Just another tech blag
Short little how to’s or op-eds that I ran into and thought others may like to know about
I found out recently about the webpage card in home assistant and how it can be used to add a WLED live view to your home assistant dashboard. Not only that, but its pretty simple to do as well!
Continue reading “Adding WLED Previews to Home Assistant Dashboards”Catia is my CAD of choice for most things, mostly because it’s what I know best. It however doesn’t have great support for STL files. We’ll be using FreeCAD to convert them to STEP files which Catia supports well. First we want to open our STL file with FreeCAD.
Continue reading “Converting STL to STEP”Keeping IOT devices up to date is a hard task, since they come in all sorts of different ecosystems, software projects, companies, etc. I run all FOSS IOT devices in order to avoid the problem with proprietary software and companies going out of business. In this, I’ll go over how I’m keeping my 3 types of devices up to date (ESPHome, WLED, and Tasmota).
Continue reading “Updating my IOT Devices”I recently started trying out the ESPHome Add-On in home assistant. With this, I was able to add and upgrade some ESP devices, however I soon realized after adding one of them, that the auto-generated name may not be wanted (or if you’re moving a device around and want a new name). So I did some research and worked out the process for renaming the device in ESPHome.
Continue reading “Renaming ESP Devices in ESPHome”Recently I ran into an error when trying to update Joplin (hooked up to WebDAV on NextCloud).
Last error: FetchError: request to https://nextcloud.rapternet.us/remote.php/dav/files/sbachhub/Documents/Joplin/info.json failed, reason: certificate has expired
I checked the SSL cert with FireFox and everything looked good there. Finally I decided to try updating the application, on a wild attempt to fix it in a simple way, and… it worked. It might have just needed a reboot, but the update worked in this case.
I recently re-did my entire network, changing out switch locations, what ports were plugged into where, and so on. This wasn’t too bad, except I didn’t make note of one thing: which ports were VLAN tagged. This became quite the struggle as I tried to figure out why my WiFi couldn’t access the internet, and why all my servers were inaccessible. I even changed what port the Unifi AP was plugged into to try and kick that VLAN possibility out of the running. Little did I know that BOTH ports I tried to plug the AP into were tagged, so neither could reach the internet. I ended up plugging my RT-N16 back into the modem to see that I had internet, and then moved the switch port the access point was into one more time to find a port that wasn’t tagged. Once I had that, I swapped what port my servers were plugged into to find a non-tagged port, that would get my Unifi controller back up so I could go and clean up the rest and get things back into an operational state.
TLDR: Label or remove VLANs before re-architecting things
The home assistant API can be used to build external tools to manipulate information in home assistant and control elements in it. This can be useful for triggering automations with custom code. It can even be triggered using curl on linux, allowing for simple scripts executing home assistant actions.
Continue reading “Enabling the Home Assistant API”I wouldn’t normally go into this, but boy does this product tell me that I’m the product being sold here, not the tablet. Starting with purchasing the tablet, Amazon asked if I wanted my account preloaded and I am glad I said no, or else they would’ve probably subscribed me to every fee possible.
When going through the initial setup, there were multiple pages of “do you want to sign up for this monthly service for $xx/month”, each of which moved the accept and deny buttons, often swapping them from the previous page, so don’t just click quickly through or you’ll have a new monthly bill.
On top of that there was the same situation with permissions, do you want maps to be able to use your permission (oh and allow Amazon to track your permission too, can’t do one and not the other). This really liked like they saw the windows 10 and Google privacy settings and said “we can do worse, much worse”.
One final insult Amazon gave us through this tablet is how it handles its lock screen ads, when the tablet is asleep. It will wake up the screen to play ads, this is just…. one great big slap to the face. Pros: cheap, Cons: Software, now to work on rooting and installing lineage OS, if its possible.
I can’t believe I missed this option being added to LightBurn. In the device settings, there is now an option to enable is the laser on when framing option. This turns on the laser with a low power setting when running the frame to make it obvious where you will be cutting/engraving. This replaces holding shift when hitting the frame button from older releases. This small quality of life improvement is much appreciated here.
I’ve got a VM running a critical service on my Proxmox host. This VM doesn’t have any real data to speak of, it just runs a few automated tasks that we rely on, so the virtual disk is rather small for it. For some reason while working on the VM (likely restoring a backup from a previous problem I had), I must’ve restored the VM and made my NAS mount the location of the virtual disk. So my virtual machine has been running off my NAS for a while. Until one day, when I had to bring my NAS down for an extended period, and the service went down too. I spent a bit of time trying to get it back up before realizing that the disk was located on the NAS and the NAS wouldn’t be up for a while. Nevertheless, once the NAS was back up, I moved the disk back to the virtual host where all the other VMs run from… oops.