Monthly Retrospective: May 2024

Posted on By Mark Wilson

May’s update was late, and June’s is in danger of rolling into July, so here’s a few highlights from my life in and around tech…

At work

On the work front, it was a short month – I was on holiday for the last week and with public holidays too there was lots to cram into a few short weeks. Nevertheless, I still managed to:

  • Continue to develop Node4’s new ransomware scanning service.
  • Finalise a dozen product data sheets for our public cloud services.
  • Submit some blog posts to our marketing team to support upcoming campaigns.
  • Keep pushing some pre-sales activities forwards.
  • And mine and Bjoern Hirtenjohann (/in/BjoernHirtenjohann)’s internal Node4 podcast on public cloud was released:

But the biggest activity in the month was presenting at Node4’s Infrastructure Symposium. One of our Practice Directors brought all his teams together to learn about the products and services that we jointly deliver. With four (or five, depending on how you look at it) companies all merged, there’s been a lot of change at Node4 over the last year or so. Getting everyone together is a great way to break down boundaries and understand the direction we’re headed in. And for me it was a chance to outline that our cloud offers span public, private and hybrid delivery models – and that we will deliver what’s right for the client, not for us. We call this Pragmatic Cloud (and I freely admit we didn’t come up with the term, but it I like it a lot).

I also celebrated my 9 year anniversary of joining risual/Node4 in May. And, for those who were confused by my comments last month, I was saying that my recent move has been overwhelmingly positive and I’m in a better place than I have been for a long while!

Elsewhere

Away from work…

  • My youngest son, Ben, passed his driving test. I was ready for a big insurance bill, but what I wasn’t ready for was: a) no decrease on the bill for the 19 year-old’s insurance (now with 2 years’ experience); and b) a 350% increase in premiums between him passing his test 2 years ago and the 17 year-old passing now. Even with a black box, parents as named drivers, etc. the car insurance bill for the two old cars that our family share with the teenagers was around £4500. For contrast, the bill for my Volvo (with just me and Mrs W as drivers) actually fell and is now back under £500. Public transport is just not reliable enough where we live, so the choices are: a) drive the teenagers everywhere; or b) pay the money. I’m still getting over this assault on our savings… some families just won’t have that money and I dread to think how many uninsured cars there are on the road as a consequence.
  • My eldest son, Matt, continues to race his bike up and down the country. After a catastrophic failure of the fork steerer tube, his Canyon road bike was hastily replaced. That meant a drive to Wakefield to collect the new bike, but it is rather lovely. I don’t get to all his races these days but I did manage to watch him in Ixworth and I was in the team car again for the Lincoln GP. Unfortunately, when he went to Ireland to race the Rás Tailteann I had to make do with watching for updates on Twitter!
  • Ben and I have been planning our Interrail trip – and now we have bought our passes along with inbound/outbound travel. Plus, we’re going to be taking the NightJet sleeper train from Berlin to Vienna! There were a few challenges with seat availability (things have changed since last time I went – we can use high speed rail, but there’s limited availability and we need to pay a supplement). This is more of a problem when dates are fixed so we had to change our route a little. On the flip side, with the start and end locked in, the middle section of the holiday is now free for us to be flexible.
  • I completed the home network upgrade. Was the switch from AmpliFi to UniFi worth it? Time will tell. It’s certainly more flexible but it’s cost me more and my house does not lend itself to structured cable runs. Maybe I should have just replaced the broken AmpliFi mesh point but it felt like I could fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy.
  • On the home automation front:
    • Octopus Energy sent us a Home Mini, which should give more granular data on electricity consumption, once I get the Home Assistant configuration right (I’m still tweaking).
    • I’ve also continued to play around with Home Assistant, including a bed occupancy sensor (which I can link to turning off the lights). I will admit that’s probably a step too far into nerd territory.
  • The month ended with a short break in Spain. Originally scheduled for May 2021, we never did get to go on a family holiday to Barcelona and the Costa Brava, though Matt made it out there on a training trip to Girona earlier this year. So, half the holiday, with only one of the “children” (though he is now twice the size!), Nikki, Ben and I spent a glorious few days in an around Begur.

