Life, The Universe and ... Everything!

I was fortunate to have traveled a lot when I was young, as my dad worked for British Airways. Most of our holidays were spent visiting wherever British Airways flew. The bulk of these flights were on BA's 747 fleet, affectionately known as the "Jumbo Jet". My first flight on a 747-100 (then BOAC) was on 11-Dec-1973, between London and Singapore. My last flight on a British Airways 747-400 was on 22-Mar-2001, between Boston and London. All in all, I've flown a total of 78 flights on BA's...

I needed an excuse to learn how to create my own Docker Image, and fortunately all the stars aligned perfectly : An Itch that needed ScratchingTime and Resources to do itAn Urgency that forced me to actually see it through ! The Problem I have a RPM repository of custom packages, which has dependencies on some standard packages. To simplify installation, I want to include just the standard packages (just the ones I need) in my repository as well. In CentOS 8 however, some of the standard...

i discovered this useful node-red plugin node over the weekend, called node-red-contrib-cast (https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-cast). With it I can get node-red to tell my google home devices to either read out some text or play some media. So now when my door bell is pressed, in addition to triggering my 80s doorbell, the google home minis around the house start playing a clip from Paul McCartney's 1976 track "Let 'Em In" ... 🎵 Someone's knocking at the door ... Somebody's ...

Previously I installed some sensors around my home, and got them to update their status into an MQTT Message Broker. The Message Broker acts as a central nervous system for the apartment, making the status of sensors available to everything. Knowing status alone is not enough, we must be able to "do" things with the knowledge. We want to be able to transform the status from one form of information to another, to make decisions by combining inputs from different things, and finally, to act ...

Many moons ago I set up a sonoff basic power relay with tasmota firmware and a Mosquitto MQTT Message Broker on a raspberry pi so that I can switch my 3D printer on and off remotely. I've recently added a few more tasmota devices in my apartment for home automation, and wanted a more stable platform for my mosquitto MQTT broker. I've also been playing with Docker on my Synology NAS (installed via the Synology Package Manager), and since that has a redundant storage, a UPS, and is already ru...

I recently install two 433Mhz radio-frequency gadgets at my front door ... a wireless pushbutton and a wireless door sensor. The pushbutton costs USD3.55 from banggood.com. It has a replaceable battery and can be fixed to a wall using screws or double sided tape. When the button is pressed, it broadcasts a unique code on 433Mhz, just like an automatic gate remote control. The door sensor is a combination of a reed switch and magnet, and costs USD5.30 on banggood.com. Like the push button,...

My dad "recovered" this recently ... a DIY doorbell kit I bought in the early 1980s and had on my bedroom door back when I was a kid. I cleaned it up a bit, and it still works! It sounds very retro, like the telephones from the 80s. The sound of a mechanical bell is quite rare these days. How it works - Watch In Slow Motion! When the button is pressed, a circuit is formed that runs from the terminal at the bottom, through the magnet coil, over the wire to the other side, through the ...

What? Samsung BD-J5500 Blue-Ray/DVD Player, Region-3 Only PlayerWhy? How?Power OnPress Black Button (below yellow "C" button)Press 56732 (this code depends on which region your player is locked to, see the source article below)"3" will appear on displayPress "9""9" will briefly appear on displayPlayer is now region-lock free. Source? https://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks/samsung-bd-j5500/12530

My Synology DS918+ has two Seagate Ironwolf NAS 6TB drives in it, currently configured in a Storage Pool. With two drives, one is essentially a mirror of the other, so the total storage available is only 6TB. Well 5TB if you "count" the way hard drive manufacturers do. It's now time to add to this storage. I called C-Zone at PJ Digital Mall and was told they had the drive in stock. Unfortunately, when I got there, it turns out there was a mix up and they didn't have actually have them there...

Objective I want a webserver under Docker on my Synology NAS serving multiple websites (virtualhosts) that support HTTPS. Prerequisites Docker is already installed in my Synology NAS and accessible from an admin account shell.I've set up my router's public port 80 to map to port 8001 on the Synology NAS, and port 443 to map to port 8002. Port 80 on the NAS is used by the Synology's DSM interface, so my web server needs to run on a different port.The domain name for the web site has a A rec...