Migrating From Ghost to Hugo (Again)
Posted on October 5, 2017
| 5 minutes
| 1011 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
A year ago i migrated from Ghost to Hugo, and about the same time my rate of publishing dropped dramatically. A part of this is because most of my writing is done in small bursts, opening the Ghost editor whenever i have 10-20 minutes. With Hugo this wasn’t really possible (for me), and most of my issues with Ghost (upgrading) became voided by running the official Docker image
Fast forward a year, and Ghost has released version 1.
[Read More]
Graphing Raspberry Pi performance with sar
Posted on August 24, 2017
(Last modified on September 11, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 353 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
As part of monitoring the general health of my Raspberry Pi boxes, i like keeping a historical image of how the load was at a given time. I have real time monitoring in place, which will alert me via Pushover if something goes haywire1, and my surveillance does it’s own checking and alerts (via the same pushover container) if a sensor fails to report within a given period.
I based my graph generating script on the one described here, though the memory calculation in that script is not what i wanted, and this being a memory restricted platform, i also wanted to monitor swap in/out.
[Read More]
Raspberry Pi Sense Hat
Posted on November 24, 2016
(Last modified on May 20, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 284 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently acquired a Sense Hat, and despite not having much use for it, i decided to have some fun and learning a little along the way.
The hardware The Sense-hat is a little Hat for Raspberry Pi’s that contains a bunch of sensors, along with a small 8x8 RGB LED Matrix. It contains the following sensors:
Gyroscope Accelerometer Magnetometer Temperature Barometric pressure Humidity Along with the hardware, there’s an official Sense-Hat Python library available.
[Read More]
There and back again
Posted on April 25, 2016
| 5 minutes
| 1043 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
A tale of switching blogging platforms
Preface I started this blog when i got a “free” Raspberry Pi hosted by the nice people at PCExtreme. Originally this blog was using Octopress because of the limited power provided by the Raspberry Pi and while it was never meant to be a high volume blog, i felt that static pages were the least CPU intensive.
As time went by, i became increasingly more and more annoyed with the way Octopress was “a part” of my blog, and updating it involved pulling things from git and rebasing.
[Read More]
Scheduling lights with Philips Hue and a Raspberry Pi
Posted on November 13, 2015
(Last modified on December 22, 2015)
| 4 minutes
| 747 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Up until a few weeks ago, i’ve been using IFTTT for controlling various automated light tasks.
The lights i want to control are mostly outdoor lights, turning on at dusk, and off again at sunrise. I also automatically tone the light down and into a slight more red color in the kids rooms around bedtime, and in the living room a wee bit later :)
IFTTT works, but is not very punctual.
[Read More]
Monitoring temperatures with a Raspberry Pi.
Posted on June 26, 2015
(Last modified on September 3, 2015)
| 4 minutes
| 744 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I recently got into a discussion about dogs, kennels and temeratures. I have a German Shepherd, and he has a nice insulated dog house in his kennel, and the discussion was along the lines, how much heat does it take to warm up the doghouse, if it gets hotter than the outside at all.
Now, a normal person would have solved this by putting a wireless meat thermometer in the doghouse, made a few readings of it with/without the dog, and compare it to the outside temperature.
[Read More]
Sending notifications with MQTT and Pushover.net
Posted on February 16, 2015
(Last modified on April 15, 2015)
| 2 minutes
| 416 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I’ve improved a bit on my Pushover.net setup, described in this previous article.
I started using MQTT, namely the Mosquitto broker for sending data to/from my machines, instead of the old point-to-point setup i was using.
MQTT provides publish/subscribe, with messages up to 256MB each. It also features QoS, ranging from 0 - which basically just means the message was sent on the network, to 2, where you have guaranteed delivery of messages to the broker.
[Read More]
Realtime login monitoring, Part 2
Posted on January 24, 2014
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 636 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
My original script for monitoring had a few issues. While it worked really well for the actual push notifications, it didn’t seem to be able to survive log files being rotated.
I initially settled for a solution where I just scheduled a restart of my service every night after the logfiles rotated, but i hate loose ends, so I rewrote the script, this time using inotify instead of just calling “tail -F” in a subprocess.
[Read More]
Realtime login monitoring with Pushover
Posted on September 9, 2013
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 5 minutes
| 939 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
See Part 2.
My previous article was about securing your Raspberry Pi and having it alert you via email whenever something suspicious occurred. This time I’m taking it a step further, and adding real time push notifications whenever somebody logs in via ssh.
For delivering the notifications I’m using Pushover, which is a generic push service, with clients for both iOS and Android. The app isn’t free, but once you purchase it, the service is free up to 7500 messages per app, per month, which is more than enough for this purpose.
[Read More]