I just jumped into topic of smart intercom (e.g. the one, you can use to see from or to talk via phone). Obviously, cloud-first solutions of unknown provenance and storage/external access policies are totally off (hello and bye-bye Ring). I felt slightly down until this nice comment on Reddit. Yes, there is ONVIF standard (as soon as you know the name for the standard, the rest is simple). Ali is full of devices with declared ONVIF support. And Home Assistant has ONVIF integration on it.

Today I present a very unusual video, coming from a source I never imagined I’ll link to. It’s a hobby DIY ‘engineering for fun’ youtube channel which I never expected to give me big insights. But I got one. As operator I often get to the ‘tuning problem’, when I…

There are inevitable moments when you need to do loop calculations in Ansible. You have a group, and you need to extract some variable from all hosts in that group (except those who don’t have this variable), and use it for iteration, or for other purposes. It’s nasty in Ansible…

Symptom: no lock screen under Gnome/Wayland. The rest of Gnome is functional. Analysis: journalctl -b shows following lines: gsd-media-keys[3703]: \ Couldn't lock screen: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: \ GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: \ The name org.gnome.Shell.ScreenShield was not provided by any .service files Solution: Check if gdm3 (Gnome Display manager) is installed

How to use $DS_PROMETHEUS and don’t get error ‘not found’ — The problem I’ve just solved was to use $DS_PROMETHEUS as datasource for a provisioned dashboard. I’ve looked at node-exporter, thought a bit and found solution. You need two additional sections in your dashboard json file: __inputs "__inputs": [ { "name": "DS_PROMETHEUS"…

You may think I’m rehearsing a Unix textbook from 1990s. Oh, you can run programs in parallel. How nice! What an amazing UNIX you have here! Nope. This is a real problem I was struggling to solve. The problem: My script (just a list of executables with parameters) has some…

My home network is about 40 devices (including petty things like thermometers, and important things like electrical window shutters with smart relays). About 20% of lightning in my home was converted. I do a lot of experimentation (read: buying random cheap stuff from Ali with ‘zigbee’ label on it and…

There is a nice pattern for a scripts: you write their tests right in the script. It’s allow to bypass any import issues and just ship code and tests together. This approach works perfectly if you have only simple tests: def my_production_function(x): if x > 0…

(this is not a guideline, just my working notes and logs) I get a bit tired of lack of cool things for IoT, so I start to drift to DYI. Which I’m not very good (I’m been paid for pressing YAML buttons, not the hardware buttons). …