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,…

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!

.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…

Unrar on a RaspberryPi running Raspbian

To my surprise I found that there’s no usable unrar command on my RaspberryPi. I run Raspbian on it and it so happens that I wanted to unpack a rather large rar file. The unrar-free package is not good enough for some archives, so that is not an option. So how to get a working…

Segfaulting VIM. What?

I got quite the surprise today while opening a file for editing using vim. fx@teikapi2:~ sudo vim /etc/hosts Segmentation fault Say what? Vim, segfaulting? Okay. There was an automatic apt-get upgrade on this machine today, so that is the explanation. Still quite weird and most definitely not expected. Quick backtrace under gdb showed: #0 _dl_lookup_symbol_x…

Systemtap on Debian Jessie

So I wanted to play a bit with Systemtap on Debian Jessie. I installed it: sudo apt-get install systemtap Afterwards I wanted to run a quick one-liner: fx@cloudhawk:~$ stap -L ‘nd_syscall.*’ Checking “/lib/modules/3.16.0-4-amd64/build/.config” failed with error: No such file or directory Tip: /usr/share/doc/systemtap/README.Debian should help you get started. It failed, but hey, at least it…

vtop

As much as I enjoy hardcore command line stuff, it is nice to have some eye candy there as well. Like htop, for example. However I have recently discovered vtop. Not sure about the practicality of it but it sure looks nice (albeit at the expense of some additional cpu cycles): If you have node…

Azure + Packer

Yes, it works. How cool is that? The hardest part is to set up your environment and even that is easy. Kudos to MS. What you’ll need: a linux machine, golang, packer, Azure plugin for packer, nodejs, Azure cli tools and an Azure subscription. I’ll start with a clean Ubuntu 14.04 machine. Let’s start by…