Home Automation With Home Assistant

I’ve been interested in home automation for ten or fifteen years now, probably since writing my thesis on home networks access control, quite some time away. My view of a well made home automation is a home that responds to its inhabitants, in some cases even anticipates their wills and wants. Well, anticipate may be a bit of a stretch, but even “infers from” is already sufficiently close to magic.

Getting Started With Yubikeys

I bought a set of Yubikeys to figure out what the fuss was all about. Getting started was surprisingly painless and i now have a new authentication factor for Google, Github and Lastpass.

Change Your Mac Profile Picture Into Anything

So you’re tired of the standard profile pictures, don’t want to use the camera, don’t have a Mac Server? Here’s a fairly simple workaround to use any picture as your profile picture.

Experiencing New Things

Today i’ve experienced several things, many of them new. Some new in a meaningful way, some mainly trivial. And in a broader scope of things, mostly trivial really.

Mac tip: Map Caps Lock to Ctrl or Escape

Caps lock? Show me a programmer or a system administrator that actually uses caps lock for producing CAPITAL LETTERS. Actually, don’t. But the point is, CAPS LOCK as a toggle for typing in SCREAM CASE versus normal case is really an outdated concept. That’s why i mapped my Caps Lock key to be a control key instead.

Theses on a Thesis

For some strange reason, i realized that there’s a spot in my old MSc Thesis which says it’s available on line. So i thought i’d follow up on that promise and make sure it is. And while i was at it, i wrote a whole page about how to (not) write your thesis. So there. Now for some truly unfathomable reason, the link to the thesis page doesn’t show if you’re reading the preview of this.

Renewing your Gitlab Pages certificate the Hard Way

I got a nice and polite notice a month ago that my certificate on my blog is expiring. Thankfully i have documented the process on my blog, i thought. Sadly, i can’t remember on which of my computers i created the certificate. Also, i need that computer to renew the cert, and in the end, none of the computers i tend to use actually seemed to be able to renew the cert. So it looks like i’m having to renew the cert the Hard Way. From scratch.

My Summer Vacation

A month back, i wrote a post “Help, it’s summer”, discussing (or rather, lamenting) how hard it can be to wind down and how i should “work” at allowing myself not to do anything work related – if i could only think of what that would be.

Well, all in all, i think i’ve done a pretty good job.

Hugo Composite Theming

Just recently, Hugo, the web site generator i use for this site, got a new feature: Composite theming. This means that you can build themes on other themes, or even do weird things like multi theme sites. I decided to try theme compositing just to change the fonts of my site.