Background| Peter Hicks' Blog
After being inspired by Piotr Przybyl‘s talk about integration testing, I started off a new project with some thorough testing of a Spring Boot JAR. Software development is full of obscure problems, and when uploading an object to an emulated Amazon S3 service using LocalStack, I kept getting the error: Not the most helpful error … Continue reading "Fixing ‘host must not be null’ with LocalStack and AWS S3 Client"| Peter Hicks' Blog
macOS Ventura has been released. I use my Mac Mini far less than I do my MacBook Pro, so I decided to upgrade without a fresh install, something I very rarely do. Surprisingly, the only casualty of the upgrade was Microsoft Defender, which came up with a warning triangle and a suggestion I click ‘Fix’, … Continue reading "Microsoft Defender and macOS Ventura"| Peter Hicks' Blog
In the past few weeks, I’ve been actively looking at how I can manage all my ‘smart’ (or ZigBee/WiFi connected) IoT devices in my home from a central place. I started with Home Assistant, but quickly found the user interface a bit too clunky for my appetite. Searching around, openHAB came up as a good … Continue reading "Automating your home with openHAB"| Peter Hicks' Blog
I recently posted about real-time data from your smart meter and all was good, but then thread by Robin Hawkes on Twitter caught my eye: These devices connect to your WiFi network and allow you to switch a connected device on or off, on a schedule if you require, and also monitor power consumption. That … Continue reading "Monitoring your appliances’ power"| Peter Hicks' Blog
I’m a long-time user of Slack. Many of my customers use it, and we share channels to exchange information and work better together. I’m also a member of a number of other Slack workspaces for various projects. The Linux app is great, with one exception – it’s very heavy on logging: I don’t want my … Continue reading "Slack’s verbose logging on Linux"| Peter Hicks' Blog
A year or two ago, I took the plunge and had a smart meter installed. I naively thought that being able to read energy usage was a simple case of connecting a ConBee-II or similar to the ZigBee HAN. To save anyone else from going through the same range of emotions as I did, here’s … Continue reading "Real-time Smart Meter data"| Peter Hicks' Blog
If a webpage tells you to run a command to import a GPG key when setting up an APT repository, it isn’t necessarily correct! Newer versions of Ubuntu no longer use apt-key and /etc/apt/trusted.gpg, preferring you put repository GPG keys in a file under /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d. Having recently reinstalled my desktop and not realising this, I … Continue reading "Working around ‘Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg)’"| Peter Hicks' Blog
Once again, I’ve spent far too long trying to work out how the heck to get a LetsEncrypt X.509 certificate on to the HPE Integrated Lights-Out 5 board. To save me some time in three months, and to save you some time since you’re already here, the instructions are really straightforward. Be aware that this … Continue reading "Installing a LetsEncrypt certificate on an HPE iLO 5"| Peter Hicks' Blog
After leaving the networking industry in 2013, I decided to replace the Cisco network equipment at home with Mikrotik for reasons of cost and power. Twelve years later, I’ve ditched Mikrotik and moved to Ubiquiti for some solid reasons.| Peter Hicks' Blog