Posts By: Jon Scaife

0MiFlora Plant Sensors in Home Assistant

Posted by & 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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1Remove any device from home assistant

Posted by & 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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0Wordpress LogoShow enlarged image on hover in wordpress

Posted by & 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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0Wordpress LogoAutomatically generate and serve avif images with wordpress

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I have spent quite a lot of time optimising the performance of this site, and as part of ongoing work I monitor new technologies that could help improve the speed for visitors. I’ve been tracking the adoption of next-generation image formats for a while and with support by web browsers now fairly widespread it was time to figure out how to make use of these new formats in wordpress.
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0Enable windows desktop slideshow with a script

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I’ve been updating my unattended windows deployment setup recently, and one of the things I wanted to enable was the slideshow wallpaper with the location set to my wallpapers location on my server. This isn’t as straight-forward as it ought to be, but after bit of fiddling around I figured out how to do it fairly simply.
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0Batch script to rename PC based on reserved DHCP name

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I use WDS on a standalone server to set up new PCs and to reimage PCs when they have ended up mangled beyond repair. With a good number of PCs in my own house it is useful to reimage them ocasionally when swapping or upgrading hardware. Most of this process is now automated by an unattend.xml file but one step the unattended process doesn’t seem to support is renaming PCs back to their original name.
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0Updating firmware on Conbee II stick for Home Assistant

Posted by & filed under Home Assistant.

I use a ConBee II USB stick for my zigbee mesh in Home Assistant. I wanted to update the firmware and found it is easiest to do this by shutting down HA, unplugging the stick and using a windows machine to update it, then putting it back into the HA system and booting HA back up. There are full instructions for the process in Windows on Dresden Elektronik’s website