Technology | Our thoughts and musings

How to setup use NexxHome garage door opener with Google Home

After a lot of discussions and false starts, we finally took the plunge in making our home a smart home starting with smart speakers and thermostats. After we moved into our own home, we were always kind of worried about the garage door and once or twice we have left it open only for our neighbors to call us and alert us about it.

We were not sure about how to handle it when a couple of our friends told us about the smart garage door openers that operate over WiFi and are accessible over the internet from anywhere. We did some research and based on the reviews and feedback from our friends, we decided to go for the NexxHome smart garage door opener. Based on the information provided on the product page on Amazon and on the NexxHome website, the device works with Alexa as well as Google Home. While I was able to find a lot of sites that showed how it works with Alexa, I was not able to find any tutorials on how to link and enable NexxHome with Google Home. The device doesn't even come up on Google Home App when I try to add a device.

I was disappointed and stumped. But then, I found this document on the NexxHome support page that kind of gave me a direction to pursue.

Integrating NexxHome with Google Home is not very straight forward. There is a roundabout way of doing it. Before linking Nexxhome with Google Home, the Nexxhome App needs to be prepped up a little bit.

Open your NexxHome App and tap on Setting (gear icon)
In the next screen, tap on "Works With" menu and enable Google Assistant
Once that is done, open your Google Home App and click on the user icon
Tap on Explore and in the search window, type Nexx Home and select on the Nexx Home result
In the next window, click on Link to link your NexxHome with Google assistant and enter your NexxHome credentials to login when prompted.
Once you login, the Nexx will be linked and it will show Try it button to try the commands.

That's it. This successfully links NexxHome with your Google Home and Google assistant.

Note: Although it links successfully, the linkage is not very reliable and you may not get the desired results every time. However, for me, it has worked as expected 8 out of 10 times. Hope this helps others as well.

Troubleshooting and fixing 404 errors on a self hosted WordPress

After hosting my website on Plone and attempting to host it on plain HTML5 I decided that time has come for me to use a CMS. As I wrote in the Hello World post (i.e. the first post) I chose to use WordPress. I installed it and as my work and life made me busier and busier, I kind of ignored. It is very apparent from the irregularity of the posts and blank periods in the posting.

Anyhow, the point is that I didn't realize that the permalinks, categories and tags were not working. When I clicked on a particular post or tags or categories, it showed me a 404 error. So essentially I had a broken site on my hands. And here I was wondering why my site was not coming up in searches and why I was not getting any traffic. SEO helps Google to crawl and index the website most effectively when permalinks, tags and categories are setup correctly.

Apparently, it is a very common error in WordPress with a very straight forward solution. A simple google search most likely leads you to the right solution. My objective is not to add to the burgeoning posts of "How to fix 404 errors on WordPress". The objective of this how-to is to address one edge case that will occur when you are trying to host WordPress on your own server/computer.

I followed a lot of posts and almost all of them told me the same thing.

Re-save the permalink settings and
Ensure you have the .htaccess in your WordPress directory (some of them don't tell that you should have it in the WordPress directory though).

I was at my wits end on what to do to solve the problem. I was about to give up and try and reinstall WordPress when I came across this site and the how-to. That how-to does address the edge case of people like me who like to run their own web servers instead of buying managed hosting. In fact, I am running my site in containers. In fact re-installing WordPress would have added work and would have broken my site. Thankfully I stayed away from it.

The rewrite module of Apache is not automatically enabled. This was the "A-HA" moment for me. I checked out the modules that were loaded by running sudo apachectl -L and sure enough there was no rewrite module enabled there. I double checked that I had the rewrite module binary in the mods-available directory in my Apache distribution.

At this point, I was ready to enable the module by running sudo a2enmod rewrite and sudo service apache2 restart on my server and enable the module. After that, I was able to reset the permalinks to whatever I wanted it to be. This fix also worked tags and categories.

I hope this helps whoever is facing this issue.

Slyly yours, Netflix

Dear Netflix,

Did you really think that you could increase your revenue by surreptitiously increasing the subscription price by upgrading the plan without my permission (and several hundred thousands others) to premium.

Well, now the rant is out of the way, I think I can get down to business.

This all started a couple of days ago, when I got an email from Netflix on Apr 21 telling me that my plan price was going to increase to $10.99 from $9.99 and the updated pricing is part of Netflix's commitment to improve Netflix. Ok. So far so good. I understand the prices are going up and I am willing to pay more for better service and I didn't think twice about it.

