For a couple of years now I've been using the Hubitat Elevation C7 home automation hub. I was doing some tweaking this weekend, and I wanted to setup SMTP and SMS notification channels. I had been using Twilio for SMS, but it wasn't a free service. And I also wanted...
Recently I've been re-doing my home network, and I'm now using the OPNsense firewall, replacing my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 12 with a more robust solution. For OPNsense I selected the PROTECTLI FW6D platform, which has 6 ports and an Intel i5-8250U CPU. I've also been running Pi-Hole on my network for...
Want to know the top audio plugins to optimize your desktop headphone experience? Check out this post, along with hardware recommendations.
Do you want a wicked fast VPN back to to your home network that seamlessly roams between cellular/LTE and Wifi? Look no further than Wireguard. This blog post will show you how to install and configure Wireguard on a Raspberry Pi 4 and an endpoint such as your phone. I...
About 18 months ago I requested a MacBook Pro at work, instead of refreshing my Windows Lenovo laptop. I've always been a Windows user, so I was a bit unsure about the switch at first. However, already being in the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and Apple...
This post about Solar energy systems is going a little outside of my normal "IT" theme of this site, but it's very technical so I thought I would share. I've been doing a ton of research about going solar found all of the technical details fascinating, as well as confusing...
​A little while ago I blogged about how to setup Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4 B with DNSCrypt. However, not all devices on your network may play nice with your DHCP server and respect the DNS servers that it provides. Google is infamous for hard coding DNS in products,...
Note: Updated 6/28/2020 to include Gravity-sync and MacOS/iOS Pi-hole control apps. Note: Updated 11/15/2019 to optionally use the ​NextDNS.io DNS filtering and analytics service.Note: Updated 11/1/2019 for Anonymized DNS configuration, added Raspberry Pi 4 firmware update procedure, and apt package removal ​to free up more space.Recently I've become more and more...
Notes: Although the notes from the session are not lengthy, the impact of this announcement cannot be understated. VMware has finally brought to the table slimplifed VCSA (and later ESXi) certificate management. I can't wait for the future betas to try out these new features. New APIs for Cert...