Home Automation

Posted on 2023-11-21 in misc • Tagged with technical, home automation • 4 min read

Introduction

For many years, I have had some form of home automation in my home. I used to have a few x10 devices that I used on my aquarium to control lights. We eventually purchased a security system that had z-wave support, and then we had a few devices connected …


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How I do mail (Part 2)

Posted on 2023-02-01 in misc • Tagged with technical, howido • 2 min read

Almost a year ago, I had posted that I had been happily using mutt and davmail for all my mail. I was mostly happy with it, but doing calendar appointments with people, getting HTML emails, and too many people sending me screenshots, I ended up going back to Thunderbird.

Another …


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restic_backup script

Posted on 2023-01-17 in misc • Tagged with technical, how-to • 1 min read

Introduction

After running a basic restic backup script that I randomly found on the internet at some point, I decided to make it a bit of my own. Specifically I wanted to get matrix notifications working, but I also added some error checking and a little bit of lock handling …


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Changing out my key switches

Posted on 2022-12-28 in misc • 2 min read

When I bought my new Keychron K8 pro keyboard, I was stuck between choosing the "red" or "brown" switches. Based on many things I found around the web, it seemed like the brown ones would suit nicely. When I got my keyboard, I fell in love with the feel of …


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MS Teams PWA

Posted on 2022-11-21 in misc • Tagged with technical, rant • 6 min read

Introduction

It's apparently official, the Teams progressive web app is now available. There is nothing particularly magic about this "release", so everything I have already bitched about is still going to be that same suck fest. But now there will be even new ways to suck, as it will be …


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Backups with Restic

Posted on 2022-11-09 in misc • Tagged with technical, how-to • 4 min read

Introduction

For many years, I had paid for a CrashPlan home user plan and backed up all my systems with that. It was pretty simple, had a basic "set-it-and-forget-it" kind of thing going for it. 5 years ago, they ended the Home user version and were only offering a small …


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Keychron K8 Pro custom firmware on Linux

Posted on 2022-10-14 in misc • Tagged with technical, how-to • 6 min read

One of the main reasons I wanted the Keycron K8 pro instead of any of the other Keychron options was the QMK firmware. Updating macros, and normal keys using VIA is handy, but doesn't let you do the more complicated things like MOD-TAP which I wanted for my CAPSLOCK key …


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MS Teams Rant

Posted on 2022-10-14 in misc • Tagged with rant, technical • 46 min read

Note

I originally wrote this on 2021-03-11. I have kept this up-to-date with my various gripes and frustrations (and even the few things that have been fixed) as I come across them.

Introduction

I have used instant messaging programs essentially since the world wide web began. I have used IRC …


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A new Keyboard

Posted on 2022-10-10 in misc • 6 min read

I have spent most of my space on this blog bitching about MS stuff. I can (and do) go on forever about that stuff. Instead, today I am going to talk about something that is awesome. And that is my new keyboard.

You can read my life story about keyboards …


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OneNote is 💩

Posted on 2022-09-27 in misc • Tagged with rant, technical • 2 min read

Like many Microsoft products, I do not care for OneNote at all. I dislike the text placement box, I hate the organization that is vaguely skeuomorphic and mimics a physical notebook. I just don't like it. But today I am going to present some absolute stupidity. This stupidity may be …


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Playing with I3WM

Posted on 2022-07-13 in technical • Tagged with i3 • 2 min read

Introduction

I have used Gnome as my desktop environment on Linux for ages. I have been using it so long, I don't even remember when I started. I like the clean, minimal look of Gnome as a whole, and prefer to the way GTK apps look (as opposed to what …


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Elasticsearch with NGINX

Posted on 2022-03-25 in technical • Tagged with elasticsearch haproxy nginx • 3 min read

For quite a while, I have been running an elasticsearch cluster of 5 nodes internally. They all talk to each other happily, but there is no authentication. I wanted to add some security with SSL and authentication. I checked out the elastic documentation, and the thought of managing a bunch …


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Fedora and Slack

Posted on 2021-11-09 in misc • 4 min read

I have loved Slack and have used it for a very long time. It is the standard by which I judge all other chat platforms. While it's certainly not perfect, it's as close to perfect as any of the options out there, and the mobile client in particular is stellar …