A week later on April 29th, I received another email from Netflix telling me that they have updated my plan to premium allegedly as "I had asked" and the price had gone up to $13.99. I don't remember asking or even logging in to Netflix account to update / upgrade my plan so where did this come from? I promptly went to the account settings and reverted the plan to standard which is 2 screens at a time with HD content as opposed to 4 screens at a time with HD and Ultra HD content. I don't even own a TV that support U-HD content. Why will I use that service?

In perfect honesty, my family and I don't even get to watch Netflix twice a week. What would make us upgrade to 4 screens and Ultra-HD content? This doesn't seem right and honest behaviour to me. And now I am stuck with a service I don't want to use and will not use till the next billing cycle.

I would still like to see where I have requested this change to the account plan.

Netflix, are you listening?

Rock, Paper, Scissors… in Python

For a long, long time, I have been an enthusiast of Python programming language. I am embarrassed to say that I have been trying to learn it fully for the past 10 or so years. In this much time with proper focus and dedication, I would have been a guru. But here I am, still a novice. But that's beside the point.

Now that summer vacation is here, I have decided to teach my kids Python programming as much as I know. I want to show them the path and take them with me as far as I can go and then I hope they will go further from there. While Some time ago (maybe a couple of years ago) I had given myself a challenge to create a program that I had no source or coaching. So I had decided to create a game in Python. I chose the simple game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Over time, I changed computers and somehow I lost the source code of the program.

When my daughter started learning, she reminded me of the program and wanted to play the game. So I got started to write the program again. I'm happy to report that I have successfully re-written program. I'm sure there is a lot of scope of improvement in the coding style, code, and overall structure. But I am just starting and hope to improve. I'm posting the source code of my program and I will welcome all constructive criticism of the code and suggestions for improvement.

# An all-time favorite game of Rock Paper Scissors. # An all-time favorite game of Rock Paper Scissors. # Programmer: Mukul Dharwadkar # Date: June 27 2017


import random
def instructions():

"""Displays the game instructions"""

print \ """ Today we will play the perennial favorite game of... Rock! Paper!! Scissors!!!.

The objective of the game is to outthink your opponent (in this case me) and defeat.

The rules are very simple

1.Paper covers the Rock

2.Rock breaks the Scissors

3.Scissors cut the Paper

Choose your move from the following:

1. Paper (p)

2. Rock (r)

3. Scissors (s)

Are you ready? Alright then, let's play... """
def get_name():

"""Get player's name"""

print \

"""First of all, let's get to know each other a little better.

My name is Compy...

What's yours?

"""

player_name = raw_input("What is your name: ")

return player_name
def greet_player(name):

"""Let's be polite and greet each other properly"""

print "How are are you doing %s?" % name
def legal_moves():

"""Define the legal moves"""

legal_moves = ("r", "p", "s")

return legal_moves
def player_move():

"""Players choose their move"""

move = None

while move not in moves:

move = raw_input("What is your move %s? --> " % name)

return move
def computer_move():

"""The computer will choose its move in this function"""

move = random.choice(moves)

print "Computer's move is %s" % move

return move
def compare_moves(p_move, c_move):

"""We will now compare the moves the human and computer make and then take the output to declare the winner"""

#This is a very crude way of writing this comparison code. Is there a better way to do this?

#TODO: Find out optimized way of writing this block of code.

if p_move == "r" and c_move == "p":

return "computer"

elif p_move == "r" and c_move == "s":

return "human"

elif p_move == "p" and c_move == "s":

return "computer"

elif p_move == "p" and c_move == "r":

return "human"

elif p_move == "s" and c_move == "r":

return "computer"

elif p_move == "s" and c_move == "p":

return "human"
def declare_winner(winner):
if winner == "human":

print "%s wins. Congratulations and well played!!!" % name

elif winner == "computer":

print "Computer wins. Better luck next time %s." % name

else: print "It's a tie"

#main body of the program instructions() name = get_name() moves = legal_moves() greet_player(name) p_move = player_move() c_move = computer_move() winner = compare_moves(p_move, c_move) declare_winner(winner)
Note: The indentation of the code is lost.
To do: Create a GUI interface for the program if I can.

Running WordPress site in distinct containers

I have been running my site on Plone for a long time, but the maintenance required was too high and I ran into several issues with bloated data file, unsupported plugins to name a few. Plus the instance was not very portable in case my server died or I had to move.

Then I was thinking about creating my own content management system, but time was a factor and the I thought I was losing my focus. What do I really want to do? Publish my thoughts, or develop something new. Actually it is both, but I don't want it to become dependent on each other. So I decided to use prebuilt software. I very quickly evaluated Drupal, WordPress, Movable Type and decided that WordPress looks to be the best at this time. More on the evaluation later.

Second challenge was to make it completely portable by using containers and not just VMs.

To be continued...