Solution

Written rules did not stop my coding agents from posting in a stranger’s GitHub repo or taking down my server, so I added hooks and resource limits that enforce what the rules could not. ...

I decoded the Bluetooth protocol of my Micro-Air EasyStart soft starters from the vendor’s Android app, with help from Claude Code, and now read their compressor data into Home Assistant through ESPHome. ...

I moved this blog from WordPress to a Hugo static site, and the real work was not converting the posts but keeping every inbound link since 2008 working. ...

There are many good guides on the internet on how to use and configure Cloudflare Tunnels, Traefik, and Let’s Encrypt, using wildcard certificates, and Cloudflare Access, for authenticated home lab network access. This is yet another such guide, but using a single wildcard subdomain for remote homelab access. An advantage of using a wildcard subdomain is that the Cloudflare DNS and Tunnel and Access configuration only needs to be done once, and thereafter all access changes can be controlled through local homelab Traefik configuration. Another advantage is that services being exposed are not directly inferable by looking at DNS record names. ...

Last year was the first time I used RGB holiday lights for decorative outside lights, and this year for Halloween I started with some Halloween pumpkins. I used a Boscoyo Pumpkin King and a Goofy Gourd because they are printed in color so they look good day and night. The Pumpkin King stands 95" / 2.4m tall, so it took a little extra effort to assemble and mount. Last year I used wood planks as backing on my coro props, but that made hanging them a bit awkward. This year I used aluminum channel (cheap 1m sections of DIN mount rails) connected with short sections of thick wood dowels. I notched the channel so that I could hang it flush on the pillars using flat head screws, much easier. And as I did last year I spray painted the back of the coro black to make it blend in as the back is visible from the house entrance. ...

Our house uses a Noritz natural gas instant hot water heater, with a dedicated hot water recirculation line. Problem is the heater is installed in the garage, and in the summer the garage gets so hot that the aquastat that controls the recirculation pump never turns on. This leaves us with cold water in the recirculation line, and we have to wait several minutes for hot water, defeating the entire purpose of the instant hot recirculation line. ...

In a previous adventure I replaced an Adaptec HBA with an LSI SAS3 HBA, and the chassis drive bay LED’s stopped working. I suspect the LSI card does not play nice with the SGPIO sideband controller, and I decided to replace the chassis with one similar to my SC846 chassis, where the LSI card and drive bay LED’s do work fine. What should have been a simple replacement turned into quite a recovery operation. ...

In my last post I described how I converted one of my W2K16 servers to Unraid, and how I am preparing for conversion of the second server. As I’ve been copying all my data from W2K16 to Unraid, I discovered some interesting discrepancies between W2K16 SMB and Unraid SMB. I use robocopy to mirror files from one server to the other, and once the first run completes, any subsequent runs should complete without needing to copy any files again (unless they were modified). ...

Update: On 27 July 2018 eNom support notified me by email that the issue is resolved. I tested it, and all is back to normal with DNS-O-Matic. Sometime between 12 May 2018 and 24 May 2018 the eNom dynamic DNS update mechanism stopped working. I use the very convenient DNS-O-Matic dynamic DNS update service to update my OpenDNS account, and several host records at eNom, pointing them to my home IP address. ...

What started as a simple Mini PCI Express WiFi card swap on a ThinkPad T61 notebook, turned into deploying a custom BIOS in order to get the card to work. I love ThinkPad notebooks, they are workhorses that keep on going and going. I always keep my older models around for testing, and one of my old T61’s had an Intel 4965AGN card, that worked fine with Windows 10, until the release of the Anniversary / Redstone 1 update. After the RS1 update, WiFi would either fail to connect, or randomly drop out. The 4965AGN card is not supported by Intel on Win10, and the internet is full of problem reports of Win10 and 4965AGN cards. ...