Add new Tasmota device to Home Assistant with MQTT

Pre-Requirements

To add a new Tasmota device to the Home Assistant (HA), I assume that:

  • HA is installed
  • An MQTT Broker is running and an user in HA is already registered/in use
  • Already one other Tasmota device is connected to the HA (so you know it’s working)
  • The new Tasmota device is already connected to the local HA WiFi
  • Already has upgraded to the newest firmware

Todos:

Give device a better name

Click Configuration -> Configure Other -> and enter at Device Name a name which makes sense

Privacy friendly online alternatives

Please let me know, if you have some good alternatives

GISCUS - You can now add comments to my blog

When I was researching some stuff for a blog post about Github Actions, I stumbled over the blog from Github user @nicolasiensen.
When I read the post, I saw that people were able to add comments with being logged into Github.
Something like this I have seen a long time ago, but this was so complicated, I just ignored it.

But now as I saw in his blog , it’s super ways, thanks to Giscus
The setup was super easy, the repo must be public, you need to add the all to your repo and enable discussions.
And the best is:

Docker cheat sheet

  • Stop all containers - docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
  • Debug into running container - docker exec -it container_name /bin/bash
  • Debug into docker image - docker run --rm -it image_name /bin/bash
  • Remove all docker dontainers - docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)
  • remove all images you need to download everything again) - docker rmi -f $(docker images -q)
  • delete all docker network bridges - docker network prune

Install patch for Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II

New Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II

Alt text
(i maybe should have cleaned it, before the picture…)

I got my first Thinkpad Trackpoint keyboard as a farwell gift from a company I worked for (thanks <3 ).
I don’t use any mouse, I just use the red “joystick” (called trackpoint) to navigate. For users which aren’t used to it, it’s a horror if they have to use my keyboard. But if you are used to it, you don’t wanna work without it anymore.
As you can see, the old one is not in a good shape anymore. And as working-from-home is the new normal, the company I work for, offers us the equipment we need, so I ordered a new one.
This is a newer version, which is running without a cable but wirelesse with an USB dongle. So far so good.

Building a raspberry pi streaming cam

the setup

This is how my setup looks like:

as webcam I use a Waveshare 10300 RPi Camera (E)
(bought it here, unpaid advertisment)

Install raspberry pi image

Download the images from the raspberry pi website
copy it to your sd card.
on the webpage they recomment to install the rpi-manager via sudo apt install rpi-imager, but for me it wasn’t working because of dependency problems.
So I installed it the classic way:

Pushing container to Docker hub

First build an docker container and run it afterwards so you see it with docker ps -a As an example, I use the container for the MagpiDownloader

docker build -f Dockerfile . -t mag-pi-downloader
docker run -v $(pwd)/issues:/app/issues/ mag-pi-downloader -f 131

After that is done, have a look, for all the docker container:

$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS                          PORTS     NAMES
ea901f38e328   mag-pi-downloader   "/bin/sh /app/entryp…"   About a minute ago   Exited (0) About a minute ago             exciting_feistel

As you can see the newest has the container id ea901f38e328

Exclude one element from Lombok model-wide setter and getter

Lets say you have a User model with Lombok modelwide @Getter and @Setter:

@Getter
@Setter
public class User {

    @Id
    private String id;

    private String username;

    private String email;

    private String password;
}

setId(String id) makes no sense.
Normally the id is set by the DB, so it makes no sense to set it.

So you can use @Setter(AccessLevel.NONE) (or @Getter(AccessLevel.NONE)) to exclude it from the Lombok setters (or getters)

@Getter
@Setter
public class User {

    @Id
    @Setter(AccessLevel.NONE)
    private String id;

    private String username;

    private String email;

    private String password;
}

(I found this answer on Stackoverflow by user Michael Piefel for this problem, thanks!

My Firefox Extensions

  • Facebook Container from Mozilla
    “Facebook Container isolates your Facebook activity from the rest of your web activity in order to prevent Facebook from tracking you outside of the Facebook website via third party cookies.” (from the Github description)

  • Dark-Reader from Alexander Shutau (also available for other browsers)
    so join the dark side for a nicer reading

  • HTTPS everywhere by EFF and Tor Project (also available for other browsers)
    “Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site. The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by using clever technology to rewrite requests to these sites to HTTPS” (description from the website)

How to play The Curse of Monkey Island on Linux

As I was always a LucasArts fan in the 90ties, I wanted to use my “free time” (thanks to the Corona lockdown) for playing this old classics.

I bought Monkey Island 1 + 2 on Steam - with the Proton helper, it starts all easy, out of the box.

Monkey Island 3 and 4 I was buying at Gog (it was cheaper) - no help here to get it running for Linux. (it will still run from Steam out of the box, afaik)