Andrej Friesen

Scrabble game spelling: In Lifting Others We Rise

Helping out Friends getting into IT - Mentoring

A friend from the master study days added me on LinkedIn the other day. After some "what are you doing ping pong" I found out, that she wants to get into IT for work. During our master's, we were part of a learning group and became friends. I never saw

Today I learned

How to Fix Linux and Windows Showing Different Times When Dual Booting

Fix the time offset when dual-booting Linux and Windows.

3 cats in and before a fridge explains the HTTP status code 300 - Multiple Choices

A new chapter - Going to work part-time and start my own thing

Starting to work more on my own things. Will it be a Flutter app, more blogging, live streaming? I have no set plan yet but some ideas.

Blog Comments and Forum!

My website has comments now. And a forum for a yet non-existing community!

Delete key of a keyboard with red backlight

Self-Hosting

I deleted my blog - damn

Again a stupid mistake from my side. This is the downside when self-hosting. You do will do mistakes. This is one of them.

breadboard with an ESP8266 and other components

Home Automation

My first electronic hardware: a remote pc-switch for Home Assistant

A friend recently asked me, if I know a smart home switch that runs 5V and it is pretty small. His use case was to turn on/off his HTPC in the living room. This was accomplished via infrared and a Logitech Harmony which he wants to retire. He shared

Different air quality measurements like temperature, humidity, CO2 ppm, etc. in a dashboard

Home Automation

Measuring Air Quality in your Home Office

Measure Air Quality in your Home Office with Home Assistant

Weather forecast and rain radar in home assistant

Home Automation

Rain Warning Sensor with Home Assistant

Disclaimer: This is only useful for people living in Germany. But you might get inspiration from this post to build this yourself. Let's go. So the other day I stumbled across a competition from the German Make magazine about automation and found a guy who did build a lamp that

Tuxedo Aura 15 laptop on lap outside in the park

Home Lab and Hardware

Tuxedo Aura 15 Review - A Good Linux Laptop

A personal review for the Tuxedo Aura 15 from a long time Linux user and developers perspective

Graph showing visitor count peak in the middle because of sharing on Reddit

The Reddit Impact

The impact of Reddit and what I learned from that.

Home Lab and Hardware

Dell Latitude 5310 - bad performance on Linux

When I started my new job at gridscale (01.08.2020) I got a Dell Latitude 5310. Quickly I found out that this machine is not suiting me well and I want to share my experience. Main workflowThis is not about bashing the Dell Latitude 5310. It might be a

Home Automation

Smart bed heater update

Smart bed heater update with integrated timer function in ESPHome.

Home Automation

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

How to build a smart bed warmer with Home Assistant.

Home Lab and 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 Automation

Free Uptime Monitoring and Alerting for your Home Assistant

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

Today I learned

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

Self-Hosting

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 and Hardware

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

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

Home Lab and Hardware

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

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

ajfriesen