Hardware-ish project: Display for Netatmo Weather Station

I've finally published a small project: ESPHome-powered display for the Netatmo weather station.

Netatmo CO2 monitor

This is ESPHome-based display for Netatmo weather station. The primary goal is to display indoors CO2 concerntation in my home office so that I know when to open a window. Or when to close and hopefully save some money on heating.

The device itself is not a CO2 monitor and requires Netatmo to be working with HomeAssistant.

graph LR
    subgraph Internet
        NC([netatmo.com])
    end
    subgraph Home
        Netatmo[(Netatmo Weather Station fa:fa-cloud)]
        HomeAssistant[HomeAssistant fa:fa-house]
        Display[CO2 Display fa:fa-display]
    end

    click Netatmo https://www.netatmo.com/en-gb/weather/weatherstation
    click NC https://my.netatmo.com/
    click HomeAssistant https://www.home-assistant.io/

    Netatmo-->Internet
    Internet-->HomeAssistant
    HomeAssistant-- Wi-Fi -->Display

Find it here: https://github.com/vrusinov/co2_monitors/tree/main/netatmo_esphome_m5stickc_display

How learning is different from fixing

I've started a page where I intend to collect links to various materials that I liked.

Today's addition is John Allspaw's talk Incident Analysis: How Learning is Different Than Fixing. The talk is only about 20 minutes long (the rest are questions and I didn't find that part particularly interesting). In the talk John describes common pitfalls of incident analysis.

A few points that resonated with me:

  • Severity of the incident has nothing to do with how difficult and interesting it was
  • Good postmortems are stories - they use typical story-telling techniques and are interesting to read
  • Often postmortems become box-ticking exercises. Many postmortems are written to be filed, not read. This happens even in pioneering SRE orgs like Google.

Spend 20 minutes of your time, it may be worth it.

House renovation: June 2022

Busy month with no visible progress.

As expected, planning application received no appeals. So we are good to go.

Thus, we are ready for... not construction yet. But for more design work. With more details now. Electrical, mechanical, etc.

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Windfarm walk

There is an interesting walk on the border between Wicklow and Wexford in Ireland. The walk is unusual as it in the windfarm. I didn't have an opportunity to walk under the wind turbine before. It's an interesting experience and it was worth a drive from Dublin.

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House renovation: May 2022

The planning permission is approved.

However even though it's a "clean" approval with no unusual conditions and no protests/submissions, we now need to wait until beginning of June in case there is an appeal.

Flowers

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House renovation: Mar 2022

We show what we plan to do to our neighbours. They seem to be ok with our plans.

Philip prepares and submits planning documents.

I find a piece of wood near bins in our apartment complex and use it to attach planing notice.

Planning

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Running OpenVPN in Kubernetes

(updated )

I condemn Russian invasion to Ukraine. I hope the war ends soon. I wish Ukrainians can take their country back and start rebuilding. I wish there was no more suffering.

There is another, less bloody but still important war happening right now. The informational war between Putin and regular residents of Russia. It's been going on for a really long time but escalated dramatically in the last few weeks. Thousands of people were arrested for participating in anti-war protests. Many, if not all independent news sources were blocked so that Putin can continue spreading lies through the government-controlled channels without facing any criticism. And the sad part is that Putin appears to be winning this war. Many Russians are now brainwashed. I've been watching for years how many of my acquaintances become angrier and more and more radicalized. Thanfully my close friends (those few who are still in Russia) were spared and still have their critical thinking intact. But for how long?

So I've decided to help them and set up a VPN service which will help them to get access to free information.

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