Two browsers walk into a bar. The bartender introduces them, then the horse says to the Ukrainian: "

…uhm.

So anyway, you've maybe heard of PouchDB, an IndexedDB (and WebSQL and LevelDB and HTTP…) wrapper that is replication-compatible with CouchDB. And maybe you've heard also of WebRTC, a browser API for "real-time communication" between peers.

Well, I combined the two.

It's called PeerPouch and it seems to work. In theory and practice. Basically it adds still another backend to PouchDB, which proxies all calls on the local instance to one on another peer. Connection setup itself is done via a PouchDB/CouchDB instance too. So it's Pouches all the way down.

I'm worried there's no easy-win use case due to the usability issues of combining browser storage (confusing) with peer-to-peer connections (uncertain) while still requiring mutual access to a central server (there's always a catch), but PeerPouch could be helpful for things like:

• unhosted-style apps where users keep their own data, but still want to share amongst themselves
• situations where there is a central server, but bandwidth/latency to it are too poor to be useful for an app's data needs — kinda one step away from offline first?
• collaborative apps where you want eventual consistency quickly

PeerPouch itself is super simple to use. So I'm thinking combined with an in-memory PouchDB backend it could join the ranks of WebRTC wrappers for generic chat/game/whatever apps disregarding the data storage PouchDB usually offers. The advantage would be not require anything more than a potentially-free IrisCouch or Cloudant pre-hosted server backend for signalling.

To demo/test it, I built a no-frills direct file transfer utility which I hope to get hosted once I get a suitable server backend ready for shared public consumption. Metakaolin is also high up on the list for some peerish collabification. Have you got any projects where this might be useful?

My solar system designer (and my mom and a sister) arrived tonight. Our solar photovoltaic modules should be arriving tomorrow morning. Then the install begins.

If the weather and wireless cooperate, you should be able to join the process too. I've got something of a reconnaissance mission waiting on standby. You can tap into the feed at solar.batsig.nl and into any commentary on Twitter.

Nerdly status report commenceth.

Nexus 4

Probably the biggest recent change was selling my iPhone 4 and replacing it with a Nexus 4.

No, not the cheap old off-brand tablet which it is taking a picture of.

As I found out when I got my Nexus 7 last year, modern Android is an excellent operating system. Seriously. The browsers [yes you have options], the extendable platform, the multitasking and notifications, even the visual design (especially the visual design?!) all put iOS to shame. It came down to: Google creeps me out, Apple pisses me off, and both big evil corporations are snug in bed with our benevolent shadow government (ALL HAIL). So I might as well enjoy a surveillance device with the superior user experience.

Unlike Apple, Google's not afraid of shipping products that do useful things with all the data they collect for the NSA, but I'm still trying to avoid most of those. Plus, many of the core pieces (calendar, contacts, photos) at least in theory will let me connect them to my own services via my own plugins. I'm eager to dabble in that when I find some time.

Wristmap

Speaking of time…

To celebrate finally having a pocketable Pebble proxy (my larger Nexus 7 doesn't get cell data and iOS pretty much sucked at all things Pebble), I got my Wristmap watchapp far enough along to share with others. Plenty more improvements to make, but it's already gotten some really encouraging feedback on the Pebble forums. You can read more details and follow along there.

net.ipcalf.com

Thanks to an impromptu lunch discussion about SIP with Lance Stout, I figured out how to extend my barebones public IP address site with a very handy new subdomain!

The new net.ipcalf.com subdomain uses WebRTC to find not your public IP address, but your network IP address — i.e. the LAN address you need for doing local testing. So it works great in Chrome and Firefox. Which both work great on my AWESOME NEW PHONE by the way :-P

Apparently it's already been making the rounds within the web security community due to how simply it shows the information disclosure, but in my opinion being able to set up peer-to-peer connections inside a LAN is a really cool feature of WebRTC worth the tradeoff. And not just as a handy web-development tool. (PeerPouch is coming.)

Greenhouse progress

It's not there yet, but the fish-feeding/greenhouse-monitoring equipment I mentioned in my last post is coming along fairly well. Over the weekend I got many of the additional sensors coded up and an improved food spout attached.

I've got to re-architect the Arduino side of things to avoid some long-blocking sensor reads, and shore up the Raspberry Pi side which has not been terribly reliable since an unfortunate wire-wrap accident involving a toddler. And then get it on the web.

Upcoming: Solar PV install!

This month will be busy though, as the next two weeks' schedule involves making this happen:

(design by my dad)

There may be a floating webcam involved.

On vacation, I…

Worked

I'm very grateful for clients that I can help from wherever I have a bit of occasional internet connectivity.

Bought a cool domain but just redirected it to some other domain for now

'nuff said

Submitted some talks to Cascadia.js

Though it looks like I wasn't the only one. The conference is in conjunction with a CouchDB conference too, so maybe I should keep submitting proposals!

Got "wristmap" mostly working

My "Hello World" app for my Pebble watch is called wristmap and it pretty much just shows a map of where you are thanks to Stamen's Toner tileset. You can zoom with the buttons and that's about it for now. Something small I should be able to ship, though.

Also contributed some patches to a libpebble fork that's helping me test httpebble usage via my Mac (instead of my Nexus 7) during development.

I suspect in practice there's some optimization that will be needed before deploying this. Right now the watch has to make about 50 HTTP requests per screen refresh which Isn't Ideal™. I've been studying Huffman coding and might like to try my hand at an implementation ;-)

Continued progress on Microstates

…specifically, I'm starting to see signs of life with the node.js module I'm putting together to wrap the Raspberry Pi RF24 library.

Didn't forget Fermata

I have an http client named Fermata that I use all the time but haven't urgently needed to improve much lately. Finally found a bit of time to think through the design of some lingering "nice-to-haves" before calling it a stable 1.0 release.

Fed the fish

(photo by Hjon)

Before we left, by which I mean still going at it about 10 minutes "before we left", I was testing sketches and flashing firmware and forwarding ports so that I could start using my greenhouse controller remotely. Thanks to some coding on the road a willing mechanical engineer friend back in town, we were able to re-connect the parts in place, find RF reception and FEED THE FISH from a thousand miles a way. Yay internet!

Relaxed

I got a lot of time in with both immediate and extended family too — whoohoo! In case you were wondering.

It's been hard work to work hard lately; my timesheet says I still haven't done as much of it as I should have. Freelancing ain't free.

Room to Think

Room to Think's coworking space is now closed, and the formal organization is dissolving. We hadn't found enough demand for full time membership, and the time and energy available for solving our sustainability problem had run out. I spent most of June overthinking the situation, talking with each of the members, helping figure out plans, etc.

The Meetup group is still going strong though, and I'm in a good new [although not to me!] office with several of the same friends I had at the coworking space.

D3.js book

I quit the book project towards the end of June. I expected it would take a significant amount of time, but I didn't account for just how. Staying up late working on the book was mentally and even emotionally draining, and in conjunction with the Room to Think happenings pretty much destroyed my ability to get paid work done during the day. Still sad to not have my name in print on a topic like D3, but I've been making too many other investments this year and could not afford this one.

I'd written the first third of the first three chapters, let it rest/rot for a month while worrying about more pressing concerns, and am now starting to consider the best way to share something useful out of that effort.

"Projects"

Have been delayed by at least two months, especially the ones that were already several years behind. Expect further delays until I am independently wealthy or irreparably destitute or get settled into some semblance of a productive daily/weekly routine which doesn't include book deadlines.

Life

Is a blessing. The kids have been growing, the garden/fish/list-of-exciting-household-projects has been growing, I have been growing. To what end I don't know, but here's to the flow.