Recent content on mwitkow@'s corner
During winter months, humidifiers are crucial to avoid super dry air indoors. I strongly prefer evaporative humidifiers (over mist ones), as they don’t leave residue all over. For years I used two Xiaomi SmartMi Evaporative Humidifier, connected happily to my Home Assistant. Last month, both of my humidifier (version 1 and verison 2) died: one wouldn’t turn on, the other one would…
Let’s be honest. Your digital life is a mess. Your inbox is a warzone, your calendar looks like a game of Tetris played by a squirrel on espresso, and your Google Drive is a digital graveyard where files go to be forgotten. You dream of a world where things just… organize themselves. What if I told you that with the advent of AI, you can McGyver your way to harness your Google…
I think I finally cracked what was causing my work Macbook Pro (M2 chip) as well as my personal Macbook Air (Intel chip) to crawl to a halt when using Chrome or VSCode… Turns out GPU rendering was off. To be frank, I’m not 100% sure what effect these flags have, but they definitely fixed the Chrome Helper process killing my CPU. Chrome Go to chrome://flags and set Enable to the…
In this post I’ll show you how to use a Raspberry Pi and some soldering skills to automate old Somfy blinds via the MQTT protocol exposed to Home Assistant and Google Home. Somfy blinds We’ve moved to a new apartment and one of its features are external blinds (a.k.a. covers) that are controlled through a dedicated remote of the Somfy brand. However, just like with a TV, finding the…
Unfortunately my internet provider (UPS CH) has intermittent failures. After switching to my own WiFi router, I decided to set up monitoring around my home internet connection to see the real impact. The setup will consist of a Prometheus instance, ping and SNMP monitoring targets and Grafana for visualization. Installing Prometheus The standard install guide is quite generic. What I wanted, was a…
As someone learning German, I wanted to avoid learning a new keyboard layout (German QWERTZ) as well as the language. Thus in this blog post, I go into the details of how to get German umlauts on a US keyboard layout across Linux, MacOS and Windows. A little background Like most Polish computer users, I grew up with the, awkwardly named, Polish (programmers) layout. It is effectively a English…
In this blog post I go into the details of how to add an NVME SSD to an old-ish Intel NUC by replacing the built-in WiFi card that sits in the mini PCI-Express port. The goal was to increase the IOPS performance of my media server from ~50 writes/sec to ~15000 writes/sec and make the whole system more responsive. Background In the distant past, my media server was run on a Raspberry pi 3 b+, with…
In this post I’ll walk you through how to set up Blokada, an open-source (see project) DNS resolution-based ad blocker for Android. It is highly configurable, and doesn’t drain your battery as it installs itself as a “on-device only” VPN inside the Android networking stack. On Play Store, you’ll only find Blokada Slim, with cut down functionality, as ad blocking is…
This post goes into the details of how to set up a Home Assistant instance behind a Google Authentication proxy that allows pre-defined @gmail.com to access your Home Assistant instance, while also allowing Google Assistant integration in Home Assistant to work correctly. This setup relies setting up a Wiregate instance that will act as a authentication proxy in the Cloud which will sit in front…
This post describes my setup on building Anki repetition-learning decks for complicated words I need to translate when reading German websites. This should work for most languages. The end product in a MacOS Anki learning mode FluentCards FluentCards is Chrome extension that creates a pop-up with the translated word (using Yandex dict) in the context of the web page. It’s like Google…
This post goes into the details of how to make websites you run in your home, such as Home Assistant, exposed to the public securely and (almost) for free. The post details how to set up a free GCE instance, TLS certificates via LetsEncrypt, a Treafik proxy with Google authentication, and automatic VPNs built using Wireguard. For brevity, I called this setup Wiregate, i.e. a wire-guard gateway.…
My name’s Michał (IPA: /ˈmʲi.xaw/), and I’m tech manager who enjoys geeky stuff, sports, and interesting people. My real face, not smoothed out by vector graphics Professional I’m a technologist with rich experience of both product and engineering management. Three things drive and motivate my work: Troubleshooting and resolving technical and organizational issues. Providing…
Right… So it’s been a while since I last had a personal website, back in Geocities times. This current Coronavirus crisis means I have significant time on my hands, as I’m stuck in London instead of traveling the world as we planned. Expectations setting As such, I decided to built a place where I could dump my random notes: things I research for myself in a form semi-digestable…