After all, now that we have wireless thermostats, door locks, outlets, dimmers, alarms, garage doors, and motion sensors, it only makes sense to publish events onto a Service Bus. In my case I used Mosquitto in a FreeBSD jail as my broker. My home controller is a HomeSeer. There are MQTT plugins available, but I…
I recently got a call from a friend who has a library of thousands of PDF documents. He wanted to know there was a such thing as a personal search engine that could index his library of documents, and allow full text search inside of them. I have a giant document library too, including PDF…
Home automation is coming into the mainstream a with recent offerings from the big tech companies, and I’m interested in it too. I’ve had a number of home automation controllers, most recently an H3 Pro SEL from HomeSeer. I’ve also become quite interested recently in DevOps monitoring, using InfluxDB, and Grafana. Sensu, Telegraf and Prometheus…
I often have a need for a fresh FreeBSD install, to host a server, or perhaps just experiment with. My usual solution is FreeBSD jails. However, I’ve recently gotten interested in Ansible and AWS. There are quite a few advantages to installing infra with AWS, however the one I’m most interested in is automating the…
A couple projects I’ve been working on have a need for a REPL style console. I had written a simple framework for creating REPL’s, which is open-sourced here.
I recently had a reason to need a TELNET server and couldn’t find a Java library that worked for me. After a weekend of hacking, I now have kTelnet, an Open-source, BSD-licensed, TELNET server.
I’ve recently become very interested in blockchain, and that, naturally led me to Ethereum and Bitcoin. From there, I got a little interested in online trading, but since I prefer not to have to think about trading, I started thinking about a trading bot. Part of the work I needed to do was write a…
I’ve been using FreeBSD jails for a while, and was looking for a simple way to create jail filesystems. After some reading, I came up with this simple script which creates full FreeBSD filesystems. The filesystem can then be used via jail.conf. #!/bin/bash JAILNAME=$1 echo “kjail “$1 JAIL_HOME=/tank/kjail/ FTP=http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/11.1-RELEASE/ # # get packages # if…
I’ve been interested in OS development for a while, and now have a prototypical ARM OS on my private source tree. For that I used gcc-arm-embedded, which worked quite well. However, as time went on, i became interested in building my own tool chains. I started with this list of requirements An up-to-date C/C++ compiler,…
I’ve been trying forever to get a mobile IPSec connection up between my OS X laptop and pfsense. Finally, thanks to this outstanding blog post, it works. I’m especially excited that it works with the default OS X and Android VPN clients. My pfsense config closely mirrors the one specified by Mike Murray pfsense…