note-to-self

Last week, I did write about resetting my unifi cloud key. The main reason I did gain a renewed interest in the cloud key was because I wanted to add some more fixed IPs to my home network. One of the nice things about the unifi controller software is that it provides a single dashboard interface to manage everything network-related. On the downside, the interface is overall quite limited. While it does offer DHCP (the fixed IPs) in this fashion, it does not offer built-in DNS (e. [Read More]

After my last password issues post, I still had some places for which I didn’t have an easy approach to reset the login. For my local network, I still use a unifi cloud key gen 1, to keep an overview of the network. Cloud key The ubiquiti unifi cloud key is a small client device on the local network, specifically running the ubiquiti unifi controller software. The controller software is there to e. [Read More]

Last Saturday, my new phone arrived in the mail. As a techie, I was naturally delighted to get my new treat up and running. Both my old and my new phone are Android phones and I was surprised to see how (shockingly) easy it was to migrate all my stuff. Not all settings were migrated directly though; mostly passwords would need to be set up again. Since I did use gnu pass + GPG for my password management as described in my previous password management post earlier this year, I figured this would be quite easy to do! [Read More]

I’ve recently bought myself a raspberry pi 400, a small form factor keyboard with a raspberry pi 4 4GB RAM built into it. In hindsight, there are probably very few scenarios in which such a computer makes actually makes sense to me, but it still looks quite nice. I first took it for a spin using the raspberry pi OS that was on the SD card that came along with the set, but while I can acknowledge that it works quite OK out of the box, it just looks so ugly. [Read More]

This is just a list of things to consider when updating my GPG subkeys (encryption, signing, authentication) for the particular setup I use on a daily basis: one master key without any expiry date to generate and revoke subkeys I use pass as my password manager. the basic idea is that it’s a command-line password manager that uses gpg under the hood for encrypting / decrypting the passwords. the passwords are encrypted with an encryption subkey pass allows managing its history with git, linking the storage on a remote gitlab / github server. [Read More]

MQTT is a popular lightweight protocol for use in home automation. If features a central broker where each of the clients can communicate with in a pub / sub fashion. Since I’ve been toying around with some home automation setups, I was curious how to secure it with TLS. Mosquitto The most commonly used broker implementation I have come across is mosquitto and is quite straightforward to setup on most *nix flavors. [Read More]