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Achieving success with Home Assistant, Flux and sensors

My philosophy for home automation from the start has been that the best UI is no UI, meaning that I just want things to work automagically. I don’t want to fiddle buttons or software on a day-to-day basis. Sensors and automations should do most of the work. In addition to automation, I wanted f.lux/Flux/Night Shift for my lights, meaning that the lights …

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Restoring access to PosgreSQL after Helm upgrade

If you’ve used PostgreSQL in Kubernetes with Helm, chance are you’ve locked yourself out after performing an upgrade. The reason for this is that if you do not specify a password explicitly using postgresqlPassword, Helm will rotate this password for you when you run helm upgrade. Not ideal. This has happened to me a few times over the years. To …

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VMWare Fusion error - cannot open /dev/vmmon

This weekend I needed to use Fusion for the first time since I upgraded to macOS Mojave. Having run Fusion 8 for many years and being happy with it, I was somewhat annoyed with needing to upgrade to Fusion 11. At least that appeared to be the consensus on the interwebs. In retrospect, I’m not 100% sure. That said, I’ve received great value from …

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Interview with John Agosta from Canonical/Ubuntu on working remotely

In this interview on remote work, I’m speaking to John Agosta from Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu). As a long-time Canonical team member, John and my paths have crossed multiple times over the years, starting when I was at a cloud company, and he was at the server division at Canonical, to more recently when he moved to the Ubuntu Core (formerly …

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Building a Pwnagotchi for WiFi penetration testing (with a PaPiRus Zero display)

Security has been an interest for me for a long time. This is why Pwnagotchi piqued my interest. Using cheap hardware, you can create your own lightweight WiFi (and Bluetooth) sniffing device. Thanks to a known vulnerability in the WPA/WPA2 protocol, the Pwnagotchi can capture the handshake, which we can then use to crack the passphrase (more on that …

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Home Assistant, ESPHome and JZK ESP-32S

Long story short, I’ve pimped out my apartment with a lot of Ikea Smart products, such that I can control (and automate) everything from Home Assistant. While I admittedly have a love-hate relationship with Home Assistant, it is generally speaking a pretty impressive software. One thing I’ve been meaning to do for some time is to log the …

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Install Ubuntu Core 18/22 on Proxmox

Today I was trying to get Ubuntu Core 18/22 working on Proxmox. Given that it is a KVM based tool, it’s fairly straight-forward, but took me a bit of time go get working (thus this write-up). There are good installation instruction for how to install Ubuntu Core on KVM, but I needed to do a little bit of work got it running on Proxmox. Before we begin, …

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Interview with Rimas Mocevicius from JFrog on working remotely

First out in this interview series, we have Rimas Mocevicius. Rimas is someone that I got to know from the London Kubernetes scene some time ago. He worked on Deis (before it got acquired by Microsoft) and is the co-creator of the popular Kubernetes packaging tool Helm. These days, Rimas works at JFrog and on their various Kubernetes tooling. In this series, …

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What are the best productivity hacks?

People love talking about productivity hacks (a.k.a. productivity porn). The “hacks” usually range from the latest tools (todo-lists, email clients) to workflow improvements. As someone who have paid attention to this for the last decade, and spent far too much time experimenting with these “hacks.” Today, I can say one thing with …

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So you want to build a remote company?

Little did I know when I wrote A Decade of Remote Work that it would completely blow up. After being featured on Hacker News, the article to this day keeps driving a significant amount of traffic from all kind of sources (including Twitter). Since the article, I’ve started a series of articles on remote work. In this article, I will explore the topic of …

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Remote Work is Deep Work

Over the last few years, two things that I’ve paid close attention to are Deep Work and Remote Work. In this article we will explore this and discover how closely these to concepts overlap. Back in 2009, Paul Graham, wrote an essay titled Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule. In the essay, PG outlines the vast difference between how a manager’s schedule look …

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Mental Health and Remote Work

In recent years, we’ve started to see more people speaking out about mental health in the tech industry. This is great, as it is a topic that has been somewhat taboo in the past. In my last blog post, A decade of remote work, I did not explicitly speak about mental health, and I must admit that it is something that I’ve only recently started to pay proper …

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