Weeknotes 234

Another brief sojourn to Sheffield this week. Good times ✅

When setting up Home Assistant there are two integration choices when it comes to Zigbee connectivity: Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA), which is the “official” integration from the Home Assistant people, or Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) (with the MQTT integration), which is a third party integration but has supposedly better device support, and more flexibility.

I decided upon Z2M. Zigbee2MQTT requires more setup but I’m happy to tinker to get things working. Z2M requires a separate MQTT broker – Mosquitto is the oft recommended choice, which I went with.

But I did not setup authentication, because authentication is how you make things not work. This is a home network and if someone gains access to my network bad things have already happened, but still, we should do what we can so I decided to set it up finally.

Like the time I didn’t Dockerize Plex for ages and then it just worked, this was a very similar experience. It did take a bit of planning, but not much.

Anyway, during the setup I discovered a neat feature. You can store your credentials in a different file from the main mosquitto config.

mqtt:
  user: '!secrets.yaml mqtt_user'
  password: '!secrets.yaml mqtt_password'

Then you can put your secrets in secrets.yaml like this:

mqtt_user: user
mqtt_password: mqtt_password

This means I can version control the config without committing credentials to git.

The Christmas trip down south is now done and dusted. We were blessed with an easy journey both times, which takes a lot of the stress out of things. It was nice to see everyone, but I’m glad to be home. I guess this is home now.

TrackWeight – Turn your MacBook’s trackpad into a precise digital weighing scale.

I went to check the Game Boy I completed a few weeks ago, ready to be wrapped up for Christmas, and it no longer plays games. For reasons. This is annoying. I have had to fall back to a backup gift and will need to troubleshoot this one now.

Some brief experiments with different 3D printer build plates this week yielded mixed results. There is much to play with and tweak.

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse.

This is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

How to Stop Avoiding Big Tasks, Using an Easy 20-Second Trick

This has been hanging out in my web browser for weeks…

Saying that the advice is good I think. I’ve done something similar to this, but not quite the same when coding. I’ll leave what I was doing in the comments of the code, and what I should do or try next. Using the word “NEXT” is surprisingly powerful. I am going to try and implement this across tasks which are not programming based.

The f*** off contact page

In order to combat my inability to concentrate on anything much at all, I am constantly using the Background Sounds feature of iOS. I find the noise helps. (It’s hidden away under Settings -> Accessibility -> Audio & Visual -> Background Sounds, but I’ve got a button for it in Control Center).

I use Noizio for this on my Mac, but there is something particular about the Apple supplied sounds that I like so I went looking for Background Sounds on macOS. I it is a thing on macOS, but again, it’s hidden away in Settings. I now have this Raycast extension to easily toggle it on and off.