prometheus

5 Articles

This image created using GPT-4o on Poe using the prompt “picture of an upright freezer connected to a computer for temperature monitoring, together with a graph and an alarm siren. Suitable for a professional blog. Be humorous and use a vintage theme.”

Freezer Monitoring: Because Ice Cream Is A Dish Best Served Cold

July 21, 2025 by 23 Comments

[Scott Baker] wrote in to let us know about his freezer monitor.

After a regrettable incident where the ice cream melted because the freezer failed [Scott] decided that what was called for was a monitoring and alerting system. We enjoyed reading about this hack, and we’ll give you the details in just a tick, but before we do, we wanted to mention [Scott]’s justifications for why he decided to roll his own solution for this, rather than just using the bundled proprietary service from the white goods manufacturer.

We’re always looking for good excuses for rolling our own systems, and [Scott]’s list is comprehensive: no closed-source, no-api cloud service required, can log with high fidelity, unlimited data retention, correlation with other data possible, control over alerting criteria, choice of alerting channels. Sounds fair enough to us!

Continue reading “Freezer Monitoring: Because Ice Cream Is A Dish Best Served Cold” →

Promethean Matches: The Ancestor To Modern Matches

December 25, 2023 by 7 Comments

The history of making fire at will is a long and storied one, stretching back to the days when we’d rub wooden sticks together, or use flint and steel to ignite tinder. An easier, albeit vastly more expensive and dangerous alternative came in the 19th century when chemists discovered auto-ignition using a potassium chlorate mixture and sulfuric acid. This method was refined and later patented by Samuel Jones in 1828 as the ‘promethean match’ after the God of Fire, Prometheus, which is the topic of a recent [NurdRage] chemistry video.