Writing

These retrospectives are a bit of a blogging catch-all, but I did write a post on LinkedIn that turned into a blog in its own right. You can read it at the link below:

Photographing

Bits and pieces

  • 300m short of 200km!
  • Choose your PIN wisely:
  • Commentary on technical debt and the British Library’s ransomware attack woes:
  • Who doesn’t love a bit of Top Gun?
  • Thoughts on location tracking for family members:
  • Why it’s better to find a real application compatibility fix instead of just giving users admin access:
  • And why encrypted messaging is difficult:
  • Finally, shipping sunlight for green energy. Not as bonkers as it sounds!

Featured image: author’s own

My first attempt at home automation: Alexa-controlled Christmas tree lights!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve wanted to play with some home automation tech for a while now but the absence of clear standards and relatively high cost of entry (with many of the popular systems requiring a hub) put me off. We also have the relatively unusual situation in that there is nearly always someone in our house, so even the idea of a smart thermostat to turn down the heating when we’re out (e.g. Nest, Hive, etc.) is not a good fit for our lifestyle.

Then, a few weeks ago, I bought myself an Amazon Echo Dot. My business case was weak. After all, voice controlling my Spotify playlists is a bit of a novelty (and not all of the “skills” that are available in the US are available over here in the UK) but I could see there was potential, especially once IFTTT support comes to the UK (which it finally did, last week).

Over the weekend, I decided to take things a little further and to see if I could control some lights. I wasn’t getting far with the fixed infrastructure in the house (due to challenges with a lack of a hub and B22 vs. E27 light fittings meaning I’ll need to convert some of the light pendants too…) but my colleague Richard Knight (@rmknight) suggested a TP-Link Smart Plug and I picked up a TP-Link HS110 on Amazon. Then it was a case of deciding which lights to control – and I went for the Christmas Tree lights…

After a fairly simple setup process (using TP-Link’s Kasa mobile app) I had the switch working from my phone but then I took things a step further… voice control with Alexa. Kasa and Alexa are integrated so after enabling the skill in Alexa and linking to Kasa, I was able to control the lights with my voice:

Everything I’ve described so far was just a few minutes’ effort – remarkable straightforward out-of-the-box stuff. Being a geek, I started to think what else I could use to control the Smart Plug and I found an excellent post from George Georgovassilis (@ggeorgovassilis) on controlling a TP-Link HS100 Wi-Fi Smart Plug. In the post, George sniffs the network to work out exactly how the smart plug is controlled and he provides a shell script, then others have chipped in with C# and Go options. I had to find which IP address my Smart Plug was using (looking at the DHCP server leases told me that, then a MAC address lookup confirmed that the unknown device starting 50:c7:bf was indeed a TP-Link one).  Using the compiled C# code I successfully controlled my HS110, switching the lights on/off from the command line on a PC.

So, last year saw a miniature Raspberry Pi-powered Christmas Tree (featuring my terrible soldering) – this year I’m controlling the full tree lights using mainstream components – I wonder what Christmas 2017 will bring! And my second Echo Dot is arriving today…

Somfy roller-shutter garage door stopping part way down

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I replaced our up-and-over garage door with a roller-shutter version.  It wasn’t new; our neighbour converted her garage so I bought her nearly-new door but that means I didn’t have a professional installer to fall back on when it stopped working recently.

The garage door control system is a Somfy Rollixo RTS and last week, we found that the door would come part way down and then stop, as though there was an obstruction. After winding it down manually one morning, Mrs W was not happy and I promised to take a look when I got home. I couldn’t find the problem – what’s more I couldn’t troubleshoot it using the manual either.  What I did notice though was that, rather than the two red lights I’d expect to see for a safety-edge transmitter low battery indication, I had one red light on the control box, and one orange light on the safety-edge transmitter (which is fitted to the door curtain).

Somfy Rollixo RTS instruction manual has incorrect diagnostics for low battery warning on safety-edge transmitter

I found I could over-ride the cut-out by pressing and holding the remote control button, and set off to the Internet to find a replacement 3.6V Lithium AA battery. First mistake was not reading the Google results carefully enough and ordering a 2/3 AA battery from Farnell/Element 14. Now I can’t return it as I can’t find a courier who works with consumers and will carry Lithium batteries! In the meantime, I’ve bought the correct (AA) battery and, this morning, I swapped it over, after which I found the door operated as it should. That was a relief, as I feared that swapping over the battery would wipe some settings and require me to re-programme the door.

So, why blog about something as trivial as changing some batteries? Well, because the instruction manual is wrong and my experience might help someone else!