November 25, 2010Web hosting provider exploited again

The previous hack to Tiedeman.com was a replacement of the index.html page with a banner page for a hacking group. This exploit hijacked the standard error pages to provide ad content.

November 28, 2009Weather station out of service

The weather station has been failing to upload data for the past 4 months. The weather station hardware appears to have lost communication with the computer on July 8th, 2009. The weather data displayed on the LCD was correct but the data wasn't making it up the chain to the web sites. A simple reboot of the weather station hardware has fixed the issue.

September 21, 2008The webcam fails . . . again.

The newer S410 webcam has failed after only a little over a month of service. As these cameras weren't built for this type of service, I am not really surprised. Getting a replacement may take a while.

August 25, 2008Replaced the failing webcam

The failing webcam has finally been replaced with a new camera. This was a simple replacement of a Canon S400 with a spare Canon S410. This should have been done sooner but the weather website maintenance engineer doesn't get up to Michigan on a regular basis anymore.

May 22, 2008Weather photo conversion to webcam size

The weather underground site has a new feature where you can upload your weather photos and they will be made into a video. Limitation is that the weather photo has to be 150k or less. Since we use a Canon PowerShot s400 to take the weather photo, we were over the limit by about 1.6 megs. Used some Image Magick and Perl scripting to get the photo into the proper format.

May 21, 2008Weather photo house keeping

Fixed an issue with the camera that takes the weather photos. It looks like after several years of service the camera may be showing its age. I had to make an adjustment in the processing of the photo to correct the exposure (a little under exposed but will work in more situations).

January 31, 2007Tiedeman.com gets hacked by G3N3T1X - 3X3NT

That was interesting - It was a basic defacement of the main page. I found an entry in one of their forums containing links to all of the sites that they hacked. Tiedeman.com was within a group of 90 other sites. If you want to see the forum posting, here is the link http://www.rootinq.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=428. If you go there, be careful, you never know what they may try and hit you with. Overall not a big deal to me, however, the forum says they got the "Birmingham Social Anxiety Group". Now, that is just plain mean - Those people already think that they aren't liked. :)

November 19, 2006Photo albums synchronized with home libraries

Over the last few weeks a massive amount of time and bandwidth has been spent synchronizing our local photo libraries with Gallery.  There are now over 10,000 photos in the private picture library (password required).  The synchronization process is 95% automated so updates happen frequently now.

July 21, 2006Gallery used for photos

Replaced the photos section with Gallery.  Gallery is an open source web based photo album organizer.  Go to gallery.menalto.com for more information.

July 16, 2006Tiedeman.com look and feel overhaul

After years of sitting dormant, a complete facelift has been applied (or should that be removed) to the web site.

April 8, 2006Weather camera software gets an upgrade

The weather camera script was updated to date and time stamp the weather photo.

February 25, 2006Weather camera goes online

Weather camera #1 (view of the backyard) has been put in place.  The camera consists of an old Connectix QuickCam.  A script was written to automate the picture capture and transferring of the image.

December 25, 2005Weather station goes online

An Oregon Scientific WMR-968 (Christmas present) was put into production around 9:30 am.  This weather station features the following:

• Anemometer (measures wind speed and direction)
• Barometer
• Thermometer
• Humidity sensor
• Self-emptying Rain Gauge
• Indoor temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors

September 20, 1999Tiedeman.com web site is put up

Unfortunately, not much happens for the next few years.