Simply Explained

When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangible magic of my childhood for them.

I've been writing a monthly newsletter for the past 2.5 years. In every edition, I link to interesting articles related to science and technology. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how many of those links are still accessible, and how many have succumbed to link rot. Let's dive in!

In this post, I’ll show you how I integrated Obsidian into Alfred so I can search my vault from anywhere on my Mac. I just open Alfred, type “note” followed by my query, and see my search results. Hit enter and the correct note opens in Obsidian. Easy and quick!

Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. I'm focusing primarily on my YouTube channel and newsletter, but there are personal reflections in here as well. Last year was an off year for me, and I'm gearing up to make up for lost time in 2023.

Using smart light bulbs means you can no longer use your physical wall switches because the bulbs need constant power. I think that's pretty dumb. Using a physical switch can be way faster than using an app to control the lights.Here's how you can put a Shelly in between the switch and bulb so that you can use both in harmony.

Six years ago, I reworked my anagram solver so it would run on top of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. However, this year I realized I didn't need server-side code or a database at all. I could make it completely static by pre-computing anagram solutions.

I recently integrated Home Assistant with Apple Reminders so that automations can create new todos. This is trickier as it sounds, because Reminders has no API that can be accessed from Home Assistant. Here's how I worked around that problem with a script, input text helper and an iOS Shortcut.

Last year I migrated this website from Jekyll to Eleventy. This year, I’m finally implementing WebP images to save bandwidth and make this site even faster to load! This simple change reduced my bandwidth usage by 50% and is still backwards compatible with old devices and browsers.

In 2019, I built an energy monitor to keep track of our electricity consumption. Then, in 2021, Home Assistant added an Energy Management feature that keeps track of electricity and gas usage. So naturally, I had to make my gas meter smart as well.

Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. Last year has been my most successful year on YouTube so far, and I'd like to share some statistics and thoughts. I will also go over how my email newsletter is doing and where I'm headed. And finally, I'll set myself some goals for 2022.

I've been working on a few IoT projects recently, and while prototyping, I need a simple but flexible data store. I just want to push data to an API and query and visualize it later on.There are many solutions for this, but most are expensive or very limited. So I set out to build my own serverless IoT data store with 2 Lambda functions and a D...

When using AWS IoT Core, most tutorials will tell you to include device certificates in your firmware. While that does work, it means you won't be able to run over-the-air updates.In this post, I'll show how to store AWS certificates in the NVS partition. This will make it possible to deploy a single firmware update to many devices.

When Cloudflare announced that their Tunnel service would become free, I saw an opportunity to strengthen the security of my Home Assistant instance. Until now, I have been using Cloudflare's CDN to connect to my HA instance, but that required opening ports on my router and setting complicated firewall rules.By using Cloudflare Tunnels together...

Governments are pushing CO2 sensors to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, but proper ventilation is equally important for our health and even our cognitive performance.In this blog post we'll look at a DIY CO2 sensor: how it runs ESPHome, how it integrates with Home Assistant, how it works and what safe CO2 levels are.

My YouTube channel has been attracting a lot of spammers. They try to trick people by saying they know how to profit from trading cryptocurrencies or that they can recover lost wallet keys.I've been marking these comments as spam, thinking that YouTube would learn to recognize them, but that doesn't help. Time to take matters into my own hands ...

Like many others, I'm generating a lot of digital data. Constantly taking photos, writing scripts, taking notes, coding projects, and making videos. I'm storing all these files on Google Drive, which has been very reliable but also a bit risky. What if Google closes my account? Or loses my files?Time to set up a NAS so I can backup my files loc...

I'm a big fan of ESPHome. I have 24 devices running it, and I only buy new IoT devices when I know they can run ESPHome.ESPHome is a modular firmware that you have to configure with YAML files. You define what components it should load and how it should talk to the hardware of your device (GPIO pins, LEDs, relays, sensors, Home Assistant integr...

Here's how to run Unraid as a virtual machine under Proxmox. This is useful when you're already using Proxmox and if you want to use Unraid as a NAS.

Building a battery-powered IoT device? Then you'll want to monitor the battery's percentage. Here's how to do it properly.

There's nothing more annoying than a website shifting down just as you're about to click on a button or link. This is called a layout shift, and Google has declared war on them. They've added layout shifts to the Core Web Vitals, and if your website has a lot of them, it will get penalized in the search results.Here's how to prevent (lazy loade...

Jekyll has been powering this site for many years now. It replaced my WordPress setup, and I haven't looked back. Over the last few months, I have become fed up with Jekyll. It's slowing me down. Time to replace it with something new and shiny!

