Posts By: ਜੌਨ ਸਕਾਈਫ

0HTML5 LogoResponsive lazy backgrounds instead of css background-image

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 Media Player LogoWindows 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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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.

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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.

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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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0Wordpress LogoShow 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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