Hi there 👋

Staying updated when it comes to any part of your life is always crucial, but even more so when it comes to your homelab. That’s why I decided to try and find a more lightweight and faster solution, then my current clunky SMTP setup, which tended to end up with me getting huge volumes of email every time something went down. Enter ntfy.sh - a simple notification system powered by HTTP Requests and topics ...

Blogs are great and all, but they need to have a level of interactivity, otherwise it can feel a bit dull. That’s where comments come in. And it’s become incredibly easy now, thanks to this amazing platform I found, powered by GitHub Discussions. Enter: Giscus - A comments system powered by GitHub Discussions 💬 💎 Setup Setting up Giscus is relatively simple, especially if you’re using a theme it already supports. Head here to do so. ...

It’s nice to keep a link in my Instagram bio that links to some of the stuff I work on, just in case anyone wanted to take a look. Previously, I’d just include a link to my GitHub, but recently, with my new website and this blog, I’d like other things to be accessible there. In this case you’d normally use a cloud-hosted link in bio solution, of which there are many of. But what’s the fun in that? How about we self-host one instead. ...

What’s the first thing you normally tend to interact with when you connect to a machine remotely. That’s right - the terminal, and so ensuring it’s as useful as possible is always very helpful. There’s many options out there for doing so, from oh-my-bash to oh-my-posh, but I wanted something a bit more portable. Enter: Starship - the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell Installing Starship Installing Starship is relatively simple, and the docs for doing so can be found here. ...

So after some totally innocent poking around at school, I found out our school was using Smoothwall to control our network activity. Now, this wasn’t that hard… especially considering that every time we tried to open something that was blocked it said ‘Smoothwall’ in big green text, but there’s a bit more to this. I wouldn’t suggest trying most of this at your school/work, as I had oversight from the IT department before I started my endeavours. ...

On our school laptops, for whatever reason, the applications menu from settings has been removed. As a result, you cannot uninstall any non-Microsoft store applications - it just tries to open a settings menu that we can’t access. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to build a PowerShell script to tap into the Uninstall Information registry keys - and get the uninstall paths from here. It also has some other features, such as: ...

All the images on my blog need a place to live, and while I could just serve it on the blog itself, some of my other projects need locations for files to live - and serving it on them natively just isn’t a viable option. Images and the like are also more heavier then text, and so it can often be beneficial to load them from a more local server. ...

I recently learnt that you can control the UniFi APs LEDs via SSH, which allows you to script their control. This means that I can change what colour they are using, and schedule them to turn on and off automatically - see here for that. However, I though it might be worth making a small post regarding exactly what I found. DISCLAIMER: Proceed at your own risk. These have been tested on a U7 Pro, and are unlikely to have any catastrophic problems on other APs, but be careful regardless. ...

Modularity always helps when it comes to the maintenance of complex systems, and so it should help when it comes to managing Home Assistant. A while back, I stumbled across Frenck’s GitHub profile, where he was showcasing his Home Assistant config - https://github.com/frenck/home-assistant-config. I found the idea of splitting each entry into it’s own dedicated file, rather then having one huge config file, much more intuitive and easier to manage. Setup Navigate to your data folder 03:43:35 vivaan@ultimate ~ → cd /clstr/homeassistant/data Create a new integrations folder This will be where all the entries for Home Assistant’s config will be stored. ...

The UniFi U7 Pros have these neat LED rings on them, but they can be pretty distracting during the night - so I thought it would be cool to be able to control them via Home Assistant, and automate them. And honestly, another set of lights to have control over - especially considering they seem to make pretty good night lights. Setting up the APs In order to control the AP LEDs, you will need to enable SSH. You can do this via the UniFi Controller. ...