Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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The Auth Layer I Didn’t Build
Everything on my home network that has a web interface sits behind one reverse proxy. You type a friendly hostname, the proxy terminates TLS with a real certificate and hands the request to whichever container is behind it. It is the most useful single thing I run, and in August I realised it was also a very tidy list of everything an intruder on my LAN would want to look at.
The proxy adds no authentication of its own. Whatever login the application has is the only login there is. So on 11 August I sat down to answer a reasonable question: does this lab need an identity provider in front of it?
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Fourteen Lists, One Job
I replaced fourteen overlapping Pi-hole blocklists with one maintained list, but only after replaying a week of my own DNS traffic against each candidate.
A Reddit post made the case for merging every blocklist you use into one “master” list, hosting it on GitHub, and pointing Pi-hole at that instead.
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The Dot Stopped Talking to Amazon
A 2016 Echo Dot, a bootloader exploit, and a voice assistant that never leaves the house.
Home Assistant has had a local voice pipeline for a while. Speech-to-text, intent matching and text-to-speech can all run on hardware I own. What I didn’t have was anything to talk into. A satellite needs a decent microphone array, a speaker, and a box that looks like it belongs on a shelf.
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Three Years Without Buying a Drive
A year ago, running out of disk space was a shopping problem. You waited for a sale, bought a bigger drive, and moved on.
That’s over for now. AI data centres are buying up the world’s memory and flash, and it’s spread to hard drives too. RAM, SSDs and hard drives all cost two to five times what they did twelve months ago, depending on the part. I already skipped buying a second offsite drive in my backup post because a 16 TB disk had become absurd.
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The Detector Was Never Looking
A neural network running at 5.8 milliseconds an inference, pointed at a room with cats in it, that had never once detected a cat.
I have an NVR. It runs in a container on one of the cluster nodes, it does object detection on that node’s integrated GPU, and it is fast: 5.84 milliseconds per inference, sitting at about 6% of what the detector can do. Person events come in with confidence scores between 0.73 and 0.93, which is healthy.