All posts in “hack”

HomeKit IR Blaster: Controlling My TV with HomeKit

HomeKit IR Blaster: Controlling My TV with HomeKit

by Stephen Radford

If you've read any of my previous posts then you probably already realise I'm on a mission to automate my entire house and control it using Apple's HomeKit protocol. I'm pretty satisfied with the lights in my house now but there's plenty more I would still love to be able to control from my phone. In Search of an IR Blaster Rather than replacing everything in my home it made sense to try and find something to control my existing stuff. The majority of things like my TV, amp, fireplace, and fan are all controlled by IR so I started…

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Cheap HomeKit Light Bulbs

by Stephen Radford

Following on from my previous posts about using HomeKit with LIFX and creating HomeKit LED Strips I wanted to see if I could add some more bulbs into the mix. I wanted RGB bulbs so I could colour match with the LED strip I made so I looked at the LIFX Color 1000. It looks like a fantastic bulb and the only problem I have with it really is the price — at £60 on Amazon. Having built the Homebridge plugin for Magic Home WiFi devices I looked for some other devices running on same protocol. I found a fair few…

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Hacking macOS Sierra's PIP

Hacking macOS Sierra's PIP

by Stephen Radford

One of the headline features in macOS Sierra is Picture in Picture. Unfortunately Apple decided to restrict this to Safari and iTunes which means the majority of users will never get to use it. Digging into the Sierra GM PrivateFrameworks directory revealed a very helpfully named framework called PIP.framework. As with any framework it can be included in a project and used like any other. However Apple remove the headers from their private frameworks which stops us from using them freely. I ran the framework through Steve Nygard's excellent class-dump spitting out a number of helpful header files in…

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