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 …
Posted on Fri 21 February 2020 in linux
A few years ago, I already considered using a Raspberry Pi as a broadband router. Back then, its first generation wasn't fast enough. This changed with the 4th generation of the Raspberry pi.
The test setup was similar to the setup I use previously:
Posted on Fri 27 September 2019 in macOs
I was looking to read out the current temperature and fan speed of my MacBook Pro running macOS 10.14 Mojave. I prefered build-in tools over shady apps. After some searching, I found the powermetrics tool (which needs sudo privileges). By default, it outputs lots of details every 5 seconds …
Posted on Sun 22 September 2019 in misc
I discovered the 404to302 concept after a tweet by Aral Balkan, and immediately liked the idea. It solves a hard problem (keeping permalinks alive and working) in a fairly easy way: simply archive the old site, and avoid re-using the same permalink again. If you permalinks contain a date of …