SELF-HOSTED WEATHER STATION DATA VISUALIZATION

My dad bought a weather station. Since I don’t like relying on cloud services that might go away at any point in time or request monthly fees from you, I made sure he gets a model that can send it’s data to a local hosted service.

THUNDERBOLT BRIDGE FOR FASTER NETWORKING

For context, I have an absurdly fast internet connection, much faster than any wifi standard. When playing around with open source LLMs via ollama, the downloads of those models are huge but also hosted on very fast servers. Downloading on my desktop, which is a Mac Studio connected via 10Gb ethernet was a breeze with 900 MB/s download speeds. Doing the same over wifi would be at least 10x slower at my home (no wifi 7 devices there yet). Installing the models on my laptop therefore would be way more efficient with wired Ethernet connection. One solution could be to buy a USB-C to 10G Ethernet adapter and plug that into the 10G switch in my office. Or simply connect the two computers via Thunderbolt cable directly. By default macOS offers a “Thunderbolt bridge” to network all macs connected via thunderbolt ports. However by default, the Ethernet port of the Mac Studio is not included in that bridge.

USE LOCAL OLLAMA DEVSTRAL MODEL WITH ZED

I started playing with Zed an editor for programming with AI agent support. Since it allows us to run local models via ollama I played around with it, here are the steps to reproduce it on macOS:

TRUENAS REPLACE ZFS DISKS WITH BIGGER ONE'S

System: TrueNAS Community Edition 25.04.1

Goal: replace the 4x 4TB RAID-Z2 ZFS pool’s disks with bigger 12TB disks to increase the available space from 6.9TiB usable to 21.01TiB usable space.

ADA, GO FORTH, C PYTHON & BASH RUST!

Came up with the phrase Ada, go forth, C Python & bash Rust! while I was preparing breakfast. Absolutely no clue how my brain came up with this, but now it’s archived here :)

CONNECT TO MIKROTIK ROUTER SERIAL CONSOLE PORT

I added a too restrictive firewall rule to my Mikrotik router and locked myself out of the machine, because it dropped all incoming TCP connections. The only access I allowed was via their web-UI and SSH, both TCP based protocols - I was locked out.

FROM PYTHON TO RUST

I have created a YouTube channel called Bedroom Builds on there I started a Series that shows how to transition from Python to Rust - enjoy :)

KNX BASED HOME-AUTOMATION AND REMOTE CONTROL

I created a small web-based GUI which allows my dad to switch on/off the heating and lights in his house from afar. After learning how the protocol of the Samsung Airconditions works I also added support to control them remotely, see here. I also created an abstract way to talk to all the cheap webcams my dad installed around the house to give one central consistent UI for showing their current image and PTZ control. Very practical in summer-time when you switch on the aircon one hour before you come home or switch off the light you might have forgotten while already on the road. The interface itself is not opensource but I contributed to the tools in use, like cherrypy web framework or the knxd daemon to talk to the KNX bus. For showing faster statistics and keeping track of the current state of all KNX devices I also created a custom datatype for PostgreSQL to efficiently store and query a KNX message log called pgknx.

SAMSUNG AIRCONDITION REMOTE CONTROL

The original Samsung solution involves the air conditioning units registering in the cloud and using an app on the phone to remote control them. Found infos online on how their autodiscovery and protocol works and wrote my own client, now remote control over web-UI without relying on Samsungs service is possible. Our A/C’s are now not allowed to connect to the internet directly anymore and are managed by a custom web UI accessible via VPN tunnel.

THUNDERBIRD LABELS PLUGIN FOR ROUNDCUBE WEBMAIL

I am using Thunderbird email client with my IMAP Server. However I also have roundcube webmail to access my emails via web-browser. To keep my labels management possible on both clients I created this plugin for roundcube.