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
My Home Tech
I have a menagerie of tech at home.
Connectivity
ISP
Andrews & Arnold , who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses.
Heracles
The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT . My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus.
Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart
A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house. 5 is probably overkill. I run 4 separate SSIDs as VLANs to separate out House, Guest, Work and IOT with various rules as to who can talk to what. Alfred sits on both the wired network and the IOT one to act as a bridge. They have Bluetooth as well so one day I’ll investigate using them as a BLE to MQTT gateway instead of the couple of ESP32 I have filling that duty.
The Car
Background
I used to have a Lotus Elise
Apologies For The Inconvenience
If anyone other than me is subbed to the RSS feed, I’m tweaking a lot of things still as I learn Hugo and that is causing all the previous posts to get re-posted. Sorry about that.
Prose
I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh .
I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek.
However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears.
- No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory. After half a dozen posts with a few pictures each it became a mess. I wanted to be able to separate out the images in some sensible manner.
- There was no control over the size of images unless you appended some API parameters to the file name. This broke the image preview in a Markdown viewer which meant I couldn’t see what the image looked like until I published the post.
So, Hugo. I originally wanted to use Hexo, but the image plugin for that doesn’t install. I plumped for Hugo as https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil uses it for his blog and that’s good enough for me.
It’s Getting Hot In Here
Many moons ago I fitted a set of Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensors in the engine bay as I didn’t trust the radiator. I put one in the water hose from the engine to the radiator, another in the hose from the radiator back to the engine. For air temps I put one in the air flow either side of the raditor.
To measure this all, I buried a Raspberry Pi behind the dash and came up with a funky set of three relays so the Pi could shut itself down safely when I killed the power. It never worked very well.
Send It! (to the bin)
My car now takes about 48 litres of fuel. I noticed though that the gauge was not going down. Given it is not a car that sips petrol I found this hard to believe. Fuel level sensing is done by the fuel tank sender. It has a float on an arm that moves up and down with the fuel level and that in turn moves a variable resistor.
First Hypothesis - Gauge is wrong
I fitted a spiyda Gauge Wizard when I fitted the tank as the sender and the gauge were definitely not a matched pair. Because this needs calibrating, I had it accessible in the footwell so all the wiring (+12v, ground, sender, gauge) were all usefully accessible. I removed the Gauge Wizard and connected a multimeter between the sender and ground. I then drained the tank and pumped in 10 litres whilst watching the MM. The readings did not change as they should have done. The gauge is not a suspect.
Thinking About Thinking
I had a thought in the shower this morning that I do my best thinking there. I then thought about why I think best there and came to the conclusion that it was because I didn’t have my phone to distract me.
It’s too easy to grab my phone and fiddle with it to occupy my mind. I don’t switch off and just let my mind wander. So to this end, I’m going to purge my phone of all consumption apps i.e. games, ebooks, news, mastodon for at least 4 weeks. I want to see if I find myself thinking more because I do enjoy having a good idea.
Wifi Hack
I run HomeAssistant on some no-name fanless PC which has WiFi and Ethernet. I mainly access it over Ethernet, but it uses the Wifi to connect to my IOT SSID and expose its MQTT broker to the various Tasmota and ESP32 devices I have kicking around.
The problem was that every now any then the Wifi would quietly crap out and all my devices would stop updating. I could do one of two things.
Fighting To Get It In
I’ve now made all my brackets, detoured via tidying up the wiring and I’m now on getting it in. This car was designed to take a 6 gallon MG Midget tank. I’m trying to get a 10 gallon tank in. It is not going well.
The tank is catching on the diff cover of the axle. I may be able to get away with taking the rear cover off, or I may have to drop the axle from the car.