Mat's Hideout

Category: Tech

  • A New Outlook

    A New Outlook

    19th Feb 2024 – this morning Microsoft finally forced its “New Outlook” onto my Windows desktop. And now, it’s broken. I don’t mean “bugs” broken. I mean “they want more money” broken: Exactly one year and one day ago, I posted a favourable review of Windows Mail, the little desktop app built-in to Windows that […]

  • Shelly EM – Power Monitoring in Grafana / Influx

    Shelly EM – Power Monitoring in Grafana / Influx

    New Youtube vid – see below for code! The Youtube vid covers general concepts, and below I’ve listed the basic steps to getting this working, plus posted some code samples you can use. Buy your Shelly EM with one or two current clamp sensors. Shelly make a 50A and a 120A sensor for the same […]

  • DIY Multisensors – what are the options?

    DIY Multisensors – what are the options?

    Preamble Let’s get one thing out of the way. Wireless vs. wired? One of my favourite YouTubers Andreas Spiess released a vid this week about PoE on the ESP32. Andreas touched on the discussion of Wireless vs Wired for IoT devices and I agree with his comments. I’ll leave this here: wireless is fantastic but […]

  • Flashing the BlitzWolf BW-RC1 Infrared Blaster with Tasmota

    Flashing the BlitzWolf BW-RC1 Infrared Blaster with Tasmota

    I’m going to cover exactly how I flashed my BW-RC1 IR blaster. My reference was this article by Matthew Harrold, which pretty much says the same thing as I’ll write about here, but I’ll try to (a) include some more photos, (b) more specific instructions, (c) cover the process of flashing, and (c) how to […]

  • Mailbird 2.0 Review

    I’d like to consider myself a child of the modern world, but … email. I’m a slave to it. I have a number of different enterprises that I run and look after, I administer 7 of my own Google Apps Domains not to mention looking after a few more for my clients (schools) who have […]

  • Dynamic DNS using Linode and local powershell script

    After noip.com and dyndns.org shut their doors to all but non-paying customers, I spent many years without being able to reliably access my home network from outside. Of course, it was always possible to do without dynamic DNS by making a note of the current IP address and use this for as long as the […]

  • My KeePass to LastPass Migration Woes!

    Preliminary This blog post details the technical difficulties faced when trying to migrate from using KeePass to LastPass. KeePass has been an excellent password companion for the last 6 years and I’ve been using MiniKeePass for iOS, loading my password safe from Dropbox quite happily. But since starting to use a Chromebook I’ve been increasingly […]

  • OLED from BuyDisplay.com – Mat’s Hookup Guide

    Here’s a quick hookup guide and sketch to get the ER-OLEDM032-1W display to work with Arduino. We are going to use the u8g library to drive the OLED. The ER-OLEDM032-1W is a 256×64 graphic OLED module costing $26.56. White on black. I bought mine from eBay although the Chinese brand BuyDisplay.com sells them directly. There are two […]

  • Multi-zone audio: a discussion of the options

    Multi-zone Audio: the last 15 years Multi-zone audio has been possible in the home for decades now, but until recently has only been an option for the super-house; the high price of systems and installation meant it was out of reach for the average home. The first cheap device I know of that opened-up multi-zone […]

  • Pimped-Out DIY Alarm Bell Box

    For reasons of general sensibleness and security I won’t go into much detail about exactly how my DIY Alarm Bell Box is configured to work in relation to actually keeping thieves away. Just a reminder that it’s always best to get help from Electronic Manufacturing Services for projects like this. Suffice to say: network of […]