Andrej Friesen

Home Assistant

Smart bed heater update

Smart bed heater update with integrated timer function in ESPHome.

Home Assistant

Winter is coming - Build your own "smart" bed warmer

How to build a smart bed warmer with Home Assistant.

Hardware

How to choose an HBA card for your NAS or Server

I needed an HBA for my NAS. Did some research twice (did this a year or two ago already) and forgot everything. HBA stands for Host Bus Adapter and is used to connect SATA or SAS drives via the HBA to the motherboard via the PCIe slot. Here is what

Home Assistant

Free uptime monitoring and alerting for your Home Assistant

How to monitor Home Assistant or any other service with a free monitoring tool: UptimeRobot

Docker logs do not show everything when using grep

I always forget how to pipe stderr to stdout. Especially when going through docker logs I need this all the time. docker logs nginx 2>&1 | grep "127."Now I have written this down and I hope I do not to forget this anymore. If so I can

My blog was down

Even though I work in the field of cloud hosting and have learned a lot there, my blog was still down for a stupid error. Out of curiosity I checked my analytics tool (umami) and could not reach it. It is running on the same server this blog is running

Today I learned

Boot several ISO images from a single USB thumb drive with Ventoy

I have a few USB thumb drives in my drawer and never remember what each of them does. One was a Windows 10 installation medium, the other was Ubuntu Desktop, and so on. Mostly I will download a new ISO and just flash it again. But that time stops now

Linux

Monitoring SMART Data for your HDDs and SSDs

Since around 2014 I am running a NAS, Server whatever you want to call it. Since then I did not have a drive failure once. Actually, I never had a drive fail me yet, knock on wood. I got interested in how these drives are doing. I was playing around

Today I learned

GitHub CLI auto-completion with Oh-My-Zsh

Setup GitHub CLI auto-completion with Oh-My-Zsh on Linux

Today I learned

Getting the full path of a file or folder in Linux

I often needed to copy the full path from a file or folder when I was somewhere deep in the file system. I always run pwd to get the current directory path, copied the string, pasted it somewhere, and then add the file or folder name behind. This was kind

Home Lab

MikroTik CRS328-24P-4S+RM silent Fan Mod

Switch the original fans with Noctua and you get an almost silent switch.

Home Lab

I am giving up on MikroTik WiFi

A few weeks back I got myself a nice MikroTikSwitch. I really like the CRS328-24P-4S+RM which is in use for a few months now. I thought their APs could be a good addition to my network as well. I can not use my FritzBox anymore because it is degraded

Home Automation

Migration from Home Assistant VM to Home Assistant Blue

After 7 long months of waiting, I finally got my Home Assistant Blue. It is basically an Odroid N2+ with 128 GB EMC, Power Cable and a really nice looking case. I mean look at this, doesn't it look just great? Home Assistant Blue took apartFor the last year or

Books

Factfulness - by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

The full title of the book is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. And yes this is a really good book about how and why we as humans tend to see things in a certain way even though it might

Today I learned

Restore snapshot with timeshift from a live medium with LUKS and LVM

Today I learned to restore a snapshot with timeshift on a LUKS and LVM installation of Ubuntu.

Today I learned

Show journald logs from last service start - systemd InvocationID

Show only journal logs from last

Custom ear-buds for headphones

A story of buying headphones and custom earbuds for sports while overthinking every aspect 🧐 Some contextHeadphones are a really personal and subjective thing. Audio in general is but I do not want to go the route of audio or Hi-Fi here. Just about the headphone themselves. For whatever reason, I

Website Hosting

Website for a private piano teacher business

Simple website for my mother's local business in Germany. I am not a web developer therefore I am using a simple one-page theme. With just a few changes the website was done. I also administrate the google maps entry which helps for google searches as well. Since the website and

Website Hosting

Website for EliOra Tanzania - Hand in Hand e.V.

Simple website for EliOra Tanzania - Hand in Hand e.V. This is an organization that is helping people in Tanzania. The project is based on donations and volunteers. Have a look at the project and the website here: https://www.eliora-tanzania.org TechstackThe website is built with the static

Today I learned

Netstat shows tcp6 on ipv4 only host

Why netstat shows tcp6 sockets even though you only have ipv4 configured.

Rancher Overview

A brief introduction into Rancher, rke and explanation of Rancher specific terms with. Also directing you to the right resources. Based on my experience running Rancher Management Cluster and Rancher User Cluster on AWS EC2.

Decrypt and mount LUKS volume in GRUB rescue mode

How to decrypt and mount LUKS volume when you had a typo in your password

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