Posts By: Jon Scaife

2MiFlora 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