Peter Mac

Embarking on the journey of home automation can feel like stepping into a realm filled with endless possibilities and, admittedly, a bit of confusion.

Background

When I first dived into this world, the array of protocols - Z-Wave, Matter, Zigbee, and more - felt overwhelming. Through trial, error, and a lot of learning, I’ve found a setup that works seamlessly for me, centered around Zigbee and Home Assistant. Here’s a breakdown of what I wish I knew when starting out, and how different protocols differ and operate.

As an IT solution architect, the impact of AI, both generative and traditional, on my role is expected to be profound and multifaceted over the next few years. Here a list of the ways I think AI is likely to influence responsibilities and the broader IT architecture landscape:

Initial decision to migrate my website from Wordpress to a Static Site Generation platform in January 2024 and the resaerch into the best tool for the job.

Orininally planned in Jan 2024, but only executed in August 2024.

How do I know what was backed up on hyperbackup? I have an hbk file but I cannot open it or see its size.

https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_restore_settings_apps_files_permissions_by_Hyper_Backup

Restoring files from previously backups.

https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/help/HyperBackup/restore?version=7

Howto retrieve files already backed up by Hpyerbackup.

Because I live in the land down under where we’re serviced by a broadband network system that’s been screwed over by a number of successive Governments, we can never be guaranteed a consistent service. I wrote the following script to run in the background on my Apple Mac to notify me of any changes to the network status. It requires nc to run…but you can change this to any command that does an external connection test such as a simple ping. It does a little sleep at the end for 10 seconds. Obviously adjust to suit your circumstances.

I’m predominantly an Apple system user (iPad, Mac Mini Desktop, MacBook Pro, iPhone), but in the hunt for the perfect note taking app, I’ve gone down several rabbit-holes.

Background

I’ve been using Evernote for general note taking and document archiving since about 2012. Overall it’s been pretty good with a few integration features that really expanded its’ use case. Examples are IFTT and Gmail integration, the scannable app and the Skitch screen-grab app. The web clipper is also incredibly useful for storing your own copy of web content that may or may not be around for longer (e.g. news snippets, stock reviews).

Over 100 tips for beginner to intermediate Linux command line users. I’ll add to the list as and when I think of it. The tips start simple but get a bit more complex as things go along.

A handy way of calculating how many IP addresses are available in a subnet is as follows:

Eg. 1 Given an IP subnet with the CIDR of 192.168.0.0/16, how many available IP addresses have you got?

Here’s some post install tasks tht should be considered to ensure your PostgreSQL setup is nice and secure.

Install PostgreSQL

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Upon installation, Postgres creates a Linux user called “postgres” which can be used to access the system. We can change to this user by typing: sudo su - postgres From here, we can connect to the system by typing: psql

> sudo service apache2 stop sudo certbot certonly --standalone

Results in the following output:

Saving debug log to /home/peter/appdir/~/.certbot/logs/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator standalone, Installer None
Please enter in your domain name(s) (comma and/or space separated) (Enter 'c'
to cancel): staging.spxtrader.com.au
Obtaining a new certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for staging.spxtrader.com.au
Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges
Non-standard path(s), might not work with crontab installed by your operating system package manager

IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
/home/peter/appdir/~/.certbot/config/live/staging.spxtrader.com.au/fullchain.pem
Your key file has been saved at:
/home/peter/appdir/~/.certbot/config/live/staging.spxtrader.com.au/privkey.pem
Your cert will expire on 2020-01-04. To obtain a new or tweaked
version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
"certbot renew"
- If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:

Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate
Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le

Then update your /etc/apache2/sites-available/vhosts-ssl.conf