Getting balanced ventilation installed

Getting balanced ventilation installed

Our house was first built as a log cabin in 1890, then extended in the 1950s, and again extended and completely renovated in 2000. It’s well insulated, and has no drafts — it seems to be relatively airtight.

Great for keeping the heat in, not so great for the air quality. Add the fact that we didn’t have a single fresh air vent, only those tiny trickle vents above the windows. What you are left with is a house with bad air quality.

So we installed a balanced ventilation system 🙂

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Moving CAT6 cable for access point; inside the wall

Moving CAT6 cable for access point; inside the wall

The first network run I did in this house — was to the hallway access point. It ran along the basement stairwell ceiling, through the basement, and into the home office.

Since I’m already running hidden network cables in the same area, I figured why not hide this one as well 🙂

Invisible cables are the best kind of cables!

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Turning Hugo aliases into AWS S3 redirects

Turning Hugo aliases into AWS S3 redirects

I’m hosting this blog on AWS S3 and Cloudfront. One disadvantage with S3 is that it doesn’t have a simple way of creating redirects — like Netlify, Firebase, or even Nginx.

But there is way; using the AWS CLI, put-object, and the x-amz-website-redirect-location metadata.

Here’s how 👇

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Controlling the Raspberry Pi HDMI port — with MQTT and Home Assistant

Controlling the Raspberry Pi HDMI port — with MQTT and Home Assistant

We have a Raspberry Pi driven digital calendar in the kitchen. I’m currently using crontab to turn the HDMI port off at night, and when we’re at work.

But a much more flexible solution is to control it using MQTT and Home Assistant. That way it can easily be automated to turn on when we’re home, if there is movement in the kitchen, or any number of conditions.

It’s really quite easy to do, here’s how 👇

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Running three CAT6 cables to the living room TV bench

Running three CAT6 cables to the living room TV bench

Ever since we bought the house, last year, I’ve been planning to run wired network to the living room TV and media center — it’s time to finally get that done 🙂

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