A collection of now mostly legacy tech tips

  • Managing Shelly relay schedules remotely from Home Assistant

    Managing Shelly relay schedules remotely from Home Assistant

    When I was first getting started with Home Assistant in 2018 or so, part of my job was assisting with the facilities management. The building relied heavily on Siemens APOGEE controllers for HVAC control, which controlled VSD fans, relays and actuators for hot/cold water circuits. Coming from a SysAdmin background, I was surprised to learn…

  • Create a dev copy of your WordPress site with WordOps

    WordOps is a popular framework to setup and manage WordPress infrastructure, forked from EasyEngine in 2018 when EasyEngine v4 changed their architecture to use Docker containers. This is a quick guide to setting up a development copy of your live WordPress site which can be useful if you’re working on a redesign or testing new…

  • Configuring Atlassian Cloud Single Sign On for ADFS 3.0

    Configuring Atlassian Cloud Single Sign On for ADFS 3.0

    Atlassian don’t officially support AD FS with Confluence Cloud – but it is working well now I’ve sorted out the issues I was having passing user’s email address through as the nameId claim. Hopefully these instructions can save you some trial and error. Enable SAML on Atlassian Cloud First off – enable SAML on your…

  • Aeotec Micro Smart Switch & Home Assistant

    Several weeks ago my long awaited Z-Wave module for the Pine64 arrived. I managed to get open-zwave  installed on Debian on the Pi, found it was on /dev/ttyS2, but this week ran into trouble setting up my first Z-Wave device, the Aeotec Micro Switch. Tailing the OZW_Log.txt I could see it get added to the…

  • Flight review: Air NZ Auckland to Ho Chi Minh City NZ269

    First up had to check we were on the right flight, SGN sounded suspiciously like Singapore, before I clicked – we’re going to Saigon. The plane: Boeing 767-300. Two seats on the sides, three across the middle. Interior looks 90s but all clean and tidy. The seat: About row 30, middle, isle. A colleague had…

  • Enhancing Qlik Sense tables with Emojis

    I’m a newcomer to Qlik, and am working on implementing Qlik Sense for a hospital. One area I was considering today was how to better communicate to users when there might be something wrong or they need to be aware of with the data they are looking at. Our data model has quality checks as…

  • BLF lights not working after switching Asterisk to version 11

    Found a strange issue after switching to Asterisk v11, the BLF buttons on our Panasonic SIP phones stopped working. Eventually thought it was worth trying setting the ‘presence server address’ which previously hadn’t been set (and in Endpoint Manager is set to blank) to the PBX and the lights immediately started working. Much simpler solution…

  • New UFB ISP option for Greymouth business customers

    Today ISP DTS announced availability of their UFB services in Greymouth, providing a compelling option for businesses considering a UFB upgrade. Being a business only ISP you can expect a higher level of service and support than the small business plans offered by other providers (Spark, Snap/2degrees). Their pricing comes in very competitively at $119/month…

  • Factory reset Panasonic KX-UT12x

    If you can’t access the web interface to reset a Panasonic SIP phone Press the Setting softkey Dial #136 Press Enter, then the down arrow (to select Yes) then Enter/li> The phone will shortly reboot.  

  • 802.1X authentication woes with NPS & EAP

    Had a frustrating issue with some UniFi APs where clients were not able to authenticate to the Pro models, but OK to the standard UniFis. Running a packet capture on the NPS server I could see many Access-Requests arriving at the server with an Access-Challenge immediately being sent back, but the AP would just keep…

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