Blog migrated to Hugo. Let me know if you find missing or bad content. Earlier generator, tinkerer, was deprecated a long time ago.

Shelly sells a smarthome sensor called Door/Window2. It works well, use wifi, is very configurable and can be used locally, without cloud. Unfortunately they’ve chosen a weird, expensive battery option, CR123A. It can cost around 70 NOK (~10 USD), and does not exist as a rechargable option. And you need two of them! So what do you do if you only have one left?

Use a single, abundant 18650 instead!

In Norway electricity is the most popular form of heating for households at 96% (source). Pure 230V AC is a very high-level energy, and we don’t really need that precision for heating.

This is a project to see if easy, not-perfect, locally generated energy can be used to lower the heating bill.

Disclamer: this is mostly for fun. A more economic aproach would be insulation, heat pump, put on a sweater, etc.

An ISP in Norway, Altibox, serves up VLANs for VoIP, IPTV and internet. The included router gives no control or options for LAN management. I only use the internet service, so I replaced it with a generic router running OpenWRT. I found no straight forward answer to how to configure it, so here it is.

# The situation

    ,--.
  (      )                 +--------+
 (internet)    -> VLANs -> | router | -> LAN
/__________)               +--------+

AFAIK the VLANs used are:

Lock your desktop, mute music or run any other command when leaving your PC. There are dozens of apps like this. This one just aims to make it beautiful, modern and easy.

Blueproximity was a program to do this, but it never worked great for me, and has since rottened. This project was inspired, but I trid making it Gnome-ish. That means simple, limited options, but does the job.