I'm a huge fan of Home Assistant to automate various things around the house. I often look at other people's setup for inspiration, and one thing struck me. Many people have cluttered dashboards and use Home Assistant to track just about any metric they can.That's quite different from my setup. So, here's how I approach home automation.

The ESP32 camera is the cheapest microcontroller with a built-in camera that you can buy. The OV2640 sensor has a max resolution of 1600x1200, but sometimes you don't need the entire image.In this post I'll show how to crop the images on the ESP32 itself, before sending it of to your preferred (cloud) IoT service.

For the past 4 years, I have made a habit of reflecting on the previous year and set goals for the new year. This year is no exception, but now I try to set better goals while reflecting on some personal things in life.

I've become increasingly reliant on Home Assistant to automate various tasks around the house. But how do you safely expose your instance to the internet for remote access?You want to be able to log in from a remote location, but how to keep others out? This post will show how I'm using Cloudflare and the Ubiquiti Dream Machine to properly secu...

If you have flashed your Shelly 2.5 with ESPHome, make sure to configure GPIO16. Otherwise, the pin will be short-circuited and cause the unit to heat up significantly, creating a potential fire hazard!

Adblocker usage is quickly rising, with some estimates saying that almost 25% of internet users have one installed. Not only do they block advertisements, but also analytics scripts (like Google Analytics, Matomo, etc.)So that begs the question: what is the impact of these blockers on Google Analytics? A significant impact could mean that your ...

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Shelly products to automate various devices in my house. They're well built, tiny and rock solid, and best of all: compatible with ESPHome.I flashed ESPHome onto all my Shelly 1's, but for some reason, I have issues with my Shelly 2.5 devices... Here's how I flashed ESPHome onto them over-the-air. No wires!

The release of ESPHome v1.15 brought better support for infrared climate control. This was enough to finally make my YTF IR Hub useable. Here's how I flashed ESPHome onto it and how I configured it for my Daikin AC and Home Assistant.

Luftdaten (now Sensor Community) is a global sensor network that measures air quality around the world. Best of all: it's open-source and anyone can build a sensor.I was very curious to see the air quality in my neighborhood, so I decided to build myself a sensor. And of course, I had to add some Savjee-sauce to it by 3D printing a baseplate fo...

With the release of iOS 11, Apple switched from JPG to HEIC to store your photos. The High-Efficiency Image File Format saves a lot of storage space on your devices while still maintaining your photos' quality. However, it does become problematic if you want to share those files with people or services that only support JPG.Here's how to build ...

I've been adding more and more devices to my smart home lately, so naturally, my garage door opener had to follow. But instead of swapping it out for a new unit, I used a Shelly 1 and a cheap door contact sensor to make it smart for less than $20!It runs ESPHome (open-source, no cloud) and integrates seamlessly with Home Assistant. Here's how I...

Static websites are still a hot topic. They are fast, and they're incredibly secure because there isn't a CMS to hack. Once you build a static website, however, the question becomes: Where do I host?In other words: what is the fastest static website hosting provider in 2020? Well, let's find out!

Last year I made that video in response to a sponsorship offer that I got from various VPN providers. They all told me the same thing: our service is the best way to protect your privacy, and we were hoping you could convey this message in one of your videos.So I decided to do just that. Minus the sponsorship part. Here's why.

Many devices in my home have become "smart" over the last couple of months, with one big exception: my trusty 3D printer. It's a super reliable Prusa i3 MK3, but it lacks an internet connection.So I decided to use a Pi Zero to keep track of my 3D prints and send the progress to my Home Assistant installation.

I have a few ESP32's running in my house. A few of them are running 24/7 and require an always-on WiFi connection. That's been quite tricky to implement. I used to include various checks throughout my code, but that's not scalable.What I need is something running in the background that is continuously monitoring my WiFi connection, regardless o...

My DIY home energy monitor has been running for almost a year now. It's been recording my electricity consumption every second and everything is neatly archived in my AWS account.Still, though, there is room for improvement. It's time to look back, evaluate & improve the design. I've identified a few pain points that have to be fixed, so le...

Every year I sit down and take a look at how my YouTube channel has been doing. I reflect, evaluate, and set goals for the coming year. This year is no exception. January 13th, 2020, marks my fourth year on YouTube. Time to do a little retrospective.

By now, it's no secret that the ESP32 is my go-to chip for making IoT devices. They're small, powerful, have a ton of onboard features, and they're relatively easy to program.However, when using it together with Arduino, all your code runs on a single core. That seems a bit wasteful, so let's change that by using FreeRTOS to schedule tasks acro...

Running an ESP32 on a battery is a tricky operation. The chip is a powerhouse, and with power comes great responsibility. In this post, I’ll outline how I got an ESP32 to run for over 15 weeks (and counting) on a single 1000mAh battery.