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Darkness

Posted on 2021-11-09 in misc • 1 min read

For the longest time, I had been against "dark" themes on my computer. Much of the time the colors were just not optimized and so many things were hard to see because of that. That was a long time ago, and now dark themes have gotten more love than they …


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Live on IPFS

Posted on 2021-07-26 in misc • 2 min read

I have been toying with IPFS for quite a while. Typically just hosting decentralized file shares for things that I post to reddit. Today I decided "since I am publishing arachnitech.com via pelican, it is already a static site, and could pretty easily be pushed to IPFS. So here's …


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Dotfiles

Posted on 2021-07-21 in misc • Tagged with howido • 2 min read

For about 7 years, I have managed my dotfiles from my home directory in a github repo and symlinked the files on the system where I wanted to use them. I recently had a catastrophic system upgrade (of my own doing) and had to rebuild a lot of my home …


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How I do mail

Posted on 2021-07-21 in misc • Tagged with technical, howido • 4 min read

Email is one of those "necessary evils" in the world. There is pretty much no way around it, though things like Teams tries (and fails because it's a giant POS). Until Teams, Outlook was my most-hated MS creation. I think it is a jumbled mess of crap that complicates email …


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Joplin-jrnl

Posted on 2021-06-30 in misc • Tagged with notetaking • 1 min read

One of the things I am constantly trying to do better is note taking. I do generally prefer to take notes on paper, but I like the accessiblity of things being digital. I'm also a huge nerd, so end up trying to make digital work. I have tried various things …


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poke

Posted on 2021-03-03 in misc • Tagged with update, programming • 1 min read

After playing with the cactus comments a little bit yesterday, I started playing with themes for this site. Since it takes modifying each theme to get the comments to work, I created a little utility to automatically modify pelican themes to use cactus.chat.

All of the details are on …


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Commenting System Part II

Posted on 2021-03-01 in comments • Tagged with update • 1 min read

Cactus Chat is live!

So this is the commenting system I alluded to in my last post. Today it went live, and I was able to modify the pelican template system to take advantage of it, and host it on my homeserver. So now all the comments are self-hosted, which …


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Commenting System

Posted on 2021-02-20 in comments • Tagged with update • 1 min read

Over the weekend I saw an article about Disqus being filled with all kinds of client tracking hooks. I set up Disqus as a comment system for this blog ages ago and never looked back. It seems a lot has cchanged and my goal is to be self-sufficient and not …


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Live Blog Embed Test

Posted on 2021-01-25 in test • Tagged with test • 1 min read

Testing an embed of a matrix live-blog bot thingy


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GTA Lobby Hack

Posted on 2021-01-09 in network • Tagged with network • 3 min read

Creating rules with OPNSense to allow for a private GTA lobby


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3D Printing!

Posted on 2021-01-04 in 3D Printing • Tagged with update • 4 min read

Well another bunch of time has passed since I posted anything here. But I have a new project that I am hoping to share information that I find. My wife got me a 3D printer for Christmas. Specifically the Xvico X3S. Sadly, a part broke within the first couple days …


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An update?

Posted on 2020-10-13 in random • Tagged with update • 1 min read

It's been a while


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Float Switches

Posted on 2015-12-27 in aquarium • Tagged with beaglebone hydra • 1 min read

Float Switches


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Relay Complete!

Posted on 2015-06-04 in aquarium • Tagged with beaglebone • 2 min read

Power Final


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Rdio and Linux Part II

Posted on 2015-05-21 in linux • 2 min read

rdio and linux part II


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Relay Update

Posted on 2015-04-28 in aquarium • Tagged with beaglebone • 1 min read

Relay Update


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Aquarium Controller Update

Posted on 2015-03-24 in aquarium • Tagged with beaglebone • 2 min read

An update on progress


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A New Year...New Projects

Posted on 2015-01-08 in aquarium • Tagged with beaglebone, programming, aquarium • 2 min read

Embedded computing


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Python Printer Peril

Posted on 2014-08-07 in misc • Tagged with python • 1 min read

Fun with python sockets


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Hosting Experiment

Posted on 2014-07-29 in misc • Tagged with announce • 1 min read

Testing new blog software


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Rdio and Linux

Posted on 2014-04-22 in linux • 3 min read

I have been using [Rdio](http://www.rdio.com) for about a year now. While it has some holes with older music, all-in-all I am very happy with the service.

Rdio uses a very capable web player so you can play your music in your browser.  That's perfect, however the …


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