Software

One of the things I missed moving from WordPress to Hugo: scheduled posts. WP just… does that. Set a future date, and forget about it.

And static site generators don’t… The site only rebuilds when you git push, and that’s it. 😢

Why schedule posts, you ask? Because at times I write 3-4 posts in a day, and I don’t want to spam. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I have a rule that there should only be a single published post a day, and if I know I’m out of topics (especially for FlatTurtle) I tend to add a week or 2 between posts to spread it out evenly.

What a time to be alive! The web is truly, utterly broken.

To be entirely clear, I’m not doing anything. It just refreshes a million times, DoSing itself in the process, until, after a while, it actually loads “perfectly” fine. All I run is uBlock and NextDNS to get rid of (a portion of) the trackers and ads.

Notes (and a working config) on getting a SlimmeLezer+ talking to Home Assistant alongside a Marstek battery CT on the same P1 port and some context on my setup.

I recently got a WP6003 Air Box (Aliexpress). The official product page seems to be offline but can be accessed through Archive.org.

It's quite straightforward to integrate in a Bluetooth Proxy and Home Assistant thanks to Omar's work.

The major problem I have with it, is that the Bluetooth (4.0) range is terrible. Neither my Mac Mini nor my Bluetooth Proxy could connect with it if I moved it from the office to the kitchen (had it on top of the fridge, so some metal there) that's roughly 10ish meters away.

In my Home Assistant quest and simplifying (not sure if that's actually happening) and getting more control (aka less reliant on the cloud and 3rd parties) I've been playing with Zigbee.

Zigbee is quite cool because it's a mesh network. As I used it before with my Philips Hue bulbs, I was eager to expand and play with Zigbee.

First thing first. Not all routers are equal. I've got these two smart power plugs as an example (Grey and Blue colour, v2 with HomeKit support) and they act weirdly. They don't seem to route sensors properly, and randomly turn off whatever is plugged in.

In my Home Assistant quest and simplifying (not sure if that's actually happening) and getting more control (aka less reliant on the cloud and 3rd parties) I've been playing with Zigbee.

Zigbee is quite cool because it's a mesh network. As I used it before with my Philips Hue bulbs, I was eager to expand and play with Zigbee.

I have several bulbs, including: Hue Iris, Hue Go, some random bulb, a reading spot, and Hue Play (3x).

I've finally started working with Home Assistant and while the learning curve has been steep, it's been fun.

I'm going to post some random notes (mostly for myself) on things I discovered, and I need to keep in mind.

For example, I have set up an ESP32-c3 Bluetooth Proxy for a Mi ble thermometer.

I've assigned the ESP device to an area: IT cabinet. However, the BLE sensors are scattered across the house (in different areas). Took me a while to figure it out, but you can assign entities to specific areas.

I have set up an ESP32-c3 Bluetooth Proxy for a Mi ble thermometer (and I have a few other BLE sensors that I haven't managed to set up yet).

The proxy config can be found here.

Be sure to modify the variables to match whatever you want to do. I'm using static IPs because auto discovery is unreliable (hostname.iot.internal).

You'll also need to add the !secret variables into the secrets.yaml file.

Recently migrated Shan from Windows to an Apple/macOS and every reboot she kept getting "Unable to connect with Autodesk Desktop Licensing Service" when launching AutoCAD on her Mac.

The official bullshit is to reinstall the Licensing Service (why is there even such a thing). But alas, that didn't fix it.

Also updating AutoCad to 2025 (we're barely even in 2024) didn't fix it (but made it work until the next reboot).

As iRail's servers go down once in a while (and contain some legacy files, making it a bit messy), I decided to back up and host the GTFS feeds of Belgian Railway (NMBS), and the 3 Belgian bus companies (De Lijn, TEC and MIVB) at gtfs.flatturtle.cloud.

Every night, around 3am (CET), the GTFS files are uploaded to Cloudflare R2.

I keep the historical files as well (iRail only did this for NMBS, but I'm doing it for all). The latest available GTFS is in */_latest/<file>.zip.