As the weather is warming up here in Norway — my kids have gotten their bikes out. To make it more fun, both for them and me, I figured I’d build a series of traffic signals that they could play with.

I first started with a traffic light, simple — red, yellow and green. To control it I am using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, this will allow me to make it communicate on Wi-Fi and MQTT later.

One (potential) downside to running public services on your homelab, is that you expose your IP address. That may, or may not, be a problem — but here are ways around it. The simplest way is to put Cloudflare in front, but this will only handle web traffic, and is a bit of a black box.

Another, more hands-on, approach is to use a VPS (or LXC container); WireGuard and iptables. We will create a secure tunnel between the VPS/container and the homelab HAProxy instance, and forward traffic using iptables.

I get emails from readers every now and then — but no topic has caused more interest than the 6-pin fan header on my two Inter-Tech server cases, 4U-4416 and 4U-4129-N.

Perhaps for good reason, it allows for the internal 120 mm fans to be PWM controlled. But is completely undocumented! Let’s have a closer look 😃

I’ve been smoking cigars for about 10 years — in the summer months, when the weather is nice, I usually smoke every evening. I really enjoy the peace and quiet of sitting outside, smoking, pondering and minding my own business.

But cigars are expensive in Norway, and I’m not travelling much these days… So I figured I’d give pipe smoking a try. I have several cigar friends what speaks highly of it — so why not? 😃

I recently got a Namron Zigbee dimmer for our kitchen counter LED strip. It claimed to be compatible with the Philips Hue bridge, and it was 😃