Geek. Beard.
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Introduction
A bit about me and where I see this site going. I’m Jeff (he, him). I live in the tri-state area of KY, OH, and WV. I’m happily married to my beautiful wife of 10+ years, Tiffany. Between us we have three beautiful children – Rhiannon, Shandi, and Isaac as well as our four legged…
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Whos who and wheres where? Presence Detection
This article will cover multiple technologies for detecting people and pets in places. It involves bluetooth, esp32 microcontroller/SOC, home assistant, MQTT, and mmWave radar sensors. The smart home is an ever evolving, ‘living and breathing’ thing. Or at least, it should be. New technologies add functionality previously never thought possible. I remember tinkering with x10…
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Time Management
Ever find yourself wasting minutes, or even hours doom-scrolling through social media? That was me and it had been getting worse to the point where I felt like it was taking away from things I needed or wanted to be doing. Been working slowly on a few things for a while now but decided near…
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Behemoth Server Exit Path
I built my current server circa 1Q2019. It’s a Dell PowerEdge R720. Equipped with 2x Intel E5-2680 2.7GHz 16C Processors, 128gb of ECC Ram, and presently populated with 2x Raid 1 Mirrored Sata SSD 120gb drives for image storage, 2x Raid 1 Mirrored Sata SSD 1TB drives for sysvol, