glsk

I was upset that close tab (×) and new tab (+) buttons in Firefox didn’t match my current icon theme (Breeze). Thankfully, a workaround is still possible in v.48.

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In this post I want to share some details about my simple low budget smart home system based on 433.92 MHz receiver/transmitter controlled by Arduino. It can be easily extended with many cheap wireless devices, such as door bells, remote sockets, smoke alarms, leak detectors, etc. I’ll describe how to control remote socket, receive alarms from wireless smoke detector and draw a plot of room temperature obtained from regular wired sensor.

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Recently I’ve visited Kanonersky island. While it’s located close to the centre of St. Petersburg, it’s mostly industrial and a huge chunk of it is pretty much a wasteland with occasional garbage piles here and there.

Before Peter the Great decided to build a city here the Finns called it Kissasaari (“cats’ island”). Later it became Kanonersky island after the word “cannoneer”: there was gunpowder storage and training grounds there.

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My old trusty hardtail is still in good shape (with many components changed or upgraded during these 8 years). Yet “M” sized frame seems a little too small for me (I’m 183 cm high) and the promised wonders of full suspension are hard to resist. So I smashed my piggy bank and bought me a Norco Fluid 9.2 (2015).

The weirdest thing about it for me is that it’s a 29er. I was very skeptical about this standard but now that the prices are pretty much the same it’s not an issue any more. Anyway, if there’s any advantage of 29er over 26er, it’s probably too subtle for me to feel.

Which is not the case with rear suspension. It’s amazing and makes a lot of difference, especially on rooty forest trails. The fork (120 mm RockShox XC-32) is a bit of a disappointment though, not feeling any better than coil XC-30 I have on my old bike.

The plan now is to turn my old bike into more city-oriented commuter. Another issue to deal with is dirt. While I pretty much solved the problem on my old bike, it’s a mess on a new one, even with SKS Shockblade II/X-Blade II combo. The rear shock, the bottom bracket, my shoes and feet are covered with dirt after getting into the smallest puddle, and we don’t have many dry days around here.

Bitcoin Core, the “full” Bitcoin client, uses a lot of disk space to store the blockchain. I use GdMap to clean up my SSD and was recently shocked to see how many GBs are occupied by those files. So I decided to join the dark side and switch to a lightweight wallet. There are several of them around of which I chose Electrum. The only trouble I had were my old (donation) addresses that are too much of a hassle to change. I seem to have solved this problem by creating a second wallet in Electrum and here’s how I made it:

First, I imported private keys for all needed addresses from Bitcoin Core. In Debug Console I typed dumpprivkey "<address>" for every address I wanted to keep.

Then, I started up Electrum, selected File — New/Restore and entered all the keys I obtained in previous step. If you do that, pay attention to all warnings and remember to backup this wallet — you won’t be able to recover it with your seed.

After that I was able to use my old addresses to receive and send Bitcoins in Electrum. Minus the gigabytes of blockchain data.

I’ve recently updated my little wallpaper generator app with classic “plasma” effect. For some reason it looks surprisingly well despite of 256-color palette. Also, simple diagonal stripes (á la Material design) were added. The latter are produced by rotating canvas by 45°, drawing horizontal stripes and then rotating back. To prevent cropping the edges, a very big canvas is created initially and this may cause memory problems. Please report any errors.

PS: Yeah, I’ve switched from CyanogenMod 12.1 to some Android 6 ROM in the process. Wi-Fi wasn’t connecting when the screen was off, making Wi-Fi Reminders barely useful, but now all is good on Marshmallow.

PPS: Does the image on the right seems wider to you too? They are actually the same size. :)

It’s finally here. Well, it’s still in beta and invite-only, but it works. Let’s Encrypt will give you free trusted certificate for your HTTPS server and provide an easy script to verify, obtain and renew it.

So far only Apache is fully supported, so if you use NGINX or Lighttpd you’ll have to configure it manually. Which is not a big deal, especially if you were using TLS with self-signed certificate before.

The only trick was that one has to use fullchain.pem for ssl_certificate in NGINX config (possibly the same applies to Lighty). After that the certificate was accepted by all my browsers on both Linux and Android: https://glsk.net.