Prelude

We decided to put up some lights around the house for this year’s Christmas. As is my curse, I decided to whip up some fancy rainbow animations using a bunch of WS2811 LEDs and a NodeMCU that I had lying around. (see: LeapRGB)

What’s unique about these LEDs is that each one contains an IC; as such, it allows you to individually control each LED in the strip. A typical LED strip might have a power and a ground line and have the entire strip light up uniformly. Here, we have a power, ground and a data line that can be fed using a microcontroller.

Intro

No blog of mine is complete without a rant (and/or flex) about GNU/Linux and my choice of distro (take a guess). An introduction to the terms mentioned here for any uninitiated (non-existent) readers:-

• GNU/Linux (popularly and arguably known as Linux): An open-source operating system (which can be free)
• Rice: a swamp grass which is widely cultivated as a source of food

Now that we have the essential information, we can get on to the story of how my experience with Linux led me to start a tech-repair empire by “putting it in rice”. I was approximately 0.38 years old when I first laid eyes on a rice grain …..

(Evil) Backstory

So, I finally decided to buy myself a domain and put myself out there on the interwebs. This obviously isn’t my first presence on the internet (throwback to pre-affordable-internet days when I used to sit around scrolling on the sand as opposed to almighty machine learning overlord curated content).

Old Website

I even used to have a website before this one. Right around the time I created a GitHub, I managed to whip up a simple landing page for myself which has been available at clifordjoshy.github.io for the past three years. By the time this goes up, that site (that I’ll let you know took me a whole night to figure out the CSS for) would’ve been long buried in some Microsoft cache somewhere. As a remembrance of the website that’s been with me throughout my (villainous?) journey, I’ll leave here a screenshot.