Non-invasive graphing of energy usage “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Reducing energy usage is hard if you can’t see it. Here’s a cheap way to graph home or office energy usage. By reading data from the energy meter, one can get super accurate, real-time usage data. Read more...

Argos, GNOME Shell extensions Argos is a free GNOME version of BitBar. Both lets you run any script to create an icon in the panel (or Mac OS X Menu Bar). You can see lots of plugins here: BitBar plugins. Read more...

VEML7700 in ESPHome I have a VEML7700 digital light level sensor, which is not supported by ESPHome, but can be used as a custom i2c component. This is how: Read more...

Nordlux lamp. Incompetence or planned obsolescence? I got this lamp from Nordlux, model 6315. It came with unreplacable LEDs, meaning you have to throw it away when they run out. Apparently the LEDs are rated for 30.000 hours, but will they last that long? Nordlux at Bauhaus Read more...

ZFS on laptop with encrypted /home With Ubuntu 19.10 it’s simple to get a workstation with boot and root on ZFS. But what’s missing from the install is encryption. This is how I did it. I suggest you first have: basic zfs knowledge

good linux knowledge

no important data on the target system

more than 4 GB RAM

SSD or better Read more...

RadiOS part 2 Overview See RadiOS part 1. So I started making a prototype to figure out if I could “sense” both selections with GPIO pins, while the designer started modeling and rendering suggestions for the physical design. The solution chosen was to first set all volume control pins to high, and check which channel control points registered as on, then reverse (control points high, check volumes). Read more...

Weather via finger, an update Overview I meant to write this post in Febuary, but never had the time. Something exploded at Tuesday 2016-02-16. I created the finger weather service in 2012, and announced it at Reddit. It got some mentions in Norwegian blogs, and i gathered a few regular users. See old stats in previous post. I’m no fan of social media, and try to stay away. But apparently someone recently noticed the service and tweeted about it. Then blogs. Since I have regularly received “thank you” mails due to one of the random messages at the bottom (Mail a “thank you” to finger@falkp.no if you like the service.). Read more...

Using finger service the wrong way Overview If you’re doing this, you’re doing it wrong… 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 19 : 45.493314 Client 92. x . x . 192 hamburg , germany / hamburg / hamburg 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 19 : 48.443380 Client 74. x . x . 189 greensboro , united_states / north_carolina / greensboro 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 19 : 56.733260 Client 50. x . x . 50 beaverton , united_states / oregon / beaverton 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 19 : 56.745653 Client 50. x . x . 50 beaverton , united_states / oregon / beaverton 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 19 : 56.759656 Client 50. x . x . 50 beaverton , united_states / oregon / beaverton 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 19 : 56.819283 Client 50. x . x . 50 beaverton , united_states / oregon / beaverton 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 20 : 16.287744 Client 5. x . x . 13 kaiserslautern , germany / rhineland - palatinate / kaiserslautern 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 20 : 35.182942 Client 85. x . x . 140 katowice , poland / silesia / katowice 2016 - 05 - 31 10 : 20 : 47.029550 Client 193. x . x . 226 oslo , norway / oslo / oslo / oslo Read more...

Google knows where you are by default Even if you don’t use any Goolge services directly, Google will know a lot about you. For example when using the libre web browser Firefox from Mozilla. Let me quote from their site: “We’ve always designed Firefox to protect and respect your private information.”. When using a location service, one get the message “Would you like to share your location with <website>?” when it should really say “Would you like to share your location with Google and <website>?”. This is stated if you “Learn more…”. This may not supprise you, as Mozilla get 90 percent of its revenue from Google, and therefore use lots of Google services out of the box. Mozilla started their own location service over a year ago with the goal to “Improve the privacy aspects of the geolocation service compared to the current market offerings.”, which is a good thing. It can be used by following this guide. My results has been varying. Unfortunately Mozilla isn’t as open as they could be on this. They will not share their database. I recommend using OpenWLANMap instead, as they both are older than Mozilla Location Service and do share the database. By installing this add-on you can transparently use OpenWLANMap in Firefox instead. You can join in collecting data for both services by using Mozilla Stubmler app or OpenWLANMap app. I’m not aware of any positioning for web browsers that works off-line, like one can on android using Nogapps.