Category: Technology
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Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT
On a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant as-an-OS appears to run everything in Docker containers, with pass-through of USB and filesystem access. This means that things like the Mosquitto and Zigbee2MQTT add-ons are all in their own docker container. This poses a problem when the default configuration for something like Z2M is “mqtt://localhost:1883”, because it can’t…
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Debugging power gremlins
When I went on board earlier this year, I noticed that my batteries were well below a good resting point. Blue Opal has a 55 Wp solar panel hooked up to a Votronic MPP 250 Duo Digital. With the panel left on deck when I’m not sailing, it should have kept the batteries trickle charged.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
