Solution on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Don't Trust Your Agents

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Reverse Engineering the EasyStart Bluetooth Protocol

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Moving This Blog From WordPress to Hugo

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Yet Another Cloudflare Traefik Let's Encrypt Guide

Wed, 29 May 2024 18:45:00 +0000

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.

Halloween pumpkins and lights

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:21:21 +0000

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.

Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:51:47 +0000

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.

Recovering the Firmware on a Supermicro BPN-SAS3-846EL1 Backplane

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 21:26:32 +0000

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.

Unraid and Robocopy Problems

Mon, 13 May 2019 03:12:41 +0000

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).

eNom Dynamic DNS Update Problems

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 16:57:07 +0000

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.

Circumventing ThinkPad's WiFi Card Whitelisting

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 20:10:45 +0000

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.

Self Signed BitFury Drivers

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 01:45:16 +0000

Almost two years ago I pre-ordered some bitcoin mining hardware from Butterfly Labs, what a waste. After countless delays, more than a year late, they finally shipped the hardware, and given the low probability of ever recovering the money through mining, I immediately sold the hardware on eBay, for a little profit.

In the meantime USB stick miners became available, outperforming GPU mining, and easy to set up and run. I’ve had a couple of ASICMiner Block Erupter’s running under my desk for some time, in the early days I saw some fractions of coins coming in, but in recent months they are so under-powered against the current hash-rates that they do little more than blink lights.

Windows 8 VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE Madness

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 22:09:49 +0000

I finally figured out why I kept on getting VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s when installing Windows 8 on my SuperMicro workstations. It turns out that the problem goes away when I use a PCIe slot associated with CPU #1, instead of a slot associated with CPU #2.

Some history on my adventures with Windows 8 and SuperMicro SuperWorkstations:
I got ACPI_BIOS_ERROR BSOD’s while installing Windows 8, SuperMicro provided a Beta BIOS that resolved the problem.
The Windows 8 install hangs if installing to an SSD drive on an LSI 2308 SAS controller, that issue is still unresolved, but can be worked around by connecting the SSD to the Intel SATA controller.
I got VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s while installing Windows 8 with an NVidia Quadro 5000 graphics card, same with an ATI FirePro V7900 or an NVidia GeForce GTX 680 or an ATI HD 7970. And this post is about resolving that problem.

WordPress.com 404 With Blogger Permalinks

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:02:52 +0000

Part of the research I did before migrating from Blogger to WordPress.com, was to make sure that current Blogger permalinks would resolve correctly once the old posts were imported into WordPress.com. At the time all seemed fine, but soon after migrating, I received alerts from Google Webmaster Tools that there is an increase in site errors, specifically 404 errors.

Some background: Permalinks are the URL’s that point directly to specific posts on the blog. These URL’s are known by search engines, are shared on forums, and are basically the static address of posts. Blogger and WordPress.com use different styles of permalinks. WordPress.com allows some customization of permalinks, but unlike WordPress.org, there is no support for custom plugins to handle rewrites for permalinks, 302’s or 404’s.

SuperMicro Beta BIOS supports Windows 8 and Server 2012

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:15:32 +0000

In a previous post I reported that my SuperMicro SuperWorkstation 7047A-T failed to install Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 due to an ACPI_BIOS_ERROR. I contacted SuperMicro support, and I was informed that new BIOS releases are on their way that will support Windows 8 and Server 2012.

This morning I received an email from SuperMicro, with a new Beta BIOS for the X9DAi motherboard used in the 7047A-T. The new BIOS allowed me to install Windows 8 and Server 2012.

Debugging Windows 8 Install BSOD

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:04:27 +0000

In my last post I described how to prevent Windows from automatically restarting when encountering a BSOD during the OS install process. This allowed me to see the ACPI_BIOS_ERROR fault code while installing Windows 8 on my new SuperMicro workstation. The new Windows 8 BSOD page looks friendly, but no longer displays any error parameters other than the main fault code.

In order to get additional details of the crash, I had to hook up a kernel debugger to the machine. Windows 8 adds USB3 and TCPIP kernel debug support, and I will describe how I used the TCPIP network option to capture details of the crash.

