Irrigation Automation (with Home Assistant) With a garden, irrigation is key if you care about the survival of what you plant. For a while we watered the garden manually, but of cause that doesn't work when you go on vacation. And it's also a chore.… ▶

The Rubenerd Blog Quiz 2025 Let's pretend it's 2005 again and do one of those blog quiz things! This one comes from RubeNerd. If you're not following his blog already, you're definitely doing something wrong. Anyway, let's have some questions and answers...… ▶

Pinout Leaf Generator If you're working with modern electronics, may it be a Raspberry Pi, an ESP32 microcontroller or any of the myriad of available development boards, you are aware of pinout diagrams. They are helpful graphics quickly showing you the capabilities of each connector pin.… ▶

Meh… another comment system I like comments. Unlike the rest of the world who has largely abandoned blog comments, I feel like they are an essential part of what makes a blog a blog. This blog is powered by DokuWiki, so there is no native solution for comments. Over the years I had different ones. For a while I used… ▶

Mastodon to GoToSocial Migration My Mastodon instance is closing down in April, so I had to move to a new instance. And picking instances is hard, so why not run my own? Instead of running a full Mastodon instance I decided to run the much leaner… ▶

65W Power Bank Comparison The battery life of my new Framework laptop isn't the worst, but it isn't super great either. But the cool thing is that it can easily be topped up with a power bank via USB-C. So I wanted one. The Framework has a 61Wh battery. Having a power bank that can give it another full charge would be pretty great. The laptop charges at 65W so I looked at power banks that can charge at least that rate.… ▶

Gnome Keyring SSH Agent on Arch XFCE I have been using Keychain for years to automatically start an SSH agent and unlock my SSH keys. But when I was setting up my new Laptop and fiddling with unlocking the Gnome Keyring, I was wondering why I wasn't using it for my SSH keys as well.… ▶

FrameWork 13 (Intel Ultra) & ArchLinux My trusty Thinkpad is now over a decade old and I was eyeing a Framework Laptop for a while now. So when the opportunity arose to get it as a work laptop I couldn't refuse ;-) I picked the Intel Ultra Core 165H model with 96GB of RAM and a 4TB NVME disk. This beast should have plenty of power for the foreseeable future.… ▶

Fish Shell I am using Bash as my shell for as long as I am using Linux. Over the years I had customized it quite a lot by making my .bashrc load a whole bunch of scripts from a ~/.bashrc.d directory. It worked fine but of course there is only so much you can do with simple aliases and function definitions…… ▶

The Enshittification of IKEA Remember when IKEA was good? I know, everyone joked about the labyrinthine shop layout and how you ended up with more in your big blue plastic bag than you had planned, but overall it was good. You got decent stuff for affordable prices and the shopping was a family experience. Complete with either a full meal or at least a snack at the end (or even both).… ▶