This is a Digital Photo Frame that is built using a Raspberry Pi 5, a screen, and Home Assistant. I don't have a flattering picture of everything setup and installed because we never found a good place in the house for it. A picture of one of the first iterations …

Table of Contents

• Story
• Findings
• Recommendations

Story of My Quest to Find the Perfect Sensor

When I first started with home automation, everything was wired. Results were fast, installation was long. Now days, much of it is wireless. So of course I decided to use wireless for two projects. (1 …

This is my experience with a Samsung Q90T 2020 TV running Tizen Operating System (OS). I can't say it is a very good Smart TV but the picture is nice. It's riddled with privacy and stability issues. I just hope it works as a dumb TV someday because I don't …

I wanted some plant sensors and discovered the MiFlora bluetooth moisture sensors. I did some reasarch and discovered I could connect them to Home Assistant using ESPHome and an ESP32. This sounded like a great idea.

I ordered some on aliexpress and waited. Once the sensors arrived, I got everthing …

This is a followup to getting an indoor air quality sensor setup in my house and to review the results from using a MERV 12 and 14 air filter.

If you wish to see my first blog post about this, see here.

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First I'll start out with the MERV 14 …

9/13/2020 UPDATE: I …

Originally I was going to do this as a video, but here we go!!!

If you're new to pfSense and want to get into more advanced features but could use some tips so you don't stumble, this might be for you. I'm going to cover some of the good things …

I have never managed an open-source project. I have only been a contributor and user. I have used many open-source projects and have managed many IT projects.

I'm going to outline some of my ideas here which I believe are the most important factors to foster and develop a project …

Recently my alarm kept triggering and I couldn't figure out why. I first figured out which motion sensor was causing it. That helped a bit, but not enough. I then boosted up the logging and discovered (1) it happened very rarely when nobody was home and (2) also around the …

After being down for almost a year, we're back! This is no longer brendon.com, it's brendon.net!

Wordpress has been updated thanks to wp-cli. I can't believe this thing want's FTP enabled to auto-update!

I setup a home automation system in my house and it runs from the cloud. Yup, you read that correctly. I do understand a lot of "home automation" now runs from the cloud but my definition of home automation isn't Hue, Smarthome, Nest, or one of the other half-baked systems …

I was asked by Packt Publishing to give the book Mastering Zabbix a review. It's by Andrea Dalle Vacche and Stefano Kewan Lee, copyright 2013.

I found it most interesting to see what topics they covered as the book title states, "Mastering Zabbix" vs. not covered. Many things I've done …

Original Posting and Script

This is an updated script to install Zabbix 2.2.x on CentOS/Red Hat 6. I have tested it on CentOS 6.5. The script was made for Zabbix 2.2.1, but if you modify the ZBX_VER variable in the script, it should work …

Yes, we all know iTunes sucks, but some of us are stuck with it. Anyway, I was receiving an error like "iTunes Library file cannot be saved not enough memory". I didn't save the exact error, I should have.

Anyway, I loaded up process monitor and noticed a lot of …

Update: This has been updated for 2.2.x. Follow this link.

Original Posting and Script

This is an updated script to install Zabbix 2.0.x on CentOS/Red Hat 6. I have tested it on CentOS 6.2. The script was made for Zabbix 2.0.1, but …

There have been many times I have needed to run NTOP on a Debian host and got it working, but never set it up 100% correctly. Usually I'd get NTOP working and configured and by that time I was too anxious to wrap it up. I'd modify /etc/rc.local …

This is about my experience with OS X from my perspective -- don't forget, everyone's different. This all took place over a little more than a year.

Chapter 1 - Introduction to Mac

About a year ago I purchased a MacBook Air and was excited to get it up and running and …

Not so fast folks!

As always, we're trying different things. I recently used some older parts and created a Server with 2.6.39 (Debian) that has a 3ware card and a Btrfs filesystem. LVM was placed on top of the 3ware partition and then Btrfs was put on top …

Update: This has been updated for 2.2.x. Follow this link.

Original Posting and Script

This is an updated script to install Zabbix 1.8.x on CentOS/Red Hat 5. I have tested it on CentOS 5.4. The script was made for Zabbix 1.8.0, but …

As I see it, its not possible to exclude .svn directories from Windows Search. At least not in Windows 7. Before Windows 7, I was using Copernic to index my data, but I thought I'd give the Microsoft solution a try. Hours later after modifying the registry and group policy …

A project I was recently involved with was basically revamping a failing Backup system due to the environment outgrowing Symantec Backup Exec. The environment was mostly UNIX. Backups were inconsistent and a lot of administration and babysitting had to occur for a good set of tapes to get ready for …

Recently I attended The Landmark Forum and had a very positive experience. Luckily, I took the advice of my friend to take the class and did ZERO research before signing up. If I had done some research, I think I would have NOT signed up. I believed his word that …

Update: This has been updated for 1.8.x. Follow this link.

I was following the Zabbix forums and people are constantly having problems installing Zabbix.

To make things easier, I wrote a magic install script for CentOS/Red Hat 5. I have tested it on CentOS 5.2.

Basically …

As of this writing, Etch is the current "stable" version of Debian.

This is how to install Zabbix!

1. Add an unstable deb-src repository to your sources.list. If you have problems later, make sure the following deb-src line is the only deb-src line in your sources.list file.

   echo "deb-src …

Box Backup specs:

• Server: UNIX (probably Linux), with a lot of hard disk space
• Clients: UNIX or windows. Clients can be configured as lazy (CDP) or snapshot mode

What it does well:

• File level backups from UNIX or Windows hosts

What it doesn't do:

• Application level backups such as MS …

About a year ago, a client needed a NetApp (NFS server), but the IPO wasn't there yet, and the startup's balance sheet was still in the Red. Needless to say after a few trials, we ended up with Open-E DSS because of budget constraints.

Oh what a roller-coaster it has …

I'm constantly online reading, writing, and more reading. When I have a problem I'm trying to solve, I start googling. I start skimming the search results, weeding out the bogus entries in my head. We all know that a URL says a lot about the quality of the search result …