Sean Blanchfield

Had a great chat with Mark Kelly on the AI Ireland podcast. A quick listen in which we cover AI, agents, the startup journey, the future, and more.

We are at the dawn of the generative AI revolution - the most significant technological innovation since the World Wide Web, and possibly the most significant ever. AI might be our last innovation, because all future innovations will be invented by AI.

The first provisions of the new EU AI Act recently came into force. I welcome the intentions of the EU AI Act, but it creates wide-ranging compliance hurdles for EU businesses at a vital time when we need to embrace the future, or opt out of it.

I was recently interviewed by Gary Fox, the founder of The Entrepreneur Experiment, a podcast that explores the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and rewards of starting a business, the importance of persistence, and the role of failure in the success of a startup.

I’ve been having back-to-back conversations about the AI agentic future for a few months now, and I’ve found people are throwing this new piece of “agent” jargon around a bit loosely, referring to pretty distinct things. Here’s what I’ve classified so far:

An ungraceful restart of my Home Assistant host left me with a corrupted sqlite3 database. This is the database where Home Assistant core stores the history of all entity state and long-term statistics, like energy and power readings. I could have deleted the old database and started over, but a better solution is to fix it. Here’s how I fixed it by SSHing into Home Assistant.

Dylan Collins and I recorded a podcast on the early days of Demonware, a video games middleware company we co-founded in 2003. Demonware developed multiplayer technology for video games studios on Xbox and Playstation, just as online gaming was going mainstream. Demonware’s splashscreen will be familiar to many gamers from the countless titles that have incorporated its technology, including major online franchises like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.

Here is a highly detailed guide to how I built my floorplan UI for my Home Assistant-based smart home. This consists of an interactive realistic digital twin of each floor of my house, with dynamic lighting, doors, and windows.

I keep notes on some odd things, and one of them is ways I have of thinking about things. For one reason or another I ended up trying to write out some of these notes properly this week, but decided not to use it. Here it is for posterity.

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 on. This all happens locally, without any cloud services, and should work with any IP camera that provides an RTSP stream. This is achieved using a modest IP camera, an Android TV (in my case an Nvidia Shield set top box), a side-loaded app called Pipup on the Android TV and Home Assistant. Read on to find out how.

I recently set up an Intel NUC as new home server, ended up hosting a wide range of services on it in containers or VMs. I initially tried using Proxmox to achieve this, but have found LXD running on top of Debian to be vastly preferable.

Getting Home Assistant OS running inside LXD wasn’t well documented, so here’s how I did it.