Posts published by: Alejandro Liu

Python Development 2023


Python development on Windows

For windows, you can use WinPython. I prefer to use this instead of …

Raspberry Pi emulation with Qemu

The idea here is that we use a Desktop PC for developing/debugging Raspberry Pi set-ups using qemu for emulating Rasperrby Pi.

qemu currently supports the following configurations:

  • Raspberry Pi Zero and 1A+ (armhf)
  • Raspberry Pi 2B (armv7)
  • Raspberry Pi 3A+ (aarch64)
  • Raspberry Pi 3B (aarch64)
    • This is the version …

Home Assistant Wall Panel

For a while I was using TabletClock with old tablets. But this has not been updated in a while. I was thinking of writing my own version until I found WallPanel.

Essentially it is purposely built web-browser with special features which makes it possible to use it to replaces TabletClock …

RDP vs VNC

For years I have been using VNC for my remote desktop needs. This works usually well enough. The features that I like are:

  • Basic set-up is easy
  • Desktop sessions are persistent
  • Can be used to view an actual X11.org desktop.
  • Browser based clients via noVNC or Guacamole

On the …

QNAP Snapshots

I wrote a small tool to access QNAP snapshots from the Linux command line.

Pre-requistes:

  • Snapshots have to be enabled
  • You need a /share/netcfg containing the file:
    • In my case, I set this share as read-only with root-squash.
    • `admin.yaml' : contains the private/public keys and the configuration of …

Docker on Void

This is a quick recipe to run Docker on void:

  • Make sure your system is up-to-date:
    • sudo xbps-install -Syu
  • Install docker executables:
    • sudo xbps-install -S docker
  • Check if docker was installed properly:
    • docker --version
  • Enable services:
    • sudo ln -s /etc/sv/containerd /var/service
    • sudo ln -s /etc/sv/docker …

Home Assistant Behind Reverse Proxy

To set-up a reverse proxy I took the following steps:

  • configure DNS
  • get Letsencrypt certificates
  • Configure NGINX
  • Configure Home Assistant to trust the proxy

At the time of this writing I can't really confirm if the reverse proxy configuration for home assistant is working as I can't tell what IP …

Looking up docker image tags

This recipe is to check the tags defined for a specific Docker image in docker.hub.

The basic API is at https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2

So the format is as follows:

https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/{namespace}/{image}/tags/

Where:

  • namespace : usually is the user account …

Home Assistant Large Clock

This recipe is my version of providing a "large clock" face in the home assistant dashboard.

Enable serving local static files:

  • Create directory www in your config directory.
  • Restart home assistant.
  • Static files are now available as http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/.

Place the HTML with your clock in a …

Moving to Home Assistant

I am busy moving away from my VeraEdge installation to a Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 4. This is because it looks like the maker of the VeraEdge was bought and it is slowly being phased out.

For this I am using the following parts:

Linux HDMI hotplug

The point of this article is to document I workaround that I came up with to handle a HDMI KVM switch.

What happens is that if my Linux PC is turned on while the KVM switch is selecting the other PC, it fails to initialize the display, so when you …