Laptop as Home Server with Ansible Here's how I used a trusty old Thinkpad T510 laptop as a home server. This is mostly notes for myself, but perhaps it'll be useful to others too. The server isn't doing much right now; just running my home weather and power monitoring Grafana
Visualizations Automating NZ Wireless Map with Google Cloud Run Almost a year ago, I promised a post detailing how I process NZ Wireless Map's data to keep it fresh. Here it is: Recap: The ProblemNZ Wireless Map is a
Books Reading Challenge 2021 [Reviews 1-4] Previously: Read Harder Challenge 2020 Retrospective. I'm starting BookRiot's Read Harder 2021 Challenge, trying to read a more diverse set of genres and authors, to hear stories outside my normal.
Books Read Harder Challenge 2020 Retrospective My retrospective of BookRiot's Read Harder Challenge 2020. BackgroundI enjoy reading: reading lets me imagine what life is like for different people, lets me hear stories different from my usual
Cyling Cycling Windsor to Ourimbah We recently cycled a 128km two-day trip from Windsor Station, in Sydney's far northwest, to Ourimbah Station, in the Central Coast, mostly following the banks of the Hawkesbury River. Hopefully
Visualizations Visualising Sydney/NSW Rents NSW Government Fair Trading holds bonds for all residential tenancies in NSW, and every month they publish Excel spreadsheets of weekly rent, broken down by postcode, bedrooms, property type (house/
Cyling Hunter Valley Cycle Tour My partner & I just finished an 8-day, 250 km bicycle tour in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney. Full route map. Anticlockwise starting and ending in Maitland.We tried
Electricity Monitoring with Tasmota & Prometheus This post is about graphing power draw of appliances using a smart plug, Prometheus time-series database, and Grafana dashboards. First, you'll need a smart plug that you've flashed to the
Flashing Kogan Smart Plugs Edit Jan 2021: A reader informs me that: Unfortunately, it seems that the newer firmware from factory is now encrypted and the Tuya Convert method no longer works as per
NSW Police Should Not Have Sonic Weapons [This is a letter I've sent to my NSW MP. Perhaps you could send something similar to your MP?] I'm writing asking for assistance to take these mass punishment devices
Documentation How are popular open source projects documented? This is a survey of the state of the art in developer documentation - how the most popular open source tools manage their documentation. I'm currently updating the documentation of
Security 2FA for .nz Domains There aren't many .nz domain name registrars supporting Two Factor Authentication.
Terminal An Argument for Auto-Starting Tmux changing the default from tmux opt-in to opt-out has cumulatively saved me days of time over the last few years
TP-Link VR1600v Router Doubled my Ping This is pretty weird! I'm writing this up in case others are struggling with this, so something comes up when they Google what's wrong. The TP-Link Archer VR1600v Modem Router
Automating Mac Maintenance with Ansible I run a bunch of software on my Macbook. I'd like to keep that software up to date and patched, so it doesn't have security vulnerabilities. Trouble is, I install it from lots of places: Random websites (for the most part)Homebrew (for most
Air Quality Ansible for Raspberry Pis During the recent Australian bushfire season, I'd been administering four Raspberry Pis around the house for air quality monitoring. The usual progression of sysadminning automation followed: SSH'ing in and running commands by handGradually making shellscripts for some common tasksCopy/pasting the shellscripts to set
Cyling Sydney Cycling Communities and Maps With so many people picking up cycling lately, I thought I'd write up the resources that I've found over the years that have helped me. When I started I was
Air Quality Review: Kaiterra Laser Egg Air Quality Monitor I bought a Kaiterra Laser Egg Air Quality Sensor from their international store for 148USD, or 225AUD. PortabilityIt's great that you can charge it up and take it around the house. I'm looking forward to using this to find gaps in our home's sealing.
Visualizations My 8-year Attempt to Automate NZ Wireless Map The almost-decade-long process I went through trying, and failing, to automate updating the data shown on NZ Wireless Map.
Air Quality Building a Raspberry Pi Home Air Quality Sensor In Part 1: Build or Buy, I discussed the various pre-built Air Quality systems you could buy: sensors connected to databases that allow you to graph the data coming out.
Air Quality Indoor Air Quality Sensor: Build or Buy? Australia's on fire, and smoke is inundating our cities and homes, causing terrible air quality, often over 10x hazardous levels. I'd like to measure how bad the air quality is
Visualizations NSW Executor Fees Visualisation or: bargain-hunting, even beyond the grave When setting up a will, you must nominate an executor to distribute your assets. It's a nontrivial task with some legal liability, so it seems most common to nominate an organization to do it for you. There are
Book Review: First They Killed My Father Loung Ung, First they Killed My Father, 2006. 238 pages. Before travelling to Cambodia, I wanted to learn a bit about their recent history - what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime. This book was highly recommended as a memoir of someone who lived
Losing the Arms Race Another month, another headling-grabbing bug: "Patch ASAP: Tons of Linux apps can be hijacked by evil DNS servers, man-in-the-middle miscreants" - The Register "Patch now! Unix bug puts Linux systems at risk" - InfoWorld "Extremely severe bug leaves dizzying
Read-along: Berkeley DB In this post, I read along with the 1999 Berkeley DB USENIX paper. Berkeley DB as a tiny (175KB) embedded key-value filesystem-backed database. Berkeley DB lets you associate byte-string keys to byte-string values, with no practical limits on the size of these keys or
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