Versatile Thermostat vs Better Thermostat: 10 Days of Data Changed My Mind

Better Thermostat vs Versatile Thermostat: 10 days of data, 90% less valve thrashing, 2x faster heating. Here's why I switched and the numbers that prove it.

The Holy Grail of Heating Thermostats: A Plot Twist (TRV801Z vs TRV801_1)

I bought 8 MOES TRV valves and discovered that firmware lottery can ruin your heating automation. Here's what I learned at -14°C outside.

The Lazy Sysadmin's Guide to UPS Battery Calibration: When You Refuse to Leave Your Desk

Replaced UPS batteries but runtime dropped? The APC remembers old capacity. Instead of shutting down my homelab and fumbling with cables, I calibrated the UPS remotely via Home Assistant's NUT addon using raw netcat commands. Runtime nearly doubled. Zero cables touched.

How I Spent Two Weeks Fighting Microsoft's Support System to Recover My Own Account: A Kafka-esque Journey Through Corporate Bureaucracy

Locked out of your Microsoft account as the sole admin? Join me on a 2-week odyssey through Microsoft's Kafkaesque support system. Learn the secret backdoors, magic words, and creative workarounds I discovered to finally recover my account. A survival guide born from corporate bureaucracy hell.

The $20 Bitcoin Lottery: When Your ESP32 Becomes a Slot Machine (With Better Odds Than You Think)

I compare the odds of winning the Polish Lotto, the Eurojackpot, and solo-mining a Bitcoin block with a $20 ESP32. The results are shocking — in the world of “lottery mining,” your tiny device becomes a perpetual lottery ticket that also tells time and costs under $3 a year to run.

When Rain Actually Makes You Happy: The $10 Zigbee Guardian of Your Outdoor Laundry

A punchy summary that highlights the key selling points - the price, dual functionality, practical use cases (laundry + irrigation), and the advantage of real detection over forecasts. It's short, engaging, and gives readers a clear reason to read the full article.

The Silent Killer and the 25$ Zigbee Guardian: Safer Home with the ZC-HM Carbon Monoxide Sensor (Home Assistant compatibile)

The heating season brings a deadly risk: carbon monoxide. See how a $25 Zigbee sensor (ZC-HM) and Home Assistant can protect your family. A simple setup for a priceless peace of mind. #SmartHome #Safety

When SMART Lies and Your NAS Dies: A 48-Hour Recovery Saga

"SMART status: PASSED" - the biggest lie in storage monitoring. My WD Red drive was dying with 69 errors at LBA=0, clicking mechanically, yet SMART said everything was fine. A 48-hour battle with silent hardware failure that nearly cost me 4.5TB of data. ZFS saved me, but barely.

The Day I Cracked My Own 12-Year-Old TrueCrypt Volume: A Journey Through Virtual Machines, Legacy Crypto, and Million-Password Brute Force

Journey through recovering a 12-year-old TrueCrypt volume: from P2V virtualization failures to discovering VeraCrypt incompatibilities with RIPEMD-160, building a 12-million password generator, and creating a PowerShell batch-processing script that reduced 412 days to 6 minutes. Full code included.

That Time I Thought I Got Pwned (But Was Just Being a Noob)

Woke up to suspicious AWS bot traffic hitting my Ghost API endpoints. Spent 5 minutes convinced I was hacked before realizing I'm just an idiot who never read the docs. Turns out Ghost's Content API key is supposed to be public. Who knew? (Everyone except me, apparently.)

Building a Reliable Local NTP Server with GPS: Another Step Towards Self-Hosted Infrastructure

The improvement is staggering! We went from ~5-6 milliseconds accuracy with internet sources to just 82 microseconds with local GPS. That's over 60 times more accurate! This is stratum 1 time accuracy in my homelab!

The Day I Discovered My TimescaleDB Was Just PostgreSQL in Disguise

For years I thought my Zabbix was using TimescaleDB. A failed upgrade revealed the truth: 391 million records in plain PostgreSQL with no optimization. My queries were 7,500x slower than they should have been. Sometimes the best discoveries come from fixing what's broken.

SDR

My New Hobby: Discovering the Invisible Radio World with SDR

An IT professional discovers the invisible world of radio signals through SDR, transforming a simple RTL-SDR dongle experiment into a fascinating journey of intercepting aircraft data and witnessing impossible long-distance communications.

ai

The Illusion of AI Reasoning - When Pattern Matching Masquerades as Thought

New research from Apple reveals that even the most advanced "reasoning" AI models like o1 and Claude aren't actually reasoning at all - they're just sophisticated pattern matchers that completely collapse when faced with novel complexity, even reducing their thinking effort when problems get harder.

TLS

The 47-Day Certificate: How Apple Killed the Annual SSL Renewal

The CA/Browser Forum just approved shrinking TLS certificates to 47 days by 2029. We'll soon pay the same price for commercial certs that expire faster than a DHCP lease. Time to embrace automation - those 'annoying' 90-day Let's Encrypt certificates suddenly look like visionaries.

frigate

Turbocharging Frigate NVR with Google Coral TPU: Performance Gains and Energy Savings

Upgrading Frigate NVR with a Google Coral TPU delivered 4× faster detection, 10× lower CPU usage, and reduced power by 50W. This essential homelab upgrade pays for itself in under 10 months while dramatically improving performance.

cisco

The VLAN Paradox: When Your WiFi Network Exists in Limbo (Thanks to Cisco's "Stroke of Genius")

Discover the frustrating paradox of WiFi VLANs on Cisco switches: they won't work until clients connect, but clients can't connect until they work. Learn practical workarounds for this "chicken and egg" problem affecting your wireless networks.

homelab

Complete Guide: Setting Up a Custom Validated Domain for Your Homelab in 2025

Transform your homelab with a custom validated domain using Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare, and wildcard SSL. Access services through clean, secure URLs instead of IP addresses and ports.

homelab

Diagnosing and Monitoring LSI RAID Controllers in a Homelab: The Mystery of Phantom Disks

Discover how I diagnosed mysterious VM failures in my homelab by accessing my LSI RAID controller, identified cascading disk failures across multiple volumes, and developed a monitoring script to prevent future storage catastrophes.

supermicro

Reviving Remote Access to Legacy Supermicro Servers: A Technical Guide

Overcoming the challenges of accessing remote console on legacy Supermicro servers using OpenWebStart and specific Java versions, plus solving the mysterious "invalid session token" error with a creative BMC reset approach that preserves network connectivity.

Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft's OmniParser: The Next Evolution in AI-Human Computer Interaction

Microsoft's OmniParser enables AI to control your computer through simple commands. While promising enhanced accessibility and automation, it raises crucial questions about privacy and the future of human-computer interaction.

ghost

Integrating Ghost CMS with IndexNow: Fast-Track Your Content to Search Engines

Discover how to integrate Ghost CMS with IndexNow - a protocol that lets you instantly notify search engines about your new content. A 5-minute setup that can significantly speed up your content's path to search visibility.

WebAnalytics

How Microsoft Clarity Made Me Feel Like a Digital Detective 🕵️

Like many curious webmasters, I recently found myself deep in the rabbit hole of website analytics. It all started when I was poking around my Matomo dashboard, admiring (or lamenting) my website stats, when a thought struck me: How the heck do I know what Bing searches bring users to

server

Another BIOS Update for HPE DL380 Gen9 - New Security Patches (3.40_08-29-2024)

Following up on my previous post about updating the BIOS on my HPE DL380 Gen9 server, I found myself revisiting this topic. My backup server recently got promoted to handle our lab/staging environment, which means it needs to be in top shape with all the latest security patches and