0 Tweaking tasmota smartplug settings

Published 13^th December 2022 by Jon Scaife & filed under Home Assistant.

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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0 Windows volume control of HDMI output

Published 8^th December 2022 by Jon Scaife & filed under Amplifiers, Misc Media Software, Windows.

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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0 Remove driver preventing windows from booting

Published 14^th November 2022 by Jon Scaife & filed under Windows.

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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0 Problems flashing an ESP32

Published 8^th November 2022 by Jon Scaife & filed under SmartHome & IoT.

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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0 How to locate an APC network Management card on a LAN

Published 8^th November 2022 by Jon Scaife & filed under Misc Hardware.

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.

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4 MiFlora Plant Sensors in Home Assistant

Published 20^th April 2022 by Jon Scaife & filed under 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.

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0 Home Assistant Tweaks

Published 7^th December 2021 by Jon Scaife & filed under Home Assistant.

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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1 Remove any device from home assistant

Published 24^th November 2021 by Jon Scaife & filed under 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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0 Show enlarged image on hover in wordpress

Published 16^th June 2021 by Jon Scaife & filed under 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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0 Vertically center images in default wordpress gallery

Published 15^th June 2021 by Jon Scaife & filed under Wordpress.

I couldn’t believe a google search didn’t already turn up the answer for this — it’s crazy that you can’t just vertically-center the images in a wordpress simple image gallery. After much faffing with CSS I found a simple answer
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