I finally managed to get my Home Assistant and ESPHome up and running. That’s awesome. Now we need to involve Azure somehow. But first we actually need another piece of hardware. We need to hook up a temperature sensor! Yeah, let’s start there. Solder on! I bought a sensor called Dallas DS18B20 off of eBay. This sensor needs 3.3 volt, ground and a connection to a data line. The ESP32 has pins for all of this. I used dataline 2…
This could have been the last part of the blog series. But it wasn’t. Thankfully! Just one of those “one step forward, three steps back” kind of things that occasionally happen! I did a lot of config in the previous part. Was it all for nothing? The thing is, I had my Home Assistant running as a Docker container. And it did work for the most part… besides it does not support add-ons when run as a container. And of…
Every company on this earth has it’s own brand, their own style and their own voice. So goes with Microsoft as well. They also have a significant amount of guidelines and an extensive word list and term collection – all available for you to learn and use from! Use the official Writing Style Guide from Microsoft today! Are you using the term folder correctly? Or directory? But, isn’t that the same thing? Not if you ask Microsoft. This is a…
We already have the power! We now need to get my ESP32 micro contoller online and able to connect to the Wi-Fi. There are some components and gotchas along the way of connecting things up. Let me show you… Prepare the infrastructure My plan is to use my installation of Home Assistant in this project. This runs in a docker container, on a Linux VM, running on my local Proxmox host. Since I’ve got a dedicated VLAN for my IoT-devices…
I’m not sure if it’s my elite hacker skillz, or just my wish for better user experiences that drives me to find ways to wash out the lines between your own computer and desktops running in the cloud. Either way, I found this method online that I want to share with you. I will share what my challenge was, how I solved it and what it feels like for the users. The challenge: The thing that always has bugged me…
Let me tell you a little story about a useful tool called Microsoft Secure Score and how one of it’s recommendations led to a crisis by killing off authentication for a Azure File Share… The Story A customer had been using Azure File Share for quite some time as a replacement for a little local NAS. All was good and well. All of the files lived happily in the cloud and no hardware to worry about. All is good! The…
My plan is to make this greenhouse totaly independent with it’s own power. “With great power, comes great responsibility” someone said… And great power comes from the sun, in this case. The introduction to this project can be found here: Greenhouse IoT Project – an app in Teams The setup In order to have some power for this setup I wanted to try out solar power. Sourced some new parts, and some used. Got the solar regulator for cheap second…
But how? On my mobile device? No! In a container, using Docker, Linux, Tmux and AzCopy. Come on, I’ll show you how I do it! The problem Downloading VHDs from Azure can take a lot of time. Especially if they are several hundred gigabytes (or Terabytes!) in size. VHD stands for Virtual Hard Drive, and is essentially a hard disk for virtual machines in the cloud. Why you need to download them may vary, but legal reasons may be one….
Since the dawn of Teams we have had individual Teams, and we have had channels. Some years ago, private channels arrived letting us create channels in Teams that could be seen only for those team members that had been given specific access to it. The drawback here was it could only be visible to existing member members and therefore somewhat limiting it’s use. That meant if you had to share the private channel with a member outside of that team,…
Windows LAPS just recently released to Public Preview. No no, not the old one (legacy Microsoft LAPS: https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=46899). The NEW LAPS. LAPS is an acronym for Local Administrator Password Solution. On Windows-machines there is by default this almighty admin-account that gives you local administrative access to that computer. This can be used in case of emergency where other means of authentication isn’t available, e.g. lost contact with domain controller. But it can also be used for malicious purposes. There are…