Author: Duncan

  • Where does the cold come from?

    Where does the cold come from?

    I recently had a thermal survey done by Snughome.ie as a precursor to doing any further remedial works on the property, such as changing out the windows. While not cheap, the data furnished (in the form of IR photos) is invaluable and points out several changes I can make that won’t cost a lot of […]

  • Mapping KDE’s zoom to a mouse wheel

    KDE’s kwin is the module that handles all window management, and one of the things that KDE can do is zoom in on the displayed graphics. This isn’t the same as KMag(nifier) which pops up a dedicated program where you can scroll around and change the zoom level; it’s a desktop-level control that zooms the […]

  • Tripping North

    Tripping North

    After a week of on-call post Christmas, I had a week of PTO with K visiting (we spent Christmas with her parents in Germany). The weather was variable, as it usually is in Ireland, but we got in a few nice walks; we had a rental car for the week, so we were able to […]

  • Doubling up on 2FA

    Doubling up on 2FA

    I haven’t used passwords to log in to my server for years; I’ve been using key-based authentication. This works pretty well, and I can even use 1Password’s integration as an SSH agent to hold the keys so that wherever I go, the keys are available to me. As a “learn how to do it”, I’ve […]

  • LXD, dnsmasq, IPv6 reverse lookups

    My residential ISP doesn’t offer reverse lookups for their IPv6 blocks that they delegate out with the PD flag to consumer routers. This causes some annoying slow-downs when talking to the various services I’m running in LXD containers, since a lot of them do reverse DNS lookups. Under the hood, LXD relies on dnsmasq to […]

  • Breaking my energy monitoring setup

    Breaking my energy monitoring setup

    The ESP8266 module for the emonTx runs what I’d describe as a pretty basic sketch. It’s functional, but it’s not very good at telling me what’s gone wrong. On Monday, I re-imaged the router to upgrade it. A side effect was a setting I’d changed for the DHCP options (what the local DNS is) wasn’t […]