Category: General

I have historically used nagios for home monitoring which, whilst a powerful and Enterprise Grade tool in some respects, is also an overkill and quite annoying to setup in a home environment setup. I really just want something basic I can look at and can see the status of all my services, get notified when…

I was having a consistent problem with my Linux machine running on an older Ryzen processor (I’m using an old Ryzen 5 1600) where every 24 hours or so the machine would freeze. Strangely it would still respond to ping, and sometimes entire services would keep running. Other services would stop, an inevitably both SSH…

I recently put Cloudflare over the top of this website to protect it and improve performance, on the free plan (I have no affiliation with Cloudflare). The entire process to onboard was an incredibly easy and out of the box you get an insane list of features: DNS DDoS Protection CDN SSL WAF Basic bot…

In a recent statement, ASIO head, Mike Burgess, expressed his intent to potentially use his powers to compel tech companies to cooperate with warrants and decrypt encrypted chats to aid in national security investigations. While the intention behind this move may be noble—ensuring national security—it raises serious concerns about privacy and the fundamental principles of…

Recently my router died after serving a good life (RIP Asus RT-AC5300) so I had to rapidly upgrade my home network. I used this as an opportunity to look to create a proper WiFi 6 network, to try to completely eliminate bufferbloat and to move to PoE switches. After some research and discussion with friends…

I started out with what I thought was a simple mission. Use Open Source software to control my fans and RGB rather than propriety and brand-specific software. It turned out to be much harder than needed mostly Corsair hardware seems to not play nicely with these tools. In the end, I’ve decided to use primarily…

I have been having heat issues with my GPU. The problems started playing Overwatch where the computer would actually completely restart. A look at the minidump showed that it was the Nvidia driver which was crashing, and watching the temperatures I noticed the GPU Hotspot Temperature was getting very high – 115C. From what I…

After many years of friend’s suggesting I explore this software I have finally taken the plunge and installed Home Assistant. If you don’t know what this is it’s essentially open-source software that is designed to connect to any of the devices in your house such as IoT devices, smart-lights, routers, TVs, cameras, alarms and so…

I needed to create a simple web interface for a project I was working on but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time setting up routes, MVC or some other pattern that was going to require a lot of setup. A friend suggested Streamlit. This python package allows you to insert a very…

Like everyone it seems I have been playing with ChatGPT and Auto-GPT trying to understand their capabilities, strengths and weaknesses and get a feel for where the technology is heading. Here are my observations thus far. GPT-3, GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 and Bard I saw a big jump in response depth, comprehension and usability between GPT-3…