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I’m back with another update to my home network setup, but this time it’s a smaller change that’s more focused on the overall tech aspect and daily usage, rather than just the network. As usual, I’ll begin with a brief summary of the content to help you decide if it’s worth your time. And I’ll also try to add a curious and useful tip in every paragraph. As usual, I’ll provide the links to the previous posts for those who want to follow the various steps and evolution of my ongoing home tech diary. Final result/summary This time I’ve made a few minor software and network improvements while also investing in new hardware to enhance my HomeKit experience. The latest additions include (you... Read More

Problem Every time I perform a search in Duck Duck Go I get tons of spamming results from the terrible, I would say bloatware, website www.msn.com, that for some reasons has a better ranking in Duck Duck Go than the original news sources. And this thing was driving me crazy, also because on the terrible msn.com there isn’t a quick link to jump to the original website. It’s a total crap. So I had to find a solution to fix this, one could be to use a stylesheet that eliminates msn.com but I didn’t want to install a browser extension only to exterminate msn.com, so I found another solution. Solution I made two bookmarklets and a shortcut to search in Duck Duck Go with the parameter -sit... Read More

tl;dr The full story What I’m doing my monitoring system screenshots Conclusion This maybe seems to be a weird post, especially for those who don’t live in Italy, because here in Italy there’s the common belief that the abilites of a worker, usually are less considered than the qualifies that it has. Or simply the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”. Unfortunaly this post will not totally debunk this myth, at least for me, because I think that in Italy the work market is not as healthy as other (north) european States, but I just want to give a little bit of hope to my fellow ci... Read More

This is a new update of the PADD script by yubiuser. But in this mod I changed how PADD is displaying the percentage of RAM used by Pi-Hole system. Why? Because the original script is display the percentage of all the overall RAM used by Pi-Hole: cached, buffered, etc… and I didn’t like it, indeed I’m interested in the real/physical RAM usage by the Pi-Hole, so I tweaked the bash script and now it display the real RAM usage percentage and bar. See the pictures to understand the differences: ## Current ## ## Previous ## You can grab this modified PADD script from GitHub Gist here. PS: remember to launch it with the 0 offeset command: ./padd.sh -xoff 0 -yoff 0 As I already wrot... Read More

A new update of my network home setup, to both hardware and software. Introduction Hardware Breeze for the hardware Netgear AX/6 AP Netgear GS308T switch Wiring Software VLANs and HomeKit Access Point Router Switch Grafana Conclusion Introduction In this new “update/release” I have added two 120mm fans inside the server cabinet, I switched to Wi-Fi AX/6, I configured my network with separated VLANSs (IoT, Guest and Main), I connected both the computer and the television with an ethernet cable and I made some little modifications to the Grafana and Prometheus setup. Before the beginning, I have to ... Read More

Edit: I updated the widget with other (more useful to me) informations, jump at the bottom: Updated v2 v1 If there’s one thing that I don’t like to use, are the stats apps in the menubar. Apps like iStat Menus, eul, MenuBar Stats, Usage Monitor, etc… to me all looks like a waste of system resources to monitor the system resource. Because they can monitor too much stuff that I don’t need to check, or the windows are vey big and I can’t put them as my desktop background. Anyway sometimes is useful to know quickly what’s going on your system, for example if an app crashed, or Lightroom is eating tons of RAM, the disk usage, etc… usually I was used to open Activity Monitor but it takes... Read More

As you may know, this blog is running on my VPS on DigitalOcean using Jekyll to generate the site, and in order to make a new post, it’s not that easy because I have to write a Markdown file, upload to the posts folder via FTP and update Jekyll via SSH. Well, this is not complicated but do the limitations from iOS is a bit tricky. But I absolutely love to write when I’m making a walk in the nature, so I had to figure out how to post from my iPhone. And there are all the (few) steps: First I create a new Markdown file using One Markdown app (App Store link): And I save it to One Markdown iCloud folder to have the file synced with my other devices. Then I go to Files app, I copy the ju... Read More

yubiuser has released a new updated for PADD, to 3.10.0, and this update I think is quite important because it fixes the “flickering refresh” that was introduced with the v3.9.0. So I updated also my modified version with more info that fits 800x480px screens. You can download it the file from GitHub: padd.sh v3.10.0 for 800x480px display Be careful because now PADD auto-center itself in bigger screen/terminal, so you need to change the launch command in your .bashrc file to disable the x/yoffset, just change the : ./padd.sh to ./padd.sh -xoff 0 -yoff 0 The full code to launch PADD now is: # Run PADD # If we’re on the PiTFT screen (SSH is xterm) if [ "$TERM" == "linux" ] ; then whi... Read More

Requirements Installation Grafana image render Automating the report Tips Bonus: build PDF reports Conclusion This project consists in a way to receive the stats of my Grafana dashboards (home network, Netatmo Weather Station/Thermostat, home consumption/Homebridge, Pi-Hole, servers, etc…) from my Grafana server delivered automatically to my inbox every time I want (usually daily and weekly). I’ve made this project alongside the project to receive the push notifications with the critical info from my Grafana dashboards/environment: Some custom push notifications that improved my life - Etcetera In this way I can make a little more u... Read More

yubiuser has released a new updated for PADD, to 3.9.0, so I updated also my modified version with more info that fits 800x480px display. You can download it here: padd.sh v3.9.0 for 800x480px display. Be careful because this release has lots of modifications, because now PADD auto-center itself in bigger screen/terminal, so you need to change the launch command in your .bashrc file to disable the x/yoffset, just change the : ./padd.sh to ./padd.sh -xoff 0 -yoff 0 The full code to launch PADD now is: # Run PADD # If we’re on the PiTFT screen (SSH is xterm) if [ "$TERM" == "linux" ] ; then while : do ./padd.sh -xoff 0 -yoff 0 sleep 1 done fi Read More