Friends: this morning while I was performing my ablutions, my kettle turned on - and by the time I reached the kitchen, there was boiling water ready for my coffee. How did I get here? Of all my projects that get sidelined and take forever to complete, is 13 years a record? Why can't I stop grinning from ear to ear even with no-one else around?
In part one of Kettle Quest, I explained my reasons for wanting kettle automation and some of the early solutions I had explored to reach my goal. In part two I found an off-the-shelf product in Weekett that promised me a ready-made solution, but turned out to be a huge disappointment that has defrauded thousands of consumers by turning their smart kettles dumb.
In part one of Kettle Quest, I explained why I wanted a smart kettle and shared my disjointed journey trying to make a dumb kettle smart. After years of compromises and half-solutions, in 2024 I finally found a kettle marketed as being inherently smart and connected out of the box.
It's a momentous day for me here, as I think a 13-year quest is finally at an end, and soon I won't be waiting for the kettle to boil every morning, or turning it on with a finger like a pleb. But this has been a long, long quest, so please indulge me for part 1, where I reflect for a moment on my journey to get here.
I've started working on implementing a controller for Paxton readers. I have a KP50 (Net2 fob reader and PIN pad) and it comes with an RJ45 plug attached. There's no documentation I can find about the pinout, so here's what I've figured out.
After a four-year enforced pandemic-based hiatus, we were back for our latest installment of EMF in June with nearly 2,750 people on site. Back at Eastnor Castle deer park again this year, we were able to use the street cabinet and fibre around the field that we installed in 2018 to get up and running quickly once we arrived on site.
In a world where FTP has finally been turned off by most ISPs, Wordpress allegedly supports SSH2 for upgrades instead, using FS_METHOD ssh2. However it fails to work in any real-world scenario because it assumes the filesystem paths on the remote host are the same as on the local filesystem.
This obviously fails with pretty much any ISP on earth as the users are chroot()ed, so a directory that was once perhaps /home/david/www.davidc.net would in fact be just /www.davidc.net when accessed over SFTP.
This script allows you to check virtual users' Maildir sizes compared with the quota, and produces a simple list of addresses that are overquota, which can be used for example by mail delivery agents to reject incoming messages when the user is overquota.
Computerphile interviewed me about the EMF temporary network that we build up in a field for the festival and tear down the next week. You can watch the interview on YouTube!
I seem to be spending a lot of my time recently hacking around RouterOS bugs. Here's a script that monitors the state of the PPP interface for a GSM modem and does what it can to get it back up and running if necessary.
The script checks three times (10 seconds apart) to see if the PPP interface is connected. If it still isn't, it resets the USB power to try and kick the communication back to life. It waits 30 seconds after doing this then, if it's still not up for two more checks, it reboots the whole Routerboard.