In an effort to be lazy, I decided to create an integration for Home Assistant…

I had a conversation with a colleague at $COMPANY recently. We catch up every now and again to discuss Life, The Universe, and Sometimes Work Things1. He knows I’m a bit of a Rust fan-boy, so if I bring it up in conversation, he tends to be less fan-boyish and more rational in his approach to thinking about it. This is a Good Thing! We need people to make unbiased judgments on new technologies, ideally with the help of a number of years experience in other languages or domains to shape their thoughts.

For a long time, I’ve used Damon Lynch1’s excellent Rapid Photo Downloader (RPD) to manage the photos and videos that are part of the ever-expanding Grumpy Metal Photography collection. Like most people with a mobile communications device, we tend to take photos of many things when out and about2. And like most people, when we want to share the best shots of the day to friends and family (the ones that don’t use social media - hi Grumpy Metal Mum!

When I attempted to use the sqlite crate recently, I was surprised to see the following error when I attempted to build my project: error: linking with link.exe failed: exit code: 1181 … = note: LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'sqlite3.lib' Short of building sqlite3 myself, which I wasn’t overly keen on doing for what should be a small portable little util, I wasn’t too sure what to do.