How to Use Octopus Power Ups and Free Electricity Session JSON Objects in Home Assistant Introduction to Octopus Power Ups and Free Electricity Sessions Octopus Power Ups and Free Electricity Sessions don’t currently have official API support. Instead, you’re notified via email a day or so before a session starts,...| whizzy.org
Automating Power Ups Octopus Energy are a UK energy supplier who are more progressive than the rest of the UK providers put together. They provide tariffs for gas and electricity which enable time-of-use based billing which is very useful for people with large battery storage and/or electric vehicles where you...| whizzy.org
Finally the wireframe city Over four years ago Stuart wrote about a twenty year search to track down an old sound sample from the Acorn Archimedes. And today, 20 years two months and one week after this search began, the final (?) chapter of this story is over. A video...| whizzy.org
Late Night Linux Telegram News Bot On the Late Night Linux podcast we talk about goings on in the Linux and Open Source ecosystem. To keep ourselves in sync we have a Telegram group where we share links to interesting articles. Telegram does allow you to see an overview of...| whizzy.org
Using data for fun and profit Electricity prices In the UK wholesale electricity prices are tightly coupled to gas prices. This means that we are currently paying around 40p per kWh, despite wind often providing more electricity than gas. The whole system is fundamentally flawed with little political will to...| whizzy.org
You live and learn. I’d previously stated that I had no interest in learning a new static blog hosting package. I said that if I wanted to create a new blog post I’d simply spin up the old Wordpress VM, write the blog post in the WYSIWYG editor, export it...| whizzy.org
Amazon have made some changes to the (admittedly generous) Alexa AWS credits programme which made me think about the services that I run there and how to reduce my bill a bit. This WP blog was hosted on a t2.micro instance running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and WordPress. You need to...| whizzy.org
In episode 100 of Late Night Linux I talked a little bit about trying out Pi Hole and AdGuard to replace my home grown ad blocker based on dnsmasq and a massive hosts file. I came down in favour of Pi Hole for a couple of reasons but the deciding...| whizzy.org
Background Story With the recent news about the ISP UK association proposing Mozilla as “Internet villain of the year” for enabling DNS over HTTPS (and subsequently changing their mind and dropping the whole category of villain of the year. Good move I think.) I figured it was probably about time...| whizzy.org
Sheesh! Making a wireless sensor has proven to be a lot harder than I had expected. Like a lot of weekend hardware hackers I thought it would be fun to build a wireless temperature sensor. I could use it as a feedback mechanism for my Raspberry Pi heating controller, I...| whizzy.org
It’s clear that a lot of people develop software using Ubuntu. What’s less clear is exactly what sort of software is being built. We see reports of people developing Linux apps, Android apps, web services, self driving cars… the list is huge. We need to get better clarity; to understand...| whizzy.org
Ubuntu Desktop Newsletter I’m going to start a weekly newsletter style update to keep people abreast of what’s been going on with Ubuntu Desktop as we move to GNOME Shell and build the foundations for 18.04 LTS. Here’s the first instalment: Friday 19th May 2017 GNOME We’re on to the...| whizzy.org
In my previous post about How To Add OAUTH to your Alexa app in 10 minutes a couple of people commented that they couldn’t actually access the users information once they had linked their account. I didn’t actually try and access any of the user information because the only user...| whizzy.org
Edit: I heard that Cisco have now removed the SIP firmware from their site. Someone seems to have hosted the files here: http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=44134296078826321023 Edit 2: Looks like the tinyupload file has gone missing too. Try this one: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EBJ-s9TIMKM0JVmZFWRk2bKeGxR9srFv I got a Cisco 7941 off eBay. This is a phone which...| whizzy.org
Alexa smart home skills require you to provide OAUTH2 so that users can authorise a skill to access the assumed cloud service powering their lightbulbs or any number of other pointlessly connected devices. This makes sense since OAUTH2 is a standard and secure way to grant access for users from...| whizzy.org
I posted this to Github, but thought I would mirror it here too. You can download the code from here: https://github.com/8none1/bravialib bravialib A Python library for talking to some Sony Bravia TVs, and an accompanying Alexa Skill to let you control the TV by voice. If you like that sort...| whizzy.org
Preamble As a analytically minded person, is it worth getting Amazon Prime? I signed up yesterday and spent the evening setting up the various services. It was on offer with £20 off, it was the day before The Grand Tour came out, and I recently bought an Amazon Dot –...| whizzy.org
As you’re probably aware Ubuntu 16.10 was released yesterday and brings with it the Unity 8 desktop session as a preview of what’s being worked on right now and a reflection of the current state of play. You might have already logged in and kicked the proverbial tyres. If not...| whizzy.org
TL;DR: There is no such thing as a “none” directive in Apache 2. If you’ve got “deny from none” or “allow from none” then you’re doing DNS lookups on each host that connects regardless of whether you want to or not. I was experiencing a very annoying problem trying to...| whizzy.org
Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights If a device communicates via Bluetooth LE and has an app, it deserves to be integrated into my home automation system. I’ve spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering various budget-friendly LED light strips to...| whizzy.org