Posts


Automating Wireguard Connection Based On SSID

I’m currently on holiday with this Debian laptop, a GL.iNet Puli XE300 and a villa full of random network SSIDs. The Puli establishes a WireGuard VPN connection back home using whatever network connection it can. This laptop also has a WireGuard config back home. What I didn’t want to happen was for the VPN to run on this laptop if I was connected to the Puli as I’d then be tunneling within a tunnel.

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ESPHome & Growatt

I have a Growatt SPH6000 hybrid inverter connected to 2 strings of solar panels and a Growatt GBLI6532 battery. Originally I used the supplied Growatt Shine-S stick (diverting via grott) to get the lovely data out of it, but I didn’t like having an external dependency, so I decided to try and replace it with an ESP32 running ESPHome. Here Be Dragons This is my setup that works for me. There is no guarantee that if you try this, it won’t burn your house down.

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FreeBSD on hold

I’ve paused my experiment with FreeBSD. It’s good (some parts really good) but I got caught on a number of barbs such as power management and serial ports. I could have nerded harder, but there are other things I need to do. It did confirm my dislike of the shitshow that is software application management under Ubuntu and it’s derivatives, and it introduced me to ’naked’ Gnome which I actually quite liked.

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Printing With FreeBSD

Following on from yesterdays post I have fought and won with my printer (by cheating). It’s a Brother HL-L8260CDW, a network capable dual sided laser printer, and I had it working with Linux and OSX using CUPS. How hard could it be?…. @vermaden gave a very detailed answer to my plea on Mastodon. Ultimately not the solution, but a heap of info to point me in the right direction. I learnt how to mount OSX disk images for starters.

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Starting again with FreeBSD

I used to run FreeBSD back around the time of version 5.x. The problem was I also ran at the time Mandrake/Mandriva Gentoo Windows 2000 IPCop firewall QMail Each of those had their own PC on 24/7 and the heat and noise got to me. I had bought my 2 week old daughter a PowerBook laptop1 and I was impressed by the BSDness of OSX 10.3 so I resolved to ditch all my noisy PCs and cut down to one or two Macs.

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Stupid Car Part 3 - Brakes

This was the original brake pedal fitted to the car. The more I studied it, the scarier it got. Apart from the poorly set up balance bar, it wasn’t fitted securely to the car. The bracket it pivoted on was held on by two bolts through the floor which was a steel sheet approx 1-1.6mm thick. The bolts were located side by side so there was effectively no leverage advantage to reduce the load on the floor.

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Stupid Car Part 2

More About The History Of The Stupid Car I tinker. I can’t help it, it’s almost a compulsion. I didn’t tinker with the Elise as it was too expensive to cock up. A kit car on the otherhand was ripe for meddling with. Having bought it second hand, I kew it already worked (for some value of working) so there was a degree of ‘compare and contrast’ with each thing I did.

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Jaaaag

I’d always fancied owning a Jaaaag. I was getting older, I was now a manager, my Mazda6 daily was about to expire expensively and so I wandered over to Autotrader…. There I found a 6 year old black XF with a 5 litre V8 going for £20k. It called to me. With the Stupid Car and my wife’s Kia Picanto it would bring the average number of cyliners per car in the family to 6.

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Buy Cheap, Buy Twice

In chasing down the issues with my car, I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6. I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises.

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Amusement

As soon as you put a machine on the internet, people will start poking it for weaknesses. This is mainly done by people running scripts they got from elsewhere. It’s the equivalent of walking down a row of parked cars and trying the handles to see if any are unlocked. Most servers will just respond with a 404 Not Found error and on they walk to the next server. However, I thought I’d amuse myself with this

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