You Don't Live Like I Do

One of Those Guys

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:40:24 GMT

Last night, after a very pleasurable theatre trip with cosmolinguist, I ended up messing around a bit with the smart plugs I bought ages ago.

I have actually been using these plugs somewhat. They're on the house WiFi and that lets me remote-control them through a browser and set timers for them. They also have a mechanical button if you want to interact with them in a more traditional manner - that's basically a hard requirement for any home automation stuff I do, after the time I visited a friend and had to poop in the darkness because the bathroom lights couldn't be switched on until he reinstalled a Raspberry Pi.

But having resurrected Home Assistant on my fileserver I figured it was time to actually get these things talking to each other. I still find HA overly complicated, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is between an "app" and an "integration". I hit a few dead ends following this guide but eventually got to the point where I could use the Home Assistant web UI to control the plugs rather than the built-in web UI.

That doesn't sound like much of an improvement but it's actually quite exciting, because now anything I can do with Home Assistant, I can do with the plugs. I installed up simple speech-to-text and text-to-speech integrations in HA, and now I can talk to the HA app on my phone, tell it to turn the plugs on or off, and it does so! And tells me it's done it in a northern voice called Alan!

It's another small step on the HA journey and I'm still not thinking about temperature monitoring around the house, but it gave me a nice little dopamine hit.

(by this time it was 2am and E prodded me to come to bed, so I excitedly demonstrated this to him and then went to sleep)

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Double Lockout

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:29:50 GMT

Recently I was playing around with the boot systems on my two main computers - laptop and desktop - to enable Secure Boot. This is a quite old tech by now, and helps protect against "evil maid" attacks where somebody has temporary access to your hardware and uses it to install some kind of persistent backdoor. I don't think this is a huge threat to me in real life but it's fairly standard behaviour now so I figured I'd familiarise myself with it.

In the process I managed to get myself locked out of both. This was mildly concerning, because usually I'd use one system to help me repair the other. Fortunately I managed to "repair" the desktop by simply disabling Secure Boot.

The laptop was a bit more complicated. ( Nerdy details )

For all that parts of this experience were frustrating, and the stakes were moderately high since going without my laptop would be a huge pain, I quite enjoyed this little pair of experiments. I learned new things, refreshed my memory of a few others, and found a weak spot in my nerding abilities. A larger, and more importantly faster, USB stick will be replacing its venerable predecessor on my keyring - and I'll keep the old one around for smaller file transfers too, so I don't have to keep reformatting.

Next steps are to figure out why Secure Boot doesn't work on the desktop, and to try and replace Grub with systemd-bootd on the laptop. But that can wait for a while before I'm in another geeky mood...

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Coins for Coins

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 23:32:33 GMT

Just replaced the BIOS battery in mother_bones' laptop. A CR2016 cell costs about 50p and we happened to have a spare one in the battery box; the laptop SKU replacement part is just one of those, with two electrodes attached to a small connector. It's shrink-wrapped so you can't easily replace the battery within. A replacement part costs about £8-20.

So I carefully disassembled the part, cutting open the shrink rap with a craft knife, removing the electrodes from the cell with a spudger, and removing the last of the shrink wrap. I replaced the cell, and reconstructed the part as best I could, sellotaping it back together.

It's a bodge, but it works - no more clock complaints on boot-up. Saved us a few quid, and I got it fixed tonight rather than having to wait for a part to arrive.

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Project: Scrim Social

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 01:16:15 GMT

Another project I've been getting excited about is setting up a Pixelfed server for roller derby people. P, and other roller derby friends, tell me that there's a desire to get away from Instagram and other Meta technologies, after they decided to openly discriminate against LGBT+ people and women. Pixelfed is self-hostable image hosting software which is part of the Fediverse meaning it interacts with Mastodon, Friendica and so on.

So P registered a domain, scrim.social, and pointed it at my colo server. If you click the link about the time I post it, it'll 404 as I'm having a bit of trouble getting the software up and running. It's not very mature software which isn't great, but it's there and I'm trying not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Next Saturday there's a pair of fixtures in Salford with two Manchester teams, Durham and Hull. Ideally I'd like to have it up and running by then, with backup + restore tested, so I can print off some flyers and start getting people interested. P has a proper artist friend involved, but I also scribbled a few logo ideas at the last Queer Club.

