Posted on Sat 07 January 2023 in linux
I'm currently running all of my monitoring through Prometheus, backed with InfluxDB for the long-term storage of selected metrics. But recently, I've been limited in functionality when creating graphs in Grafana. And although I like Prometheus, it looks like my use-case is outside the domain of Prometheus.
I …
Posted on Tue 03 January 2023 in linux
My home server already uses LXC-containers. I use them to keep services isolated, so that I can upgrade my mail server without causing issues to my Nextcloud setup. But these containers contain a full OS inside them. And while this works, it's a bit of work to upgrade a handful …
Posted on Sun 12 June 2022 in reverse-engineering
I've been dragging my feet for years to get a video doorbell. I wanted a doorbell that "just works" as a doorbell, even if the WiFi is down, and I didn't want my video footage to be stored in the cloud, but only accessible when on the local network, either …
Posted on Sat 04 June 2022 in reverse-engineering
Recently we had a heat pump (A/C, air conditioner, AirCon) installed. The indoor units came with the usual IR remote, but they also had a built-in WiFi module along with a smartphone app to control them from anywhere. I'm not a big fan of connecting home appliances to clouds …
Posted on Wed 04 May 2022 in sysadmin
Recently I was rethinking my off-site backup strategy. Ever since Amazon AWS launched their Glacier Deep Archive storage tier, it looked really interesting for backup use-cases. For starters, it's super cheap to keep your bytes around: $1.01376/TiB/month in most regions as of this writing. I haven't found …
Posted on Mon 11 April 2022 in games
I discovered another game that gives me an excuse to write silly calculator modules: Surviving Mars. Some random notes and a few tools I wrote, or interesting tools I found online:
Posted on Wed 25 August 2021 in games
I am usually late to proverbial parties, but I think I’ve outdone myself by discovering the computer game Kerbal Space Program roughly 10 years after it first became playable. It’s the kind of game that triggers my “I’ll optimize this by writing a script”, so here are …
Posted on Sat 28 November 2020 in monitoring
I live in a part of the world where broadband internet subscriptions come with a monthly data cap. The datacap is relatively large (750GB/month), but streaming 4k content will get you there! So I wanted to keep taps on my data usage. My router is the ideal place to …
Posted on Sun 16 August 2020 in monitoring
I've been experimenting a bit with Prometheus and Grafana. It allows you to make beautiful graphs from the metric data using relatively simple expressions. But one of the graphs that I had in mind, turned out to be more difficult. These are my notes.
I have a metric that counts …
Posted on Sun 26 April 2020 in microcontroller
I'm a happy owner of a few ESP32 microcontrollers. These are similar to the Arduino, but have WiFi & Bluetooth built in, which makes them very versatile. These chips come with a lot of peripherals, including three UARTs. These allow offloading the actual bit-banging of the pins to dedicated hardware …