kennywest

A while a go I bought these Avidsen branded smart plugs in a local hardware store. These plugs work fine. The only downside they have is you need the Avidsen Home app on your phone to control them. A while ago I installed home assistant on a raspberry pi to make my home "smarter". HA integrates flawlessly with Home Wizard which I use to monitor my gas and electricity consumption. It also integrates with my recently purchased tado thermostats. So everything started to get integrated ... except for the Avidsen plugs. After doing some research, I found that these plugs are actually rebranded tuya plugs and home assistant seems to integrate with these. This integration, however, is a bit tedious. You need to re-register all your plugs in the Tuya Smart app and after that you need to set up integration with home assistant on tuya's IoT cloud. Although this works, it seemed like a lot of hassle to have home assistant running in my study, ta...

A while ago I replaced my unsafe RAID 0 setup with a (faster) SSD of 1TB. Since the RAID 0 setup was unsafe, I created backups every now and then. Even when I replaced the unsafe setup with the safer SSD, I continued creating backups. I try to adhere to the 3-2-1 backup strategy. So I have 3 (actually more than 3) copies of my data on 2 different media. And 1 of them kept off-site. I still use my old script for this that relies on rsync to copy all the data to whatever destination (external drive, NFS share, ...) that I can mount. During the last run of the script I started to notice failures during the rsync copy. After some investigation and booting the PC with a rescue linux , errors started popping up while running fsck.ext4 -c . This option causes e2fsck to use badblocks program to do a read-only scan of the device in order to find any bad blocks. The results of smartclt did not look any good either :( smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-5.10.197-1-M...

Adding a SSD to a what? 10 years ago, I bought a PogoPlug Pro on a daily offers website. This was a small ARM device running some Linux flavour on an old 2.6 (I think) kernel. The device was equiped with some proprietary software from a company called Cloud Engines . The idea was to connect this device to your local network, attach an external hard drive using one of the four USB ports and tada your hard drive is now accessible from anywhere on the Internet. This service was totally free of charge. Free as in; you buy the device (price was around €30) plug it in and that was it. It was only later that Cloud Enines started to offer real cloud storage, hosted by themselves and started charging for that service. With other cloud providers like dropbox , google's drive , microsoft's on drive and many others, Cloud Engines was struggling to stay afloat. Somewhere in 2017, the service along with the company finally shutdown , leaving a bunch of users with obsolete d...