It seems that I still I can never leave well enough alone (as anyone who's known me for a while an attest to). While on Thanksgiving break I found myself needing to tinker more once I'd gotten my other projects out of the way. So. I decided to do something about upgrading my website.
As much as I've enjoyed using Bolt to manage my site over the last couple of years, the v4 series is going in a direction that I'm not entirely sure that I can work with. My knowlege of PHP is, to be honest, minimal at best …
Disclaimer: This post has lots of links to the Adafruit website. There are no referral links, I received no consideration, I just buy parts from there and do cool things with them.
A couple of ~~~weeks~~~ months ago I did a writeup of a prototype environment monitoring device for my office built out of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and some off the shelf components. In the time since I've found time here and there to work on the embedded version, which doesn't use a full computer system but a microcontroller with just enough functionality to drive a couple of …
If you've been through high school chemistry or physics, you might have learned about thermodynamic entropy, which is (roughly speaking) the amount of disorder in a closed system. Alternatively, and a little more precisely, thermodynamic entropy can be defined as the heat in a volume of space equalizing throughout the volume. But that's not the kind of entropy that I'm talking about.
Information theory has its own concept of entropy. One way of explaining information theory is that it's the mathematical study of messages as they travel through …
It's going on summer in the Bay Area, which means that it's warming up a bit both outside and inside (because air conditioning is Not A Thing out here). That, coupled with the not inconsiderable research infrastructure I have at home has left me wondering and worrying about just how hot my office gets during the day while I'm working. Now, I could just put a simple little thermometer on my shelf (and I did) but my concerns are a bit bigger than that. What happens if my office temperature reaches a critical point and servers start melting down on …
EDIT - 20200804 - Updated the Nginx stanzas because the newer versions of Certbot do all the work of setting up SSL/TLS support for you, including the most basic Nginx settings. If you have them there you'll run into trouble unless you delete them or comment them out. Also, Certbot centralizes all of the appropriate SSL configuration and hardening settings into a single includable file (/etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf) for ease of maintenance.
A couple of years ago I spent some time trying to set up Matrix, a self-hosted instant messaging and chat system that works a little like Jabber, a …
This is the initial announcement of a new project pwnagotchi-bt-power (mirrored at Gitlab), a short utility written in Python which will cleanly shut down a Pwnagotchi from an Android phone over Bluetooth using the Bluedot app.
It seems as if another summer is rapidly coming to an end. The neighbors' kids are now back in school, school buses are now picking their way down the streets, and due to Burning Man coming up it's now possible to eat in a real restaurant in the Bay Area for the next couple of days. I've been pretty quiet lately, not because I've been spending any amount of time offline but because I've been spending more time doing stuff and just not writing it up. I've been tinkering with Systembot lately, adding functionality that I really have a need …
I spend a lot of time digging around in other people's data. If I'm not hunting for anything in particular then it's a bit of a crapshoot, to be honest, if only because you never know what you're in for. You can pretty much take it to the bank that if you didn't assemble it yourself, you can't count on it being complete, well formed, or anything approximating the output of a human being (it usually came out of a database, but I think you see what I'm getting at). Sometimes, if I'm really lucky I'll just get hold of …
Longtime readers are aware that I've been a customer of Dreamhost for quite a few years now, and by and large they've done all right by me. They haven't complained (much) about all the stuff I have running there, and I try to keep my hosted databases in good condition. However, the server they have my stuff on is starting to act wonky. Periodic outages mostly, but when my Wallabag installation started throwing all sorts of errors and generally not working right, that got under my skin in a fairly big hurry. I reinstalled. I upgraded to the latest stable …
If you've been following the development activity of Systembot, the bot I wrote to monitor my machines (physical as well as virtual) you've probably noticed that I changed a number of things around pretty suddenly. This is because the version of Systembot in question had some pretty incorrect assumptions about how things should work. For starters, I thought I was being clever when I wrote the temperature monitoring code when I decided to use what the drivers thought were high or critical values for sending "something is wrong" alerts. No math (aside from a Centigrade-to-Fahrenheit conversion), just a couple of …