Over time I'll need to look at how performant the hardware is, and consider alternatives if it gives me too much trouble. And there'll be the day to day hassle of moderation which comes with every Fediverse server (I've got a copy of my Mastodon instance's blocklist to give me a head start on blocking most of the Nazis out there). But still, giving a bunch of queer people an escape from Meta seems like a good use of my tech skills!

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Smart House

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 10:38:33 GMT

I've finally got round to installing Home Assistant on my file server. This is the first time I've played with virtual machines since transplanting the hard drives from an Intel box to an AMD box, and I needed to purge and reinstall bits of KVM / QEMU to get it to work.

Of course now it's up and running it doesn't do very much on its own. There are various things it can theoretically do which I'm interested in, including tracking Gary around the house using a tag on his harness. But my starting point is pretty simple - measuring temperature and humidity in every room in the house.

The design principle is pretty solid - I plug a USB Zigbee stick into my fileserver, and it should be able to reach devices across the house. I buy some Zigbee sensor units from AliExpress for about a fiver a pop, pair them with the contoller, and deploy them around the house. Home Assistant handles monitoring, logging, graphing and alerting. Maybe I need a Zigbee router/repeater unit on the landing because my house is basically a Faraday cage, but that should be the only complication.

In practice, I've pretty much immediately hit a brick wall with this. Either I choose between ready-to-use units (which tend to use WiFi and are much more expensive per-unit), or I go for something slightly more homebrew and run into a host of problems. I've seen advice that you shouldn't use Bluetooth (as Linux support isn't good enough) or Zigbee (as Linux support is too good for the devices out there), the two cheap low-power alternatives. Or I go the ESPHome approach and solder things together myself, which is pretty much a non-starter at my skill level.

I suspect I'll end up just buying some random units from AliExpress and seeing what works, but it's frustrating that I either have to do this kind of expensive, slow trial-and-error or pay through the nose for what should be cheap kit.

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Tech Meanderings: New Gaming Machine, New House Server?

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 22:45:28 GMT

Now we've had a smart meter fitted, I've started to want to put together some kind of in-home monitoring of energy usage, temperature etc. with the intention that eventually I could start doing things like smart radiator control and so on. Obviously this will need a computer that's on 24/7 to look after things. The only computer in the house that fits that description is my fileserver - it's an old HP Microserver with a 4TB RAID where I keep backups and other files. It's been struggling for a while just running a few services such as the Unifi wireless controller, so it's clear it wasn't going to cut it for anything more.

( nerdy stuff )

This means that I'm now able to take full advantage of the AMD RX 6650XT graphic card which cosmolinguist bought for me. I'm enjoying the dappled sunlight through the swaying branches in 7 Days to Die and I'm struggling to get it to drop below 60fps, the maximum my monitor will support. Not only that, but I'm now in a Steam "Family" with gamer stepson L, so I have access to his vast library of games. This means that I've dipped my toes into Helldivers 2, a co-op shooty game which is basically Starship Troopers with the serial numbers filed off. Some of the local Discord people play it and I've joined in a co-op session with them now. Even though it's a Windows game running through Proton (formerly WINE), I'm still getting that maximum 60fps with lovely quality graphics (by my relatively low standards).

All this gaming has rather distracted me from the original purpose of this hardware - I need to transplant the hard drive from my old desktop into my new workstation when the NVMe adapter arrives, then transplant the hard drives from my fileserver into my old desktop and use it as the always-on system that'll monitor the house. So maybe that's a project for the coming weekend...

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Technical Fixes to Problems I Caused

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:51:08 GMT

This morning, cosmolinguist couldn't find the CO2 monitor which we use to maintain Covid safety during the ongoing pandemic. It was last in my possession on Friday.

I realised that it was within Bluetooth range of my phone, since the Aranet app could talk to it, which limited the search range. Then I set it to buzz every time it registered a critical level, and set the critical level threshold to 310ppm (normally outdoors is around 400). This caused the monitor to buzz every time it took a reading (60 seconds), which helped us track it down!

It was my fault for leaving it in my hoodie pocket rather than returning it to the fireplace where it normally resides, but I'm glad I could do something nerdy to help find it when I was still half asleep!

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