05

Jul/21

Home Assistant: Condition Based Auto Entities Card

Overview I was looking for a way to show / hide information based on states or attributes of an entity. Example use cases: Show any windows / doors which are open. List any low battery devices. Pre-Requisite Optional: Home Assistant … Continue reading

01

Mar/21

Home Assistant Introduction

Overview I have been using Home Assistant for 6 months and it has been an amazing investment of time and energy. Home Assistant is like the controller or brains behind any home automation. As a community project, it has it’s … Continue reading

07

Dec/20

Sleep and Time Tracking Data Flow

Overview This post should hopefully tie in what I do with my sleep tacking data and time tracking. It’s more complicated than it needs to be but automation and integration is still maturing with a large split between business focused … Continue reading

07

Sep/20

Upgrading MySQL Running In Docker (Compose)

Overview I wanted to try and upgrade my MySQL database from 5.7 to 8.0 however I have containerised my database install. What I thought was a immutable container would be a simple burn and switch turned out to be a … Continue reading

04

May/20

Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop Clipboard Sharing Not Working Using VirtualBox

I have a desktop Ubuntu virtual machine(VM) ready to be cloned so I can spin up a VM as quick as possible. Recently, the machines would loose the ability to share clipboard and the fix is below: sudo apt install … Continue reading

02

Dec/19

Pi-hole DNS Filtering

Overview Pi-hole is a very light weight, DNS filtering server. It’s so light that there are reports it can even run on a Raspberry Pi 1! Example reasons for filtering DNS include blocking ads to filtering out harmful sites (content … Continue reading

06

May/19

Converting IFTTT Date And Time From Fitbit

Overview If This Then That (IFTTT) has helpful human readable date time format but it doesn’t help any systems trying to use the date time in other systems. This is one way to covert it if the data is going … Continue reading

30

Sep/18

Manually Setting Up Webserver Time Trial

Overview In this day and age, setting up a server is a non event with cloud computing. I am currently behind in setting things up manually and scripts rather than using a tool. I have dabbled in Vagrant and Chef. … Continue reading