Home AssistantSmart MetersUtility Integrations+4
Adventures in Home Assistant: Episode 3
When your utilities start talking back — electricity, water, leaks, pumps, and the integrations rabbit hole.
Gail Henry
Engineer · Programmer · Dog Mom
I’m a subsea systems engineer and programmer by day who also finds joy in home automation, photography and digital art, music, reading, quilting, mahjong and my very spoiled dog. Technical by training, creative by instinct.
This is where both halves share a home — the engineering, the code, and the things I make when the laptop is shut.
Everything here, in four places
The site splits along the same line my week does: the technical work, the writing about it, and the things I make when the laptop is shut.
Professional work and personal experiments, kept separate.
Notes on AI, programming, photography, and the rest of it.
Albums by subject, each opening into a full gallery.
Quilts, recipes, animals, home automation, mahjong.
Selected work
A couple of things worth showing.
Home AssistantHACSDocker+1
Adventures in Home Assistant: Episode 2
I installed HACS, unlocked the secret community store, and immediately discovered I now needed a way to edit YAML like a responsible adult.
MahjongAmerican Mahjong/NMJLPerdido Mah JonggMahj-On Society Kemah
My Mahjong Learning Journey: Episode 1
Pensacola raised me, Houston pays me, and now Mahjong owns me.
What I’m doing now
Updated
Training a feeder camera to tell hummingbird species apart, and discovering that most of the work is teaching it to recognise an empty frame.
Halfway through a queen-size quilt top in jewel tones, eleven blocks of which are quietly three degrees wrong.
Rebuilding this site from scratch.
Recent writing
AI, programming, photography, and the occasional quilt.
Artificial Intelligence
Teaching a Model to Recognise My Garden
What started as a weekend camera trap turned into six months of training an image classifier on my own back porch — and a lesson about which photographs actually matter.
2 min read
Photography
Shooting at 1/4000 and Still Missing
A hummingbird wing beats around fifty times a second. Freezing it is less about shutter speed than about accepting how many frames you are going to throw away.
1 min read
Quilting
The Quilt That Taught Me Version Control
Half a metre into a queen-size top I made a cutting error I could not undo, and finally understood why I have spent twenty years insisting on commits.
1 min read
Subsea systems
The day job — systems engineering on subsea projects,....
Code and automation
Programming, AI experiments, and a house that is slowly learning to run itself. Occasionally on purpose.
Made by hand
Photography, quilting, recipes, and mahjong. The half of the work that has nothing to do with work.