Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of… Read more →
Sensoring Aquaponics
As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start. An Arduino… Read more →
Aquaponics update
Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced. I left the last post where I had a lovely clean tank and had just introduced 20 goldfish. About a week later I introduced a further 20 and I’m happy to say that around 3 weeks on the… Read more →
My foray into aquaponics
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were sharing YouTube videos around water harvesting, hydro electricity generation and the like. As the usual YouTube journey does, I ended up going off on a tangent and watching a video on aquaponics. I found it really fascinating so started looking deeper and deeper, and finally decided to give it… Read more →
LightwaveRF Comfy Review
The LightwaveRF Comfy smart home heating starter kit comes with 3 radiator valves and a LightwaveRF Link unit. All looked fairly straightforward out of the box, fortunately my radiators came equipped with Honeywell TRVs which made attaching the LightwaveRF ones really simple. That said there are a myriad of conversion attachments supplied so no worries there. Being a true geek… Read more →
Maplins weather station fun
A while ago I bought one of the Maplins weather stations, just for fun really no plans with it. The device came with a pole to which several sensors could be attached: temperature, humitidy, wind speed, wind direction and rain level. The other important bit in the box was the control station, which is a large LCD screen based output… Read more →
Ensure systemd services restart on failure
I wrote a post a while ago covering the use of Monit to monitor services running and the use case I covered was to ensure these services restarted on failure. While a useful feature of Monit, it seems to be now a little redundant with SystemD having a built in restart feature. Same use case where MySQL (or MariaDB in… Read more →
Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is look into the possibility of using 2 factor authentication, or 2FA, with SSH connections. This would add a much needed level of security to servers I host out in the wild. Here’s how I did it: The Google Authenticator mobile app used to be an open source project, it isn’t… Read more →
Etckeeper – config version control
A valuable tool I have been using for many years is etckeeper, it works by essentially turning your /etc directory into a git repository. This is a fantasticly useful set of tools as any configuration changes can be logged and also reverted quite easily. Install and setup is exeptionally easy too! Packages are available for most distributions, but my scenario… Read more →
SSH known hosts verification failure one liner
WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! Those who regularly build and rebuild machines or virtual machines on a dhcp network will probably be faced with this quite often, this is due to the known fingerprint for the previous host being different to a new one which has aquired the same IP address. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!… Read more →