falls out when you run some basic fraud heuristics against it.