Category: misc

Optimizing ESP8266/ESPHOME for battery power (and making an ice bath thermometer as well)

It’s been a long while I wanted to check for how long can an esp8266 with esphome last on a battery supply. Yet I didn’t have a reason to get it done. Time to fix that and add yet another battery optimization manual for ESP8266 to the internets.

And what’s the big reason? The story is simple. I decided to try ‘cold water immersion’ practice and make it a habbit.Yep, not the cold showers, but true hardcore ‘CWI’. I started back in summer when it was hot as hell and went all the way through to November. The weather gradually lowered the water temperature for me from ‘ah, cool and nice’ to ‘Awh shit this is cold!11’. Ideally that would become a habit.

However in November I had to pause that for a few weeks. And that meant the only thing: I had to start over again. And since the weather isn’t helping me any more, I’d have to take care and gradually decrease the temperature myself.

The first idea was to just order a dumb water thermometer. But why order when you have all the parts in stock and can just build one? And with cool features!

Hard as a rock, dumb as a brick (c)
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Distributing python apps for windows (and dealing with the pain)

Even though I’m mostly a linux user, I sometimes have to deal with windows (and, heck, well even mac sometimes). And not only to fire up steam and relax playing some game or wandering in VR worlds (unfortunately).

So this time I had to deal with distributing a python app that should be available for windows users as well. And windows, just as it usually happens, was a huge pain. At this moment on would ask – why not just use pip? And there goes the long read.

Потому что какую-то картинку воткнуть надо было…
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Getting rid of telemarketing, Pt. 1

Frequent calls from telemarketers, spam and espionage – these are the main reasons I try to use the loyalty cards and other stuff, and if I have to – tend to have a long chat about how much I do NOT want to receive any calls/messages or ‘super special deals’. However, it doesn’t stop many telephone spammers. I have to admit, I understand how miserable wok in such a call center might be, when nine out of ten people you call tend to explode and shout on you. However, there’s always a chance the call would be so inconvenient, that it will make you go nuts.

Anyways, I decided to deal with those folks using some of my dark tech magic. If successful, the plan would not only ward off any spam, but also give me an everlasting supply of pure fun. I made an IVR for all the incoming calls and put it on a dedicated number I now began to willingly share. If you want to learn the details of setting up your very own Asterisk/FreePBX server that will handle GSM calls for you with some advanced features, this post has all the details.

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Linux gaming with P106-100

Here’s what I got from taobao

This post contains a small guide on how to play games and run other graphics payloads using a dirt-cheap NVIDIA P106-100 (Which is a mining-only version of NVIDIA GTX1060 that you can get for less than 100$) in Linux in (optionally) virtualized environment, making it a nearly perfect solution for a headless gaming server. Yep, simple (or not) as that.

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LineageOS + Magisk adventures

I use LineageOS and Magisk root (A magic tool that help Android Pay and root access coexist). With Lineage you can receive updates every week on monday (for my Oneplus 5T) and so far they’ve been really stable. All was good until the last update of may bricked my cellphone. As it turned out Lineage build was perfectly fine, the bug was with Magisk (Once I removed it and flashed the update – everything worked, except for Magisk). In this blog post I’ll tell about Magisk’s epic fail, and will provide a link to fixed Magisk version that doesn’t turn your phone into a pumpkin brick.

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Social networks integration test

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything in my blog so many of you might’ve thought that I’ve abandoned it. Well, on the contrary, I decided to put a little more life in it, so I will be posting way more tech tips here. And, since apparently there’s no other way, I’ve set up social integration for this blog. For now – only twitter and vkontakte. This is basically a test post to see if everything works as expected.

Do not expect me to answer any friend request/private message/retweet whatsoever. If you really want to contact me – email is still the best option. Why? Because it took 5 minutes since registration on vk for first spammers to start doing their dirty work: .

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rf24boot: A universal over-the-air bootloader for all those uCs

Apparently I’ve come up to a point, when I want to do firmware upgrades for my home automation ‘over-the-air’. Since I’m using nRF24L01 dongles, I decided to write a bootloader for that.
While my pet antares project is slowly progressing towards the 0.2-rc2 release (honestly, really slowly), I’ve added the nice and shiny RF24 library (A port of maniacbug’s arduino library to pure C with no arduino dependences) to interface with nrf24L01 2.4Ghz dongles. I also fixed a few nasty race conditions out there on the way, but those are totally a different story.
So, what’s inside:

snapshot15
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Solidoodle & Arch linux

Okay, it’s been a while since I got my nice & shiny 3d printer from solidoodle. A few people have asked, so there go a few tips, to make the software up running on Arch Linux. I’ll be posting a detailed review sometime later, since I’m kind if buried under the ongoing projects.


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