CrashPlan Memory Utilization

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 22:39:14 +0000

I’ve been using CrashPlan as an online backup solution for quite some time, and it works really well.

I like the fact that I can subscribe to the consumer plan, with almost 3.5TB of data backed up, and that the backup client installs on a server OS. Many of the other “unlimited” backup providers I tested have restrictions in place that make such a setup impossible.

CrashPlan sends email notifications about backup status, and I noticed that something was wrong with the backup:

NCP VPN not quite Windows 7 compatible

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:24:00 +0000

I got so frustrated with the NCP VPN client software, specifically a recent update, that I decided to let my frustration out by writing about it.

For a long time I used the, IT approved, Cisco VPN client to access our corporate network. And as the OS technology moved along, so did my systems, meaning Vista, Windows 7, and 64-bit. While, for the most part, our IT approved systems remained to be only 32-bit XP. Cisco, for some reason, maybe they are representative of IT organizations as a whole, was late to support Vista, was late to support Windows 7, and for the longest time never supported x64.

DELL 2408WFP losing settings on power cycle

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:39:00 +0000

In my last post I discussed the calibration of my DELL 2408WFP monitors.

After calibration, and changing the monitor settings, the monitors looked pretty good, but I later found that the monitor colors looked all weird again.

It turns out that the monitors reverted to their default settings, invalidating the calibration.

It seems to me that as soon as my PC goes to sleep, or the monitors go into power saving mode, or power off, that on turning back on they revert to default settings.

Amazon Unbox on x64 Vista

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:41:00 +0000

While shopping on Amazon I noticed that they were offering the Pilot of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie in HD for free, so I decided to give it a try.

The install (version 2.0.1.95) went smoothly, and the 1.3GB download also completed pretty quickly, and I watched the show.

Ok, now I wanted to stop the Unbox player service from running and terminate the tray icon application, I have no need to have it running all the time.

DxO Optics Pro and Adobe Lightroom on Vista x64

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:15:00 +0000

I bought my first SLR camera, a Canon EOS 20D, and my first wide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22, several years ago. Amongst the many articles and reviews I read, online and in magazines, I came across a product called DxO Optics Pro, a product that would supposedly correct, amongst other things, lens distortion. This seemed like the perfect tool to help me with my wide angle pictures that looked very “fishy eyed”. And since DxO, then version 4, was receiving good reviews, I decided to trial the product. In those days the DxO licensing model was to pay per camera body and per lens module, not a cheap investment, but I really liked the results and so I purchased the product.

Google Email Uploader on Vista x64

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:17:00 +0000

I am currently importing a few thousand email messages from Outlook 2007 to my email account hosted on Google Apps. Google provides an Email Uploader utility, and it is easy to use, but getting it to work with Outlook 2007 on Vista x64 was less than trivial.

The utility installed fine on my Vista x64 system, but it found no mailboxes to import. A little research showed that several other people using Vista x64 and Outlook 2007 have exactly the same problem.

Getting Vista to go to sleep

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:03:00 +0000

I noted my troubles with the Intel GMA drivers, the Intel DG33TL motherboard, and Vista SP1 blue screen crashing in my earlier post.

Since I was running the 15.8 version of the Intel GMA drivers, and Microsoft KB948343 indicates that, based on the driver version numbers, these newer drivers should not be affected by SP1, yet the crash details were clearly the same, and no new driver was forthcoming to correct the blue screen crash, I decided to take the GMA drivers out of the picture.

Microsoft Expression Media / iView Media Pro to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom converter

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:08:00 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

Introduction:

Because of severe performance problems I experienced with both iView Media Pro and Microsoft Expression Media, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom.

Unfortunately Lightroom does not understand catalog sets nor does it understand people tags, so the transition is not that simple.

After I could not find a simple, or even complicated solution, I decided to write my own conversion application.

This application will convert hierarchical catalog sets into keywords, and will add people tags to keywords.

Printing from the network

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:15:00 +0000

I have made various attempts at sharing my printer over my home network. The criteria for sharing are simple; the printer must be available over the network and I must be able to print from Windows and Mac machines. In practice this turned out to be a little more difficult.

The simplest solution would have been a network enabled printer, but I had no luck in finding an affordable consumer grade home printer that can directly connect to the network.