Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant and perf-tools

I’ve been using Home Assistant for a while now. It is not ideal, but it does work and you can pretty much make it do anything you need for your home automation. My HA runs on a Raspberry Pi4, and I use a CC2531 ZigBee USB dongle to communicate with the Ikea and Philips lights,…

The case of MacBook battery draining

Recently I discovered that my MacBook Pro battery drains completely overnight. This started sometime after upgrading to macOS Catalina. The TL;DR version is – disable TCP keepalive while asleep. For the full details – read on.

Upgrading memory on Synology DS416play totally worth it

Have you ever wished that your Synology box would perform a bit better?During IO heavy operations it can become very sluggish, which, I suppose, is understandable, but still. I’ve been using a Synology storage box DS416play for several years now.It holds my pictures and videos, and all kinds of backups from way back when. For…

Zabbix in 2019

Why you might still consider using Zabbix in 2019/2020?Because it provides all the basic parts of a monitoring platform out of the box and it is very easy to set it up and get going. I remember first encountering Zabbix around 2010.Back then Nagios and Cacti (and MRTG) were the standard tools for monitoring and…

Get rid of all the ads using your Raspberry Pi

Pi-hole is the best way to get rid of all the ads on all of your devices on your local network. You set it up as your DNS server and it blackholes all the requests for ad servers. No more ads on your network!

L2TP VPN FTW

Whether for security or privacy reasons, but we can all benefit from a little bit of VPNing every now and then. Traveling and using random hot spots, avoiding snooping or traffic shaping etc. There are many valid use cases for VPN. On my devices, I have always used OpenVPN. It is simple to set up…

.NET core, C# and the Async Main() method

The more I mess around with C# the more I like it. The nice thing about .NET Core is that it really is cross platform. I can start writing something on my Linux box, continue on Mac and finish it on Windows and use the same editor along the way – VS Code. One of…

.NET Core on Linux

For a while now we’ve had the .NET Core, which is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS) framework that allows you to write stuff in the C# for example and afterwards run it wherever you like. Say what you will, but once you’ve tried Visual Studio it is a bit hard (at least for me) to…

Running GUI apps in Docker containers using VNC

In case you don’t feel like reading yet another rant, this is the gist of it: 1) Run your container and expose port 5901 to your host docker run -p 5901:5901 -t -i ubuntu 2) set up VNC server in the container and run it sudo apt-get install vnc4server vnc4server -geometry 1400×1000 3) export $DISPLAY…