Back in 2021, I got a smart meter, not to watch the little in-home display and panic about the watts being consumed (been there 6+ years before!!) but to benefit from some of the smart meter tariffs available. The little display has sat in it’s box* since the meter was …
In recent years, I’ve been writing a lot of bash scripts, some Terraform and the odd bit of PowerShell. The main thing I miss from all of these new languages is the ability to format code upon saving the file, code completion (there are some VSCode plugins that have some …
In August 2021, I wrote the following open letter to my MP ahead of COP26. I’ve sat on it a year as I’m not sure what response I would get from those who read my blog to my views on changes that are required to reduce emmissions, but given the …
After much deliberation over the years, I have finally invested in a UPS to stop my network equipment from being affected by the short powercuts we seem to have each year. I debated quite a while over the merits of getting a UPS when the Tesla Powerwall 2 can be …
In the last year, I’ve noticed that the number of packaging items which on the face of it look recyclable but have a plastic coating and therefore are probably unrecyclable, has been rising. This new trend makes the cardboard/paper look glossy but it’s an environmental nightmare! Below are some examples: …
I bought a new car in March 2022. Well, technically I ordered it 5 months before that but with the global chip (not fish and chips) shortage, it took some time to arrive! The new car is a Kia EV6 GT-Line S, single motor, no heat pump in yacht blue …
In June this year, we got an email from our electricity company (Neon Reef) saying that their prices per kWh were increasing from 12.24 pence per kWh to 17.89 pence per kWh and a standing rate of 13.51 pence per day to 22.56 pence per day!! This spurred me to …
Before someone complains about the content of this post, I had tried to contact Kuoni back in early 2019 with no success. Some of the emails bounced back but an email to HR + the Agents address at Kuoni did get accepted and didn’t bounce – there was never a …
Two weeks ago, we had a short powercut which knocked out my entire network (again!) and this time, something odd happened… My Home Monitoring application was unable to connect to the Tesla Powerwall despite a reboot of the router, home monitoring app and various other devices. Upon investigating the issue, …
TL;DR; Let Chrome fill in the website credentials, then edit the HTML to change the password box removing the type password. Background Story This year, I’d planned before christmas to take 2 weeks off in June to go to Cornwall but as with everyone else in the UK, my holiday …
I was reading through posts on thinkbroadband‘s forum yesterday and came across a post which mentioned that Speedtest.net has a CLI! I don’t know why, but I’d never realised there was a CLI for Speedtest.net. I then went onto Docker Hub to see if anyone had already created an image …
As you all probably know, a lot of the UK has been working from home since late March 2020 because of the Covid19 outbreak. Normally this would be a mixed couple of months weather wise as we go through April showers to bring May flowers but this year has been …
I bought a new toy the other day 😀 I was looking at the spaghetti nightmare running off one of my switches and decided to splash out on a new Ubiquiti US-8-150W switch to replace the existing 5 port Netgear switch. I specifically chose to get a Ubiquiti switch to …
I had quite a lot of fun the other week trying to upgrade a new Netgear GS108E switch followed by VLAN tagging a specific port so it could be part of the guest network VLAN. First challenge was to upgrade the switch as it was on a really old version …
For those of you who have visited my site before, you may have noticed I’ve completely changed the theme 🙂 It’s still very much work in progress but it finally reached a point where I was happy enough to publish it to the wider world. I’d gotten a little board …
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