Posts By: Jon Scaife

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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3Enable 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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2Updating firmware on Conbee II stick for Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

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

2Air Quality in Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

I recently wrote about how to show bin col­lec­tion inform­a­tion in Home Assist­ant, and my next pro­ject was to pull some air qual­ity inform­a­tion. For­tu­nately I have a ‘Tado’ account which meant I could pull this inform­a­tion from their API using the fol­low­ing code
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0Bin collections in Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

I’ve been devel­op­ing my Home Assist­ant based smarthome setup for around a year now (since leav­ing SmartTh­ings) and after an ini­tial steep learn­ing curve I’ve been veyr happy with home assist­ant so I have star­ted work­ing to expand the things it does as I am con­if­dent it offers a long term basis for my smarthome. One thing I wanted to add was bin col­lec­tion data to remind me which bin is due when. As I live in Shef­field I needed to pull this data from the loc­al author­it­ies out-sources pro­vider (veolia). The fol­low­ing details how I did this, build­ing very much on the work of oth­ers who have done it already for oth­er regions
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0Getting OpenZWave working with Home Assistant

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

I am slowly migrat­ing my smarthome setup to Home­As­sist­ant which, as with most open-source pro­jects, is pretty unfriendly to start with and takes some learn­ing to use. I have an Aeotec ZStick and an Aeotec Door­bell 6 which work via Z‑Wave and I wanted to cus­tom­ise the tones and reduce the volume a little. You’d think it would be easy right?
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0PSU LogoThe perfect HTPC power supply 2020?

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I recently got a new GPU for my HTPC which required a replace­ment power sup­ply as the old one was­n’t suit­able for power­ing a GPU with an 8 pin PCIe power cable. The HTPC is in use for an aver­age of around 6 hours per day and with elec­tri­city at 15p/kWh any reduc­tion in power at the wall works out at 33p a year per Watt. This isn’t a big sav­ing, but if con­sump­tion is reduced by sev­er­al watts the sav­ing can add up.
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