Category Archives: Technology

Technology related blogs

Homekit Locks

My Schlage smart lock is finally working with HomeKit – really nice to be able to use the lock like this. It took a firmware update but now seems to be playing nicely.

Next step will be the garage gate control – parts ordered.

Spreadsheets

Just looking for the best WordPress spreadsheet plugin

Probably WPDataTables looks best. Had to increase the maximum upload size of a file by editing the .htaccess file in the www directory. It was still set at a 2MB maximum.

I’m surprised that this is still the case, it must have been higher in the past. Presumably before I migrated to this server.

Continue reading Spreadsheets

Useful Apps

Its been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy with the new job.

I thought I should also put some links to useful apps for a Mac here for future reference:

Rectangle lets you move apps around on the screen using keyboard controls to quickly position multiple apps.

Karabiner Elements lets you reprogram keyboard keys for different meanings. Particularly useful is to remap the caps-lock key to something useful (eg ctrl-alt-command-shift) to give you another key control

Dozer is a menu bar app that lets you hide other menu bar apps as required.

Lockdown Sunday

Turns out that you can’t ride in a group of more than 2 adults during lockdown. So pretty depressing.

On the plus side:

Apple Watch ECG

So the public beta of IOS now enables the ECG app. Enough reason to go the public beta really. That and face mask unlocking

A real sunday

Getting back on my bicycle. Its good, as is planning for the trip down south with my mates.

Plus, upgraded my Mac mini to Big Sur, after getting the latest version of parallels to run the VM for my older software development environment for rostering.

So… All good really

Reconfiguring the network

This weekend has been a tough one, but hopefully now the network (and therefore this blog site amongst other things) should run more smoothly. I’ve been having worsening failures with the Linksys Velop mesh system. Rather than trying to fix that, I’ve gone and bought a dedicated ubiquity router and put that into the network as the main router.

This means that the server now connects directly to the internet via the router, and isn’t dependent on the Linksys devices at all. If they fail, only the wifi around the house will go down.

More importantly, it lets me put the Linksys Velop devices into bridge mode. Interestingly, only two of the five Linksys devices can do that – the ones I got more recently from the UK amazon sale. The ones that have UK plugs. But even with two of them the coverage around the house seems ok. I would note that the device that failed constantly as the parent node was not one of these two, so maybe that will improve things.

Also, I’ve been able to move the wifi out of the server space (and therefore the heat) so they might well do better in the rooms at room temperature.

We will see…

Smart Lighting

Well, its been a bit of an adventure, but I think I have most of the upstairs set up with smart lighting. Probably need another six lights for the kitchen to finish it off, but mostly there now which is good.

And its very pretty…

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

That was a fairly painless upgrade to the server. Now running on the 20.04 LTS. Seems to be working as expected. Which is kind of the point really.

So I’ll probably upgrade a few more of the virtual machines soon to get them to the latest LTS. Although I think I have till 2023 to have to do this…

Fixing the cookie problem (again)

Well, its been a bit of a while, but I think I have this one finally fixed.

The problem has been that when I moved to using SSL (ie., encrypting all traffic to and from the site) although I changed the WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php) to the new address (https://veltman.org), the underlying entry in the mySQL database still pointed to the original site (http://veltman.org).

To fix it, I had to change the following table entries:

In the table wp_options:

siteurl    https://veltman.org
home       https://veltman.org


Both needed modification as they were still pointing at the original http://veltman.org address. This was enough to confuse WordPress at the time of login