I’ve recently been working on an update/overhaul of both my various websites and the server backend. As part of this process I’ve been trying ot make sure everything is using the latest standards to maximise performance and compatability. One of the best features of recent versions of wordpress is the native support for responsive images — where the imgset=”” attribut eis used to supply alternative sizes of images in a group so the browser can use the most appropriate. In combination with async loading and lazy loading this can make pages load far faster whilst still looking good to all visitors. However css has not adopted these newer features so background images are much trickier to deal with. It can be done though…
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0Tweaking tasmota smartplug settings
I’ve now got around 30 tasmota-based smart plugs around the house. I’ve recently been tinkering with the settings on a few to optimise them for the roles they have
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0Windows volume control of HDMI output
I recently swapped out my old home cinema audio system (a Yamaha DSP-E800 and a Denon stereo receiver) connected via USB DAC and 6 channel analog for an Onkyo TX-SR605 which has HDMI audio connections. In most ways this was an instant upgrade but one issue really frustrated me — volume…
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0Remove driver preventing windows from booting
I recently tried installing AMD StoreMI on my Windows 2022 server. Big mistake — it immediately failed to boot with a BSOD. And this was just after installing — I hadn’t even run the program. So the first lesson is not to trust AMD’s software — absolutely shocking!
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0Problems flashing an ESP32
I recently needed to set up a new ESP32 device to extend my plant monitoring BLE network. I hit one or 2 issues doing so that were worth noting
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0How to locate an APC network Management card on a LAN
I recently’ got a couple of second hand APC network management cards (an AP9617 and AP9630). Both had static IPs set (i.e. they didn’t get an address from DHCP) so in order to access their web interface I needed to locate them.
4MiFlora Plant Sensors in Home Assistant
I’ve been suing the MiFlora Home Assistant integration to get data on various house plants for a while. However along the way I’ve had to overcome various hurdles including limited range of bluetooth, battery life issues, and getting the battery values to report. I finally seem to have cracked all of these and now have a system that works reliably with lots of plants around the house. I’ve summarised what I’ve used below.
0Home Assistant Tweaks
I’ve made a number of improvements to my home assistant instance of late and wanted to document what they were
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1Remove any device from home assistant
I’ve now been using home assistant for several years and most of the early challenges and learning-curves have been over-come. However, there has been a long-standing issue that is a constant frustration — removing old devices doesn’t have a standard approach and in some case is impossible from the GUI. There is a way though.
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0Show enlarged image on hover in wordpress
As part of the recent improvements I’ve been making to various websites I wanted to make images in galleries show enlarged versions when hovered over. Doing this with basic CSS is fairly trivial, but I didn’t just want to expand the original image, I wanted the browser to grab a new (larger) image too…
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“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”