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My DIY home energy monitor has been running for almost a year now. It's been recording my electricity consumption every second and everything is neatly archived in my AWS account.Still, though, there is room for improvement. It's time to look back, evaluate & improve the design. I've identified a few pain points that have to be fixed, so le...
over a year ago

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More from Simply Explained

Bringing Foam Monsters to Life: How I Wrote and Illustrated a Children's Book Using AI

I've always wanted to write a book. It's been on my bucket list for several years, but I never got around to it. Last summer I had a revelation: my kids love being read to, so why don't I write a story for them?Here's how I approached writing a children's book and how I used AI to illustrate it.

5 months ago 41 votes
How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids

When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangible magic of my childhood for them.

a year ago 40 votes
Analyzing Link Rot in My Newsletter (After 31 Editions)

I've been writing a monthly newsletter for the past 2.5 years. In every edition, I link to interesting articles related to science and technology. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how many of those links are still accessible, and how many have succumbed to link rot. Let's dive in!

a year ago 31 votes
How I Use Alfred to Search My Obsidian Notes Faster (with Spotlight!)

In this post, I’ll show you how I integrated Obsidian into Alfred so I can search my vault from anywhere on my Mac. I just open Alfred, type “note” followed by my query, and see my search results. Hit enter and the correct note opens in Obsidian. Easy and quick!

over a year ago 34 votes
Year in review: 2022

Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. I'm focusing primarily on my YouTube channel and newsletter, but there are personal reflections in here as well. Last year was an off year for me, and I'm gearing up to make up for lost time in 2023.

over a year ago 38 votes

More in technology

Practical Computing Interviewed Alan Sugar (1985)

A Quick Look Behind the Scenes at Amstrad.

2 days ago 7 votes
A robotic hand with the dexterity to sign the whole ASL alphabet

Even if we ignore intelligence, humans are able to speak when other animals — even other great apes — can’t, because of our specialized and complex vocal anatomy. Similarly, ASL (American Sign Language) wouldn’t be possible without our incredible hand and finger dexterity. Like any other complex physiological system, that is difficult to recreate artificially. […] The post A robotic hand with the dexterity to sign the whole ASL alphabet appeared first on Arduino Blog.

2 days ago 5 votes
How to run Uptime Kuma in Docker in an IPv6-only environment

I use Uptime Kuma to check the availability of a few services that I run, with the most important one being my blog. It’s really nice. Today I wanted to set it up on a different machine to help troubleshoot and confirm some latency issues that I’ve observed, and for that purpose I picked the cheapest ARM-based Hetzner Cloud VM hosted in Helsinki, Finland. Hetzner provides a public IPv6 address for free, but you have to pay extra for an IPv4 address. I didn’t want to do that out of principle, so I went ahead and copied my Docker Compose definition over to the new server. For some reason, Uptime Kuma would start up on the new IPv6-only VM, but it was unsuccessful in making requests to my services, which support both IPv4 and IPv6. The requests would time out and show up as “Pending” in the UI, and the service logs complained about not being able to deliver e-mails about the failures. I confirmed IPv6 connectivity within the container by running docker exec -it uptime-kuma bash and running a few curl and ping commands with IPv6 flags, had no issues with those. When I added a public IPv4 address to the container, everything started working again. I fixed the issue by explicitly disabling the IPv4 network in the Docker Compose service definition, and that did the trick, Uptime Kuma made successful requests towards my services. It seems that the service defaults to IPv4 due to the internal Docker network giving it an IPv4 network to work with, and that causes issues when your machine doesn’t have any IPv4 network or public IPv4 address associated with it. Here’s an example Docker Compose file: name: uptime-kuma services: uptime-kuma: container_name: uptime-kuma networks: - uptime-kuma ports: - 3001:3001" volumes: - /path/to/your/storage:/app/data image: docker.io/louislam/uptime-kuma restart: always networks: uptime-kuma: enable_ipv6: true enable_ipv4: false That’s it! If you’re interested in different ways to set up IPv6 networking in Docker, check out this overview that I wrote a while ago.

4 days ago 7 votes
This inexpensive adapter brings Apple Universal Control to vintage Macs

In the distant past of about two decades ago, one would need to use a KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch to control multiple computers with the same mouse and keyboard — and even then, it would take a button press to move from one to the other. Today, Apple’s Universal Control feature lets users seamlessly […] The post This inexpensive adapter brings Apple Universal Control to vintage Macs appeared first on Arduino Blog.

5 days ago 10 votes
3D printing is pretty darn cool, actually

I love 3D printing. Out of all the tech hype cycles and trends over the last decade, this one is genuinely useful. There’s simply something magical about being able to design or download a model from the internet, send it to a machine, and after a few hours you get an actual physical object in return! I don’t own a 3D printer myself, but I’ve had access to people who are happy to help out by printing something for me. So far I’ve printed the following useful things: a Makita vacuum cleaner holder a dual vertical laptop stand it’s such a simple and cheap design, and yet it works incredibly well if you add some rubberized material to the bottom and inside the laptop holder a dual HDD adapter for a Zimaboard a stand for the Steam Deck a carrying case insert for the Steam Deck a case for the Orange Pi Zero There’s so much more that I’d want to print, like various battery holders, controller stands, and IKEA SKÅDIS mounts. There’s also the option of downloading and printing a whole PC case, which is incredibly tempting. Will I finally be able to build the perfect home server according to my very specific requirements? Probably not, given how often my preferences change, but it would be incredibly cool! And yet I don’t own a 3D printer. The main obstacle for me is the time, I feel like in order to be successful with a 3D printer, I’ll need to at the very least learn the basics of filaments, their properties, what parameters to configure and how, how to maintain a 3D printer, how to fix one when it breaks, how to diagnose misalignment issues etc. I’ll also need space for one, extruding hot melting plastic seems like a thing that I’d want to host in a proper workshop and with actual ventilation. It’s a whole-ass hobby, not a half-ass one. Durability can be problematic with 3D prints, even in my limited experience. For example, I tried positioning the Makita vacuum cleaner holder differently, but ended up putting too much strain on the design, which eventually lead to it completely failing. In other cases, filaments like PLA aren’t suitable for designs where they are attached to warm or hot computer parts, they will warp like crazy. I appreciate the hell out of anyone that shares their designs with the world, and especially those that allow remixing or customizing their designs. There are fantastic designs and ideas out there on sites like Printables, and the creativity that’s on display warms my heart.

5 days ago 12 votes