A quick tip on how to make NVIDIA driver work in virtualised Windows install (Solving error 43).

A step-by-step tutorial to get Debian Jessie up and running in RO mode on a Raspberry PI (v3 tested). Never lose our installation due to power-related SD card corruption.

As fellow LIFX users may know, there is yet to be an official API supporting easy to use locally-installable interface to control the bulbs. (The last part being important, as my internet connection leaves a lot to be desired). This is my solution to the problem - very simple and lightweight implementation of the LIFX bulb protocol.

I have been a follower of OpenHAB for a while now and I would like to say that it is a very enjoyable and fulfilling journey. Furthermore, I believe that the ability to abstract over many of the hardware specifics is a necessity for any practical application – not even the best vendor can cover all of the bases well.

OpenHAB has seen integration of most of the smart bulbs (LiFX, Phillips Hue, etc.), which allows us to treat every light as a simple object with a colour assigned to it. This solves quite a big problem of needing to …

When I first heard that VirtualBox could be ran on a FreeNAS server, I was ecstatic. The idea of consolidating many of the little services onto one single machine was very enticing – less machines to manage UPS shutdown/power-on for, less network traffic and freeing-up of more computers to play with in my home lab!

WARNING: only use this if your database is small relative to your total storage – the mongodump create full snapshot every time it’s scheduled. See my previous post for MongoDB setup log.

This part describes how I configured my OpenHAB instance to use MongoDB as persistence backend. For configuration of MongoDB on my FreeNAS machine, see my previous post.

This posts describes steps I took to get MongoDB running inside of a jail on my FreeNAS 9.1.1 setup. All commands issued from @freenas are from the main console, and @homeauto_database are from inside of the jail. This step provided me with a fully functional persistence backend for OpenHAB.

This one was quite a time-saver for me and a definite addition to the permanent toolkit.

I’ve happened to have a set of images that I needed to merge into a PDF. Having done it using Preview app on the Mac before, I was looking if a better solution was there. And what an elegant one it was!

Steps required to get DISEMBL running locally.