Sytone's Ramblings

The occasional posts of a guy who plays with technology.

PowerShell Cron Script

2021-01-22 3 min read General
I was looking for a way to schedule jobs and yes windows has a task scheduler built in, however I wanted a bit more flexibility and less complexity. On the unix platform you can use cron. It is a scheduler that uses a simple format to define the time when the process should start and the process command. I was going to look at using it when I thought about the parsing that would be needed, I dod not want a system that much that I would write a cron parser. Continue reading

Work at home and being a team

2020-03-13 3 min read General
Now that we are dealing with COVID-19, a lot of companies are getting their employees to work remotely. For some this will be great and for other who crave social interaction not so great. For me the key thing is making sure that my team feels like a team still. Keeping the routine going is pretty important. For yourself and your team. There are lots of great posts about this so I will just list the key points. Continue reading

Running Home Assistant on Pine64

2016-08-19 2 min read General
This is a dump of me setting up Home Assistant on a Pine64 board I have. I am used to OpenHAB and have created bindings for it so this should be a new challenge and a way to see how well it works. The reason I am heading towards Home Assistant is the components it support fit some of my needs better. Also time to get to know python better :) Continue reading

Setting up Mosquitto on your Pi as part of the home hub

2015-10-25 2 min read General
To enable all your nodes to communicate we are using a protocol called MQTT, on the pi we are using Mosquitto as the broker to support this. The broker allows nodes to publish information or subscribe to get information when it is published. MQTT uses simple channels to dictate where messages go, here are some examples: HOME/Garage/DoorOne/State HOME/Garage/DoorTwo/State HOME/Garage/Temperature The structure of the channel is up to you, just keep it short and logical! Continue reading

Setting up a Pi with a NRF24L01+ Radio

2015-10-25 2 min read General
I’m using my PI as the central hub running OpenHAB, a MQTT broker and other services for home automation. On the Pi I am using a NRF24L01+pa+lna SMA Antenna Wireless Transceiver, this provide more range (1000m) from my main unit. All the nodes in the network will be running on Arduino chips and using a Mesh network so the house should have good coverage. First, wiring in the NRF24L01 to the Pi. Continue reading

Dealing with Internet Explorer ‘Continue to this website’ option missing

2014-12-19 1 min read General
Found the work around here: http://blog.oracle48.nl/internet-explorer-10-continue-to-this-website-option-missing/ To skip all the text on this page to the command one needs to unblock this restriction and for example set the minimum key length to 512; run the following in a elevated command line (cmd.exe ‘run-as-administrator’): `certutil -setreg chain\minRSAPubKeyBitLength 512 Now the “Continue to this website (not recommended).” is back If you want to revert this change and go back to the default of an 1024 bit key minimum, run: Continue reading
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