Home automation part II – location & day/night triggering

Posted on May 13, 2012 by taliz

In part one I went through the setup of the Tellstick and controlling it via a browser and/or mobile phone app.
In this part I’ll try to explain how to make it trigger based on your location and time of day/night, so you won’t have to push any buttons at all. Magic! *cough* Continue reading →

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Making suspend & wakeup work on an ION board with Ubuntu, XBMC & MCE remote

Posted on January 19, 2012 by taliz

Mostly for my own reference, but it might be useful for you too.

Most of the problems and solutions I found via google was related to bugs in the 2.6 kernel, and the solution was often to downgrade. I am however running a 3.0 kernel and figured it should be possible to solve without downgrading.

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Automating your home – it’s easy!

Posted on November 1, 2011 by taliz

Ever thought about how nice it would be to be able to power on, or off, everything in your home via your cell phone, or the internet? Just imagine one click on a button on your Android or iPhone and voila; you dimmed the lights in the living room, turned on the projector, lowered the projector screen, turned on the receiver, the subwoofer and the HTPC, all at once.
Or lets say you want to turn of all the lights in your home when you go to bed with the touch of one button.

Well, its rather simple nowadays to make that happen that easily. And cheap, too.

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Setting UTF8 as default in FreeBSD shell & screen, useful for irssi

Posted on May 27, 2011 by taliz

This is mostly for my own reference.
Running irssi with UTF8 will produce garbage characters unless screen, shell and terminal(not documented here, most terminals use utf8 nowadays though) is also set to UTF8.

The commands below will fix it, assuming you use bash.
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Create a report of your Virtual Machine inventory in VMware vSphere with PowerCLI

Posted on May 27, 2011 by taliz

Here’s a short Powershell script that outputs your virtual machine inventory to a csv-file.
Replace VCip with the ip of your vCenter server.
Replace VCuser and VCpass with, preferably, a read-only user with access to your vCenter environment.

Save the code to, for example, vm-report.ps1 and then execute it in PowerCLI.
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Transcoding a stream from a Dreambox on FreeBSD using VLC

Posted on May 24, 2011 by taliz

Do you want to watch your TV channels from home at work? Do you have a Dreambox? If so, continue reading.
Streaming the raw output from a Dreambox over the internet usually makes it stutter. So transcoding it first to a codec with higher compression, such as mp4, is probably a good idea. This can preferably be done on a host on the same LAN as the Dreambox.

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Setting up FreeBSD as a fileserver and Time Machine target in Mac OS X

Posted on April 12, 2011 by taliz

Couldn’t find a post that was up to date, the closest one I found was this:

http://thomas.pelletier.im/2010/01/time-machine-freebsd-and-afp-are-on-a-little-boat

But it recommends Howl, which is deprecated. I decided to replace it with avahi.

I based the avahi setup on these posts:
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

http://www.endeavoursofanengineer.com/blog/2010/05/08/installing-avahi-on-freebsd-2/

Lets go.

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Finding ISOs mounted by Virtual Machines in vSphere

Posted on May 13, 2010 by taliz

Well, I’ve never really gotten around to find a good answer on how to find which virtual machine has an ISO mounted. This has been problematic whenever moving the ISO storage, since it will just fail without telling you which VM is using the ISO(haven’t found anything in the logs on the ESX host or vCenter itself either). Google seems to have no answer so I figured something out myself, if you have a better method then please let me know!

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Posted in VMware | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments