cshire.xyz

Home Assistant Voice PE + NFC reader project - Part 3

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:44:39 +0800

- The planning in Part 1 of the project can be found here.

- The irritating hurdles and problems of part 2 can be found here.

This one might well be a biggie… At the end of our last installment I couldn’t get the pn532 to work with the Home Assistant Voice and I had to wait a month for a GROVE compatible version to be available…but my impatience could not accept this! So I ordered a WS1850S from m5stack.com. I attached it with the GROVE connector, changed a bit of ESPHome yaml and…worked first time! Success!

2025-12-26-Gran-Turismo-4-Spec-II

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:59:36 +0800

Bit of a note for my future self if I ever do a version update of the AMAZING Gran Turismo 4 Spec II.

First, don’t bother upgrading - it probably won’t work. Maybe for other people, but I convert PS2 *.iso’s to *.chd files. Converting that back to patch doesn’t like it.

Just go with a full patch. Look for the Gran Turismo 4 Online Public Beta (US) - [SCUS-97436] image on a place like archive.org.

Home Assistant Voice PE + NFC reader project - Part 2

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 14:49:12 +0800

The planning in Part 1 of the project can be found here.

Ok, so this project is a little bit on hold as I wait for some more parts to come through…

I got the chassis 3d printed and it looks pretty good. It’ll need a bit of sanding as the speaker platform is a little large to fit inside the main chassis.

The software largely seems to be fine, the speaker has been attached and I have soldered the nfc reader to the GROVE cable.

Home Assistant Voice PE + NFC reader project - Planning

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 14:58:07 +0800

I wanted to build my little boy something to listen to audiobooks with. He already has an nfc tag reader which he uses with a square block and nfc stickers to watch tv shows on. I wanted something like a Yoto box, but without subscriptions, clouds and general proprietary bullshit.

Enter…the Home Assistant Voice Preview.

I actually picked one up months ago and it has been great in the living room. I set the trigger “it’s TV time” to turn on the media pc, tv and speakers. However, it’s just an esp32 board inside…so very hackable!

Docker is too new, but also too old

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 10:46:11 +0800

I had an interesting, and slightly irritating, set of issues with two docker installations on two different hosts. I thought I’d note them here as I’m sure I’ll need to refer back to at least one of them in the future.

Docker too old

One of my docker hosts threw an error Error response from daemon: client version 1:42 is too old, which was a little puzzling as I had just updated the system. it turns out the answer is in this stack overflow thread. Essentially the system, for some unknown reason, had two versions of docker compose installed. Running this command:

Minisforum Customer Experiences

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 12:54:30 +0800

I bought a MinisForum UM790 Pro just over 18 months ago. It generally worked just fine - I bought it barebones and kitted it out with 2x 2TB Samsung nvme drives and 64gb of ram. It was a beast of a HTPC and emulated just about everything I threw at it amazingly well. However, every so often it just restarted for no clear reason. It would sometimes be idling away and it would sometimes be under load.

2025-02-25-When-Did-Hugo-Get-Complex

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:39:24 +0800

A quick thought…I’ve been reworking a website from Wordpress to Hugo. The last time I started a Hugo site from scratch was probably this blog. It was great being able to work everything out and add theme edits where I wanted just be reading the locally downloaded code. When did this get replaced by endless modules and submodules? How am I supposed to make the edits I want?

It’s mad confusing and really demands the use of Github. What happened to making the web simple? I’m hardly a tech neophyte, but if I have to learn entire new ways of working just to keep using a tool…maybe that’s a design issue. I shouldn’t have to be a programmer just to get a static site working. It’s only supposed to be a template machine!

Fixing Piwigo Batch Downloader issues

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 11:11:26 +0800

A photo manager is a pretty crazily important thing to us, especially now we have a baby memories to save! I have been using Piwigo for about 10 years or so. It has been…fine. I started looking at alternatives a while back because of the lack of mobile support, but then it got a functional iOS app. I decided to keep using it. Generally it works.

However, now we have significantly more photos and videos that 10 years ago…so what if we wanted to migrate to different software?

Coming to you now...from Iceland!

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 13:03:20 +0800

So we host a couple of websites for various things, alongside this blog. For many years I have hosted this blog on my Proxmox server. This ran Apache in an LXC container which doubled as a reverse proxy and other things. Having been dabbling with more powerful reverse proxying on my internal network (Another blog post to come soon…) I started taking things off the container.

It would have stayed that way if it wasn’t for a slightly crap support experience with Vultr. These guys are…fine…for renting a VPS. I had a Wordpress site with them that was coming to the end of it’s life. It ran Ubuntu 20.04, which is EOL this year and I figured I’d just spin up whatever the latest one-click Wordpress image they had and migrate over. Except, when the image was spun up it didn’t seem to have Wordpress running on it. I fire off a support request and they respond by asking me to open ports 80 and 443. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be much of a problem for me ($ sudo ufw 80 443), but this is their default install image! Surely it should just work already…Anyway, the ufw rule didn’t work and I figured I’m kinda done. What with Vultr bringing some negative publicity their own way with changes to TOS, I figured it’s time to just find a new VPS provider.

2024-11-12-Deluge-Docker-and-Mergerfs

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:41:50 +0800

I am updating a whole load of my self hosted software, including a spiffy new reverse proxy. Part of this has been replacing my torrent client with Deluge. However…The linuxserver docker image just would not download anything. It’s always either permissions or DNS, right?…well this was permissions, but not in the regular way.

Turns out my MergerFS mount really did not like a certain setting (cache.files=off), so I changed it to cache.files=partial and it worked! Links here and here very helpful in working this out.

Replace internal IPs and Ports with domain names internally

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 20:35:44 +0800

This is likely to be a long one…

If you have various services on your network to the point you can’t remember all the different IP addresses and port numbers…a reverse proxy is for you. Ordinarily this is done so that you can make services public facing, but sometimes you don’t want to expose a service to the filth of the internet. You can set your reverse proxy to work internally!

2024-08-16-Omg,-a-Mastodon-Thread-as-a-Comment-Section

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 11:55:42 +0800

I had initially integrated webmentions into this site and had my own mastodon instance. I let both languish and the mastodon instance broke. However, seeing what people like Carl Schwan and Graham Macphee have achieved in integrating Mastodon as a comments section is mindblowing on a static site.

I wanted this kind of thing with Brid.gy, but it never really worked out so well.

Surely this has got to be the next project…

2024-08-15-I-Have-Time-to-Work-on-My-Site-Again

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:23:09 +0800

Now I have joined the unemployed (technically I’m retired…) I have some time to revisit my site again. I forgot how much I enjoyed messing with templating to make things work how I wanted.

I want to get posting again and update some of the guides I have written - mainly for myself, but also for the people who have also been looking at it (which I only know about from the spanky new install of Plausible I just finished).

Updated method of importing a Broadlink IR transmitter into Home Assisstant

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 23:08:15 +0800

It has been a while since I posted anything…but that’s mainly because I haven’t been doing a whole lot of tech stuff recently. This is, at least partly, due to the fact that my setup has tended towards just working! I attribute this to using Docker more extensively - updates rarely break anymore. I don’t have to manually update as much stuff (Nextcloud was always the biggie that decided to break).

2022-07-24-Updating-Infrastructure

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 15:44:34 +0800

Migrating from Proxmox 6 to 7 was surprisingly simple, I just followed the guide here and there were no issues at all.

Recreating my reverse proxy container wasn’t too bad either, although it had me wondering if I should learn something a bit newer than Apache.

Hopefully Webmentions still work, I’ll send one to my yearly targets page to see!

2022-07-02-atom-is-dead

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 13:37:29 +0800

Gutted that Atom text editor is being archived on December 15th! I’ve tried VSCodium and..it’s not the same. Atom is so simple and clean! This whole site was written in Atom.

I’ll have to try some other text editors. Sublime looks great…but $99USD for a text editor? Are you nuts??

Maybe someone will fork it. I really hope someone will fork it!

2022-04-06-Getting-interested-in-my-site-again

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:29:26 +0800

I think I’m getting a bit more interested in the site again. I think now the Masters is out of the way I have a bit more headspace for hobbies and learning again. There’s a few things I want to learn about - CI (Netlify?), removing Google fonts and more indieweb stuff.

I would be nice to turn this notes section into a Twitter-a-like with webmentions, but I’ve still got some work to do on the formatting!

MySQL Cheat Sheet

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 17:18:55 +0800

As much as I love self-hosted services, the ones with MySql/MariaDB backends always have me looking up the same old commands over and over again! I figured it might be an idea to record some of these here so I remember in the future.

Remember to add a user to a database - the amount of time you would save if you always remembered this!

mysql -u root -p

Another Year, more targets!

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 15:19:39 +0800

Another year gone and my posting frequency hasn’t hugely increased. Possibly because I’ve been tinkering less - I think the amount of things being maintained eventually wore me down. More things running means more time fixing things when they inevitably go wrong! That said, the move to docker last year has meant that the hour I spent weekly updating virtual machines and LXC containers has become about 15mins a month. Generally this has been more robust too, which is appreciated. I found, for instance, my old Nextcloud LXC container generated a large amount of cruft as I upgraded each version. The post about upgrading PHP versions is as a result of that. Docker containers seem to make that all an absolute breeze.

Updates and things

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 14:17:00 +0800

Much like the vast majority of other blogs online, I guess I came to a bit of a halt with posting last year. This was largely because I didn’t really have many projects I felt I needed to document for posterity, although I fully upgraded my main server this past summer. I moved everything running on the server from LXC to Docker containers orchestrated through Docker Compose. This was mainly because I couldn’t seem to get networking set up on the new server with LXD/LXC and got pretty frustrated trying. I rebuilt basically everything in Docker…which turned out to be less of a hassle than I first thought. To be honest, I absolutely prefer the new setup - updating every container used to be a manual affair (although, to be fair, that was largely because I put off learning Ansible) that would take a good hour every week or two. I can now invoke docker-compose -f compose.yml pull and docker-compose -f compose.yml up -d and everything is updated in under a minute. Also, no more fixing borked upgrades (I’m looking at you Nextcloud) in LXC containers!

2021-01-01-Like-of-Ru's-New-Design

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 13:01:47 +0800

2020-11-14-Backup-Woes

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 10:10:30 +0800

Ever try to run a backup that takes about a week…on a server that seems to crash every three days? So frustrating. USB3 might be fast…but it ain’t 13TB of data I want to transfer NOW fast.

Down to my last 500gb on my backup server so trying to prep for a storage upgrade. Not happy about the second weekend in a row I have to work on it. think that the moment you cross about 4tb or data it stops being a hobby and becomes a part time job.

2020-11-01-Like-of-Webmentiond

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 07:41:49 +0800

Awesome!

2020-08-29-Plex-Kodi-Connect

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 18:21:05 +0800

I’m messing about with different options for updating my Kodi setup. Plex integration is a bit of a headache - the official Kodi Plex plugin hasn’t been updated in a long time. Enter…PlexKodiConnect. I’m just experimenting at the moment, but I think this has huge potential- it makes my media look so beautiful!

2020-08-23-System-76-Machines

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 14:26:40 +0800

I do not need a new laptop, my Macbook is more than capable for another few years. Those System76 Lemur Pro’s though…There’s even a sale on at the moment. I haven’t had a linux desktop for a decade or so, but PopOS! looks fun. I absolutely do not need a new laptop…But I want a new laptop.

Updating PHP versions outside of the official repos

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 13:57:36 +0800

Another post to document something incase I need it in the future!

I’ve had a couple of self-hosted PHP applications nagging me of late about running PHP7.2. Nextcloud, in particular, will soon require at least version 7.3 of PHP. I had to search around a bit to find instructions that worked for me, so I figured I’d amalgamate them here.

Note that if you’re using a Linux distribution that already packages PHP7.3/4 etc this doesn’t apply. However, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS seems only to offer 7.2 and some of my LXC containers needed the update.

Finding out which packages were in use on my system

First i needed to know which PHP packages were in use so that they all got upgraded to the new versions;

Setting up my Proxmox Host Storage

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 16:50:07 +0800

Another post motivated largely by my recognising that I never seem to document my projects well enough to fix them if they break. Perhaps this might show up in a search result somewhere and help someone in the future…but be warned that I don’t fully understand the concepts at work here, so consult some other sources too! I linked the sites I used at the bottom.

I recently upgraded my Proxmox host and internal drive. The install was all fairly straightforward, but I struggled to fully understand how Proxmox deals with storage. I found that the ’local’ section of the disk where the iso’s and backups were stored was only about 100gb. I realised from reading around that Proxmox doesn’t seem to like being installed on only one drive and instead inspects some kind of RAID array. This was a problem for me as my Proxmox host is an intel NUC…I had to break it all down and create the storage volumes manually.

2020-07-31-Is-Bridgy-Acting-Up

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 23:32:27 +0800

Is it just me, or is Brid.gy acting up at the moment? All the posts I’ve published today have totally failed to POSSE out to Mastodon…I’ve re-enabled my Mastodon account in the service but still no dice. It could be because of the #Hugo templates I’ve been making for syndication of notes and blog posts recently, but I guess it’s a problem to look into and try and solve later.

Importing a Broadlink IR transmitter into Home Assistant

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 21:31:33 +0800

I recently bought a Broadlink RM4 Mini for not very much money in the hope that I could use it to control my stereo, TV and air conditioning using my Home Assistant setup. The device itself is smaller than I realised (a bonus!) and is powered via usb cable plugged into a 5V/1A charger - I just used an old iPhone charger.

The device has Broadlink integration…but boy did I have to wrestle with it to get it working! I figured I’d record my progress getting it set up incase anyone finds it of use (and when I forget what I did and once again curse myself for not ever writing documentation!).

2020-07-31-Like-of-Hugo-Cheatsheet

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 15:49:45 +0800

One for the bookmarks! This should be linked on the official documentation as a just-past-starting point!

2020-07-28-Like-of-Tiny-Pilot

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:09:32 +0800

This is such a cool little device! I wish I would have had it a month ago when I did a clean install on my Proxmox host.

2020-07-26-Current-Networking-Struggles

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 12:09:48 +0800

Networking is HARD!

I’m trying to get some of my network traffic permanently going through a network-wide VPN connection. I actually have that set on my Edgerouter with a network group of devices…but they then can’t access my locally self-hosted applications which are not going through the VPN! I know it’s not a port forward issue…at best guess it’s a DNAT issue…and it’s driving me nuts.

2020-07-21-Repost-of-Hello-World

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 23:06:47 +0800

I think this will be my first working note. I’ll try and test the like, reply and repost abilities of Indieweb sites with this post. So far it’s been a struggle to get things working! I guess if mentions are rendering properly below this note it works…if not I’m probably frustrated about it.

This is me reposting the previous post…glorious post it was too.

2020-07-21-Reply-to-Hello-World

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 17:34:28 +0800

The world says “Hello” back to you pal, hope this works!

2020-07-21-Like-of-Hello-World

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 17:32:51 +0800

Cool post! I’m going to type some more here though as indiewebify.me is not liking the length of the content versus the post title.

2020-07-21-Hello-World

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 17:18:58 +0800

I think this will be my first working note. I’ll try and test the like, reply and repost abilities of Indieweb sites with this post. So far it’s been a struggle to get things working! I guess if mentions are rendering properly below this note it works…if not I’m probably frustrated about it.

2020-07-21T00:57:58+08:00

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:57:58 +0800

Love this as an idea!

My Ridiculous Workflow

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 20:30:12 +0800

I’ve had Indieweb integration get under my skin the last couple of weeks…so here’s another post.

The Problem - Now that I have webmention sending and receiving integrated into my site, I have turned my attention towards meeting standards for POSSE’d content. Unfortunately I have found no easy way to add the u-syndicated links to posts without publishing the post first, then posting the POSSE’d copies, then adding the links to the original post and republishing the whole thing again manually. This is compounded by the fact I am using a static site - the post needs to be published before it can be syndicated, so getting a POSSE’d content link in advance is impossible!

Pushl and Brid.gy integrations

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:06:52 +0800

I’m on a bit of a roll this week trying to implement more IndieWeb technologies into my blog. Previously, thanks to the the awesome webmentiond I was able to receive webmentions on my posts. While webmentiond can send webmentions manually, I wanted an automated solution. Certainly I’d love for webmentiond to possibly support this in the future…

Enter Pushl!

This little utility can be fed an RSS feed (or even multiple feeds) and send webmentions to URLs it finds in the posts. Super cool!

Webmentiond and Hugo - A webmentions breakthrough!

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 17:03:03 +0800

I have written several times on the Indieweb. Conceptually it’s fairly straightforward to understand, but actually integrating some of the technologies has proven too challenging for me in the past. Webmentions, in particular, have stressed me out!

Well, as you can see from the bottom of this site, I now have an endpoint of my own set up to receive them! For this I pass on a huge thanks to Horst Gutman, the author of webmentiond. This amazing bit of software is even packaged in a docker container to make deployment super easy. He even helped me out within minutes of asking for some help on the project github page, and clearly has helped others out in deploying his software.

One Year Old!

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 16:05:29 +0800

I just realised that this blog has existed for a year now!

Looking back, I’ve learned an awful lot. Originally I really just wanted to learn a bit more about Markdown as a language (this has helped me hugely using the notes tool Joplin, as well as discovering that Discord supports some markdown formatting) and learning how to use a static site generator.

I’ve actually really enjoyed learning Hugo and hacking different solutions with it. I’ve decided to run an introductory course on web development with it to Summer School students over the course of about 7 session. Not sure about the layout of the course yet, but I’m pretty excited about it.

RSS and a private web browsing experience

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:53:52 +0800

For a millennial like me, RSS feeds are the point where the internet began to feel like a genuinely new method of delivering content and information. My first experience with RSS was through early podcasts, although many of them were either too short or not particularly listenable and I lost interest.

My interest piqued a few years ago when I began my journey into learning about good privacy practices online. RSS feeds for news sites are a great way to pull in information without necessarily leaving a digital footprint to track. Obviously this isn’t always the case, but the idea of centralising my online reading seemed like a great idea.

Adding CSS rules to Hugo by passing simple parameters to shortcodes

Fri, 08 May 2020 19:29:18 +0800

A quick Hugo hack I worked out recently. I wanted to have textboxes on my site and Hugo gives a couple of options - I have modified the CSS of my theme to display code in this way, but I can also create larger code textboxes. The problem with that is that it won’t insert line breaks for text, but rather put a scrollbar at the bottom of the textbox.

Segregating my network using VLANS

Thu, 07 May 2020 17:24:36 +0800

I set out a target for myself this year to segregate my network into VLANs. This was partly out of necessity as I have a Philips Hue hub that was going EOL this year (obsolescence is the whole other area of tech that gets me fairly annoyed, particularly when it comes down to manufacturers simply not supporting their products). That said, it was also inspired by my latest IoT device - a Roomba vacuum cleaner! I felt that getting some more IoT devices necessitates a network that is safe to have these devices on. However, I also set out to set up Home Assistant, and need any devices on an IoT-only network to be accessible to that.

Folding@Home to fight COVID-19

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 21:38:53 +0800

Just a quick one. Distributed computing has always been fairly interesting to me, but I’ve never really experimented with it. By the time I had the hardware and time to really look into things like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the level of computing power necessary to unlock new coins cost more in electricity than they were worth.

However, Folding@Home is different. This allows your computer to be borrowed by researchers to model the folding of proteins to better understand disease. That last sentence does suggest I know what that means…I don’t really.

eLearning strategies during school cancellations

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 16:36:04 +0800

The past few weeks have been rather difficult as a teacher in Hong Kong. Next week will be the third week in a row I will have been teaching remotely as students stay at home during the Coronavirus outbreak. I have thought carefully about the strategies that work and do not work in this situation and I think I have developed a system that is working somewhat well at the moment (although I would prefer to go back to face to face teaching!). Here are some observations I have worked into three main principles guiding my approach;

Webmentions and Hugo

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 15:25:24 +0800

Despite an earlier post about my cynicism for the indieweb, I have been busy trying to integrate some the technology into this website over the past month or so. I have found this link to be pretty helpful in how to do this, but have run into technical issues that have just put me off the whole thing now.

I use a fairly simple workflow to generate this webpage - I write posts in markdown using Atom text editor (which I have come to really like and it allows me to make configuration changes to CSS and templates on the site), and then build the site. I really like using the atom-hugo plugin to aid in this and gives a nice, cohesive feel to creating website content. I have played around with various online CMS’s for creating content and I simply don’t like them much - they always feel slow or bloated or clunky! Also, there’s the extra worry about authentication and keeping the software updated. It’s just not something I really want to deal with anymore. Once I have written a post I can build the site, fire up a SFTP client (in this case I quote like Panic! Software’s Transmit) and copy the public folder to the webserver. A quick bash script later and the folder is moved to the web directory and Apache is restarted. To some people this might be a bit convoluted, but to me it’s a simple way of working and I don’t have to worry about a CMS or backend MySQL database, or PHP, or…anything!

Scripting Synology Diskstation remote shutdowns

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 14:34:00 +0800

A Synology Diskstation is a great device for beginning a homelab with. It might be a bit pricey, but it’s a great way of learning basic Linux-y stuff and self-hosting web apps for the first time. However, Synology has placed some restrictions on certain functions which you wouldn’t find in a regular linux distro. One of those which I have a bit irritating is SSH access.

I use my Diskstation as a server to send backups to. This means it gets turned on from my main server via a bash script every couple of days for the backup to run to. It serves this purpose well, even if I’m not really using any specific Synology features. It supports Wake on Lan, so turning it on is easy enough, but turning it off via a remote command has proven to be a bit of a pain. This is because it seems to need the root account to issue the shutdown so you have two options;

Glad to be back at work

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 14:28:43 +0800

It sounds a bit luvvy and over the top, but I really appreciate being back at work. I enjoyed the Christmas break, but I really genuinely enjoy my job. I’m looking forward to the topics I’ll cover with my classes this term and just being in the classroom. I think that probably makes me a bit sad…but it’s true all the same. This is my tenth year as a qualified teacher and I think my enthusiasm for the job is fairly unchanged from when I started. Moving to the other other side of the world probably helped with that.

Projects in 2020

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 14:28:06 +0800

I’ve learned a lot this year with regards to tech. This blog being moved to Hugo as the creation platform has inspired me to write more and learn markdown. I have messed about with encryption and moved away from companies providing services in exchange for encroaching on user privacy. This is the year that I have shut down several Google accounts, my decades-old Microsoft account, my Dropbox account and probably several others I can’t remember. I have learned more about how the internet works and hosting my own services, as well as increasing my awareness with regards to my digital footprint and online privacy.

Apache Reverse Proxy Settings for Nextcloud

Sun, 22 Dec 2019 20:53:12 +0800

Just a quick note about some reverse proxy settings that helped me get Nextcloud working properly. I have run a Nextcloud instance for the past couple of years, but I’ve never managed to get reverse proxying exactly right. I run an Apache webserver as a front end to all my web applications because that’s the first webserver I learned…and I spent 10mins looking at NGINX, Caddy, Traefik etc and decided I couldn’t be bothered if my setup was working fine anyway.

Collabora & Nextcloud Cloud Office Suite

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 19:51:55 +0800

Office suites have to be just about the most boring topic to write about on the internet…but when you think about it, they are a hugely important tool in education. Microsoft has ruled this space for decades now and done everything it can to try and bury open file standards for documents. Tools like Open Office and its fork Libre Office have gamely tried to catch up to the Microsoft juggernaut. Certainly in business Microsoft Office is king and that was the case in education until recently. Schools have increasingly moved away from standalone software to utilising cloud-based solutions like Google Drive. It seems to me that Microsoft is a little late to this party with Office 365 when compared to Google Docs. However…Google!

No, I will not be using Pear Deck

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 21:03:09 +0800

When I went to University I found that banks in the UK were very keen to have me as a customer. It seemed that just about every institution was competing to offer incentives to open an account with them; from free railcards to literally handing out cash. It was generally accepted, as I understood it at the time, that this was because once the account was open I was unlikely to go through the process of closing it and opening account with a competitor. The inconvenience of this meant that the banks were effectively hooking customers in young and were expecting to hold on to them for many years. My mum hasn’t changed banks since Chairman Mao was alive as far as I can tell, even if there might have been financial advantages to doing so over the years.

Embedding Mastodon Toots into Hugo Posts with a Shortcode

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 18:07:29 +0800

I found a neat Hugo shortcode to embed Mastodon toots into a post. This is courtesy of Kevin Gimbel and can be found on his blog here.

The code itself can be found on his Github here.

Essentially it’s a case of creating a shortcode (I named mine mastodon.html)

{{ .Page.Scratch.Set "include_mastodon" true }}
{{ $width := .Get "width" | default "400" }}
{{ $height := .Get "height" | default "333"}}
{{ $status := .Get "status" | default "false" }}

{{ if eq ($status) "false" }}
{{ else }}
<iframe src= "{{ $status }}/embed" class="mastodon-embed" style="max-width: 100%; border: 0" width="{{ $width }}" height="{{ $height }}"></iframe>
{{ end }}

and then embedding this into the website’s footer.html

Setting up a Mastodon instance

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 09:07:09 +0800

Mastodon is a social network with a difference. In essence it is a Twitter-clone, but without the tracking and usage of your own data against you. It is an extension of GNU Social, but it seems to push the UI-first mentality of the indieWeb. I am not really a social media user, but I liked the look of this and felt that it was worth exploring. Additionally, when I’m stating to people not to use Twitter, Facebook e.t.c. that I have some kind of alternative.

My Skepticism for the IndieWeb

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:55:14 +0800

https://social.cshire.xyz/@chris/103016588586048006

“Everything old is new again”

I’ve come across some interesting posts, articles and discussions about the indieWeb recently. On first glance it seems like another buzzword in a sea of buzzwords online for fairly mundane things. The basic premise I absolutely support - taking back control of your digital identity from the corporations. I particularly like the outline here, although, reading through it reminds me of some of posts I have previously written. The background of how the web used to be I found interesting as I certainly did not have the technical skills at the time to build my own web presence.

10 Years of using Linux

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 09:05:35 +0800

It occurred to me today that with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 19:10, I will have been a Linux user for ten years. While not by first experimental efforts with it (that would be back in 2004/5 and a Knoppix live CD), Ubuntu 9:10 Jaunty Jackalope was the first full install of a distribution I tried. At the time I was rocking a desktop PC and I was pretty amazed to find that all of the hardware worked great. That said, I don’t think I was using a wifi card which had been an unsolvable issue a few years before on an HP laptop. I can’t remember now why I was so reticent to move my Windows install to the recently released Windows 7 from XP, but it may just have been that I was completely bored by Windows at that point.

Smartd and Encrypted Notifications

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 17:57:39 +0800

My project this weekend was to get server notifications from the Smartd daemon to send as encrypted messages. This effectively completes my aim of having all email notifications from my main server moved off Gmail and sent encrypted.

Smartd is a pretty essential bit of server software. It monitors the reported S.M.A.R.T values of Hard Drives installed and reports when it detects a change. Changes in certain values indicate that a disk is potentially going to fail. In theory, and often with a bit of luck, a disk exhibiting potential symptoms of failure can be replaced with a new one before it fails and the disk RAID array can rebuild itself. I had a pretty catastrophic failure of several disks at once a few years ago, but was effectively saved by notifications of changes in S.M.A.R.T values. Given I did not have a backup at the time (which I now realise was completely stupid…), the notifications gave me enough time to start copying data off the array.

Logwatch and Encrypted Notifications

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 16:14:00 +0800

I have been looking into improving my server notifications solution (I wrote about it in this post). While having the ProtonMail third-party relay worked, it couldn’t handle attachments. Additionally, TLS between client and server wasn’t supported. While this isn’t the end of the world as messages would only be reaching the relay from my internal network, it irked me a little bit so I set about considering a solution.

That solution really send me down a bit of a rabbit hole which led to me completely replacing the MTA (SSMTP) on the server as I discovered it was no longer maintained. I eventually settled on MSMTP and Mutt (which I used previously). This was all well and good, but I still couldn’t send messages through ProtonMail’s servers with attachments. I definitely did not want to use Google, but couldn’t find any services that could support encryption like ProtonMail. I hit upon the idea of using GPG keys (natively supported by ProtonMail), but this still meant I had to find an SMTP server to deliver my messages.

Wordpress in Docker Desktop

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 11:12:39 +0800

I have been playing about with Docker Desktop for Mac over the past few days and I am astounded with just how straightforward and easy it is to have applications up and running within just a few minutes. I think about all the time I spent learning the intricacies of installing software like Wordpress and Nextcloud in full VM’s and LXC containers…and then I think that this whole process could have been simplified by moving to Docker. Nextcloud in particular was an absolute pain to get installed, and upgrading it always leaves me a bit nervous waiting for things to break.

Centering Images in Hugo

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 17:17:33 +0800

Just a quick one regarding something I learned recently about Hugo. I don’t put all that many images in my blog posts- I suppose I should try and make them more readable, but in reality this blog is more for me than anyone else! However, I have been a bit frustrated with the way in which Hugo works with images. There is no easy way within markdown to support basic image manipulation. Centering images, for example, seemingly impossible without working with shortcodes!

Docker for MacOS

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 15:46:12 +0800

I was a bit frustrated in my last post about students of mine taking three weeks to install a VM in VirtualBox to play about with. I feel a bit foolish now…but I have to say the performance of VM’s in VirtualBox on MacOS is utter pants. Everything just performed so sloooowly, regardless of the amount of resources the VM had dedicated to it. It was hugely frustrating. O.K, point taken kids.

Resilience and Teaching Students ICT

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 12:01:21 +0800

I got my first computer when I was 17. I’m not sure the exact reason why I wanted it, but I suspect it was partly to do with the frustration of sharing the family PC in the living room and probably something to do with piracy. I remember the specs though; 233Mhz, 128Mb RAM, 8Gb Hard disk…all second hand for the price of £150. This was in 2003 and, looking back on it, I think I realised this was an extortionate amount of money for the specs even then! I remember having about £15 left over to get myself a second hand monitor from the computer store (long since closed) up the road from my mum’s house. I remember carrying this 14 inch CRT monster back, with the sharp plastic edges digging into my hands. I also remember being desperate for an internet connection in my bedroom, something that was never going to happen given the lack of phone point in the room. I saved up my money, bought a Netgear 802.11b wireless router and secretly bought a broadband line from Pipex (a long dead ISP). I hid the broadband line from my tech-phobic mum for nearly two years!

Secure Email and Server Notifications

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 14:15:30 +0800

I have recently transitioned my email away from Google & Microsoft. I had been using a hotmail address since possibly the last time a member of the Bush family was President of the Unites States of America. With my new movements towards privacy I felt this could not go on!

Why not self-host email?

I had considered it a few times. However, it seems fairly intimidating at this point. Email really is a technology from another age. It is no longer simply a case of setting up a server and away you go. It seems like email is a constant battle with spam, intrusion attempts and mitigating the risk of being blacklisted by the major email providers. It all seems a bit much, and it’s about as far from set and forget as it appears you can get with self-hosting. I did also consider just running an SMTP server for outward notifications from my server. These get sent fairly regularly due to log files from backups, logwatch reports and disk errors.

My Private Cloud

Sat, 10 Aug 2019 10:33:27 +0800

For the past couple of years I have been working on a fairly extensive project. I have been attempting to replace the major tech companies (e.g. Apple, Google e.t.c.) services with equivalents I run myself. I have a few reasons for doing this, but primarily it is about privacy and security. I haven’t always been this way. I remember using Skype when it was still in beta, Facebook when you had to have a *.edu email address to register and Gmail when it was invite-only. However, the revelations of the past few years around data breaches and how these companies use your data have made me weary.

How to Make Good Passwords

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 14:39:01 +0800

I’ve enjoyed delivering training to fellow educators at various points over the last ten years. However, whenever I am giving a session about privacy, more often than not I have had colleagues claiming to have been hacked in various ways. Wunderkind hackers aside, the odds of someone brute-forcing their way into your Google, Facebook or whatever account is ridiculously low. Far more likely is having a poor password, or leaving your device unlocked and unattended. It almost seems sometimes like people know that they have a terrible method of choosing passwords, but never seem to address this problem. The main problems as I see it are;

Hosting Websites

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 20:02:22 +0800

I remember when I was in my first year at University, my neighbour in student residences used apache to share his music collection. It was just an index page of all the files he had, but at the time I was fascinated with all things file sharing. Kazaa was in the process of being dethroned and bittorrent was in its ascendency. Anyway, the idea of being able to host your own page from your own computer was fairly amazing to me. I remember going to the Apache homepage…and being completely and utterly overwhelmed. Having only really had a computer for a couple of years at that point, I gave up pretty quickly.

Self-Hosted Services

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 17:15:09 +0800

Running your own replacements for online services is surprisingly easy. There are many different guides out there (I like the Digital Ocean ones particularly) as well as YouTube channels, subreddits on Reddit (r/selfhosted and r/homelab are extra useful) and various tech blogs and guides.

The choices can be fairly overwhelming to a newbie though, so I figured I would post an outline of some of the services which have made my experience really worthwhile. It’ll also give me a chance to play around with the markdown plugins I have installed for Atom text editor.

Stop teaching children to use Google!

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 17:26:16 +0800

OK the title is a bit click-baitey, but I don’t think it’s entirely ridiculous.

I love teaching, I really do. I love the challenge of making things interesting to young people and seeing the satisfaction they derive from understanding something. With technology, however, I get a little more irritated.

Technology can be a hugely powerful tool - I know first hand. I remember building my first computer from old parts with a friend. I remember nearly frying the motherboard due to my own incompetence. I remember the pain of the electric shock I received from going at my Playstation with a screwdriver to see how it worked (always unplug your electronics before working on them folks…). It was the point where my efforts reached a level of success I could accept that keep me going towards the next challenge. I wonder how many other people remember their first experiences on the internet. I was blown away by Encarta CDs, so the idea that you could just type in a topic you were interested in into a search engine and have it send you free information was mind-blowing!

Hello World

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 14:47:02 +0800

Welcome to my site!

I’ve hosted so many different sites for other people over the last few years and never really thought I might want or need one for myself. I think I was inspired by the Hugo project and seeing a large amount of people talk about markdown. Having faffed about with Wordpress, databases, reverse proxies e.t.c for years, this seemed like a great project to remove some of the fuss related to it.

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was an educator specialising in History for the last 15 years. I started out teaching in the U.K and moved to Hong Kong on a bit of a whim. International living suited me pretty well and has allowed me to stop working for a little while.

For now, I’m a full time dad and occasional financial coach.

I am hugely enthusiastic about technology, open source software and being self-sufficient enough to not have to rely on big technology companies.

Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

1. Analytics

I use Plausible for analytics on the site. Really, I’m just interested in site visitor numbers and where people come from globally to read my posts. I don’t do anything with this data, but for the sake of transparency;

I never see ip addresses - part of Plausible’s schtick is they try to respect privacy.
No third party is able to see the Plausible data. It is never shared.
Cookies are disabled.

2. Cookies & Tracking

There aren’t any!

Uses

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page contains a list of the technology which I use, both hardware and software. I’ve seen a few of these types of pages on other peoples blogs and occasionally found them interesting…so here’s mine.

Main machines

2023 Apple Macbook Air (M3, 24gb ram)
My main machine - I upgraded from my 2016 MacBook Pro after 8 years…which isn’t bad going for a laptop. I could have stretched it out another year as security updates were still being released (just about), but it was definitely behind on MacOS versions and the battery didn’t last long on a charge. The new M3 is great!

cshire.xyz

Home Assistant Voice PE + NFC reader project - Part 3

2025-12-26-Gran-Turismo-4-Spec-II

Home Assistant Voice PE + NFC reader project - Part 2

Home Assistant Voice PE + NFC reader project - Planning

Docker is too new, but also too old

Docker too old

Minisforum Customer Experiences

2025-02-25-When-Did-Hugo-Get-Complex

Fixing Piwigo Batch Downloader issues

Coming to you now...from Iceland!

2024-11-12-Deluge-Docker-and-Mergerfs

Replace internal IPs and Ports with domain names internally

2024-08-16-Omg,-a-Mastodon-Thread-as-a-Comment-Section

2024-08-15-I-Have-Time-to-Work-on-My-Site-Again

Updated method of importing a Broadlink IR transmitter into Home Assisstant

2022-07-24-Updating-Infrastructure

2022-07-02-atom-is-dead

2022-04-06-Getting-interested-in-my-site-again

MySQL Cheat Sheet

Login to Mysql

Another Year, more targets!

Updates and things

2021-01-01-Like-of-Ru's-New-Design

2020-11-14-Backup-Woes

2020-11-01-Like-of-Webmentiond

2020-08-29-Plex-Kodi-Connect

2020-08-23-System-76-Machines

Updating PHP versions outside of the official repos

Finding out which packages were in use on my system

Setting up my Proxmox Host Storage

2020-07-31-Is-Bridgy-Acting-Up

Importing a Broadlink IR transmitter into Home Assistant

2020-07-31-Like-of-Hugo-Cheatsheet

2020-07-28-Like-of-Tiny-Pilot

2020-07-26-Current-Networking-Struggles

2020-07-21-Repost-of-Hello-World

2020-07-21-Reply-to-Hello-World

2020-07-21-Like-of-Hello-World

2020-07-21-Hello-World

2020-07-21T00:57:58+08:00

My Ridiculous Workflow

Pushl and Brid.gy integrations

Webmentiond and Hugo - A webmentions breakthrough!

One Year Old!

RSS and a private web browsing experience

Adding CSS rules to Hugo by passing simple parameters to shortcodes

Segregating my network using VLANS

Folding@Home to fight COVID-19

eLearning strategies during school cancellations

Webmentions and Hugo

Scripting Synology Diskstation remote shutdowns

Glad to be back at work

Projects in 2020

Apache Reverse Proxy Settings for Nextcloud

Collabora & Nextcloud Cloud Office Suite

No, I will not be using Pear Deck

Embedding Mastodon Toots into Hugo Posts with a Shortcode

Setting up a Mastodon instance

My Skepticism for the IndieWeb

10 Years of using Linux

Smartd and Encrypted Notifications

Logwatch and Encrypted Notifications

Wordpress in Docker Desktop

Centering Images in Hugo

Docker for MacOS

Resilience and Teaching Students ICT

Secure Email and Server Notifications

Why not self-host email?

My Private Cloud

How to Make Good Passwords

Hosting Websites

Self-Hosted Services

Stop teaching children to use Google!

Hello World

About Me

Privacy Policy

1. Analytics

2. Cookies & Tracking

Uses