Month: January 2018

  • Is your meltdown fix working?

    So by now you have patched everything you own because you read about meltdown and spectre. You are exhausted, but feel pretty good about yourself. After all, some of those beasties had a lot of uptime and other stuff happened when you rebooted them. But is it really working? Well, it turns out, your Anti-Virus…

  • OK, I’m diving in, the garage NAS shall run Debian

    OK, I’m diving in, the garage NAS shall run Debian

    OK, i dove in. Backed the truck out of garage, got the ladder out, rescued the NAS from its shelf, brought it down. Here it is all innocent looking. Its been running in the garage for about 4 years now… I’m going to open it up. After running in this environment so long (with a…

  • Ignorance is(?) bliss: the agony and ecstasy of home sysadmin

    OK, a lot of us have large home networks. And our security strategy is simple… “Allow all outbound, deny all inbound.”. Mission accomplished, right? We bought the $100-$150 router, it must be better than the $50 one? Well, it turns out that we might have erected a house made of tissue, a floor which is…

  • Cold weather and stray cats

    Cold weather and stray cats

    Earlier we talked about Outdoor Kitty. Lets compare photos, the one on the left is from the other night, the one on the right from October. The difference? About 50°C. The one on the left is about -25°C, the one on the right about 25°C. You can see the little cat house in the background…

  • Decoding the Airthings Wave Radon output

    Decoding the Airthings Wave Radon output

    OK, so i ran the Airthings Wave for a few weeks, I ended up with an average of ~20-30Bq/m^3, which is below the Health Canada worry line of 200Bq/m^3. Now, its time to look at how to make this integrate with my Home Assistant. The device uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and is integrated via…