Paul Dugas

The boy keeps getting distracted when he’s supposed to be doing school work at home so I’ve been trying to get filters going in the firewall. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to block YouTube. Even if I managed to get something working, he can just turn off wifi on the phone and bypass my firewall. I finally broke down and paid for Qustodio on his phone and laptop.

I build my first curstom integration for Home Assistant. My Recteq integration lets me monitor and control my smoker without having to expose it out to the Internet. My overactive imagination keeps coming up with scenarios where some hacker manages to burn my deck down…

IFTTT has changed their business model and wants to charge me to continue using a handful of integrations. This turned into an excuse to take a look around at alternatives to running all the glue logic for my home automation system in “the cloud”. I discovered Home Assistant is the perfect solution for me.

I discovered the battery in my 13-month-old Dell XPS 15 (7590) laptop is now swelling up making the touchpad no longer work. I’m not happy with the way Dell is (not) handling this.

I ran into an issue working with Terraform to setup an AWS Budget for a project and didn’t find the fix in the documentation or online. Thought I’d share here.

I’ve been working on a way for an ExtJS application to coexist with a PHP/Symfony site in the same project. Think I finally have a working solution.

I replaced an aging Unifi AP-LR with a new NanoHD today. Given all the activity on the home and office networks with everyone working/schooling from home, it was time.

Taking some time during this work-from-home event to refresh my Asterisk phone system. The old instance is over 5 years old. It’s time…

I had to spend one of my support credits to figure this out so I’m sharing the details here in the hope that it will save someone else the trouble…

The 9.6 update to Sophos UTM added support for using Let’s Encrypt certificates to secure access to websites behind the built in reverse-proxy feature. They can be used for the management interface and the user portal too. I no longer have to hack around on the machine to automate certificates. Finally!