Blog
ESP32-S3 Local Voice Assistant for Home Assistant
I built an ESP32-S3 voice satellite for the office. It worked. Then I set a timer, the timer went off, and I discovered I couldn’t turn it off by voice — because the alarm was so loud the microphone couldn’t hear me over it. Fixing that properly meant ripping out the entire audio layer and … Read more
Ordio – Home Assistant Music Streamer
A physical Spotify player: NFC disks, an OLED, and Home Assistant I wanted music my household could hold. Streaming is convenient to the point of being forgettable — you tap a name in a list and sound happens. So I built a slot reader: 3.5″ 3D-printed disks, each with an NFC tag inside and a … Read more
Get Computer Name from Azure Device ID
We have multiple RRAS servers, and occasionally, I need to locate which one a client is connected to for troubleshooting. Now the RRAS console has some inconsistencies, sometimes it displays the computer name, sometime the Azure Device ID (Not the object ID) The Microsoft Docs on the Get-AzureADDevice is woefully incomplete, and it took me … Read more
Domain Replication Health
I have been doing a fair amount of work upgrading/removing/building domain controllers for a client, and wanted an easy way to check replication health and topology, and came up with this script. It has a GUI and allows for export of results to CSV This requires powershell remoting to be enabled, and a powershell version … Read more
Introducing Google Bookmarks Manager for GPOs: A Simple and Customizable Tool for Managing Google Bookmarks
Managing Google bookmarks for your organization can be a challenging task, especially when you need to deploy bookmarks across multiple machines using Group Policy Objects (GPOs). To make this process more manageable, we’ve developed the Google Bookmarks Manager for GPOs, a simple and customizable WPF application that allows you to create, edit, import, and export … Read more
I’m Going Green – Part 2
Read part 1 here. So, in part 1, I was going to use a multiplexer to grab the signals from the MPU6050 gyros. What I hadn’t realised is that these devices communicate over the I2C bus, which is only really meant for on board communications, and short distances. I had to ditch this idea, and … Read more
I’m Going Green!
Starting small with 3 x 400w panels (Trina 400w panels) giving me a max 1.2Kwh output, paired with 3 x Enphase iq7a inverters and an Enphase Envoy S (metered) So as I bought this, the regulations have changed around “plug in” solar options (In the UK) and now must be wired into their own breaker … Read more