When you want to make a local HomeAssistant (a home automation software I mentioned before) available from the Internet, you probably want to secure it with SSL. There's an official tutorial on how to do that, but it has a few problems:

• It uses the official certbot client, which is super heavy and does all kind of things you don't need
• It requires that port 80 is not used while refreshing certificates
• It requires to forward port 80 from the internet to your internal HomeAssistant server

So here's is how to do it differently:

• we use the very lightweight dehydrated script (formerly known as letsencrypt.sh)
• we use DNS-01 challenges to avoid needing any open ports

I bought a new phone. My Sony Z3 compact's battery was starting to give up, the internal storage was too limited, the backplate was loose and I wasn't too happy with its overall performance anymore. Unfortunately there seems to be no phone matching all my requirements:

• recent model (2016+)
• decent CPU
• lots of RAM (>3GB)
• large battery (>3000mAh)
• lots of storage (>32GB) and SD card support
• less than 500€
• 4.7 inch display

Especially the last requirement is problematic. It seems I'm the last person who likes smaller phones. In the end I decided to to swallow the bitter pill and go with a bigger form factor and bought a Huawei Honor 9. It is very comparable to Google's Pixel 5 but is 44% cheaper than Google's pricy flagship:

So far I like it a lot. I switched Huawei's quite decent launcher against my personal favorite Nova Launcher and uninstalled most of the preinstalled apps. I haven't used the camera too much, but the very first snapshot came out quite nice:

Similar posts:

• EDC Update
• Mysterious Package Company
• Adventure Time

Our balcony is commonly known as the “Garden of Death”. Kaddi and I love to have herbs and flowers on the balcony but we suck at watering the plants. For years I said that we should have some kind of automatic system for that. This year I finally decided to build one.

Pictures at the very end.

A while ago, I wrote about a curious letter I received and how with a bit of googling, I figured out what it was.

The letter was the first of more to follow, all part of a “Mystery” bought by my girlfriend at the Mysterious Package Company for me.

From time to time I get angry mail and comments about how my original blog post “spoils the fun” because it's now easy to figure out what's going on by a quick google search. I find that a bit silly, since it's a blog post about how I used Google to figure out what the letter is about. So my blog post may have made it a bit simpler, but as I wrote – the mystery was solvable already before my post.

Nonetheless I redacted the names and identifiers in my original post. But Google continued to find my post anyway. So today I created a robots.txt entry which should remove the post from search engines altogether.

However sometimes people ask how the thing continued and if I spoiled it for my self by googling. So here's a bit of a review on the mystery I received. If you currently have your own mystery going, you might want to stop reading here.

I recently played through two new point'n'click adventure games. Here's what I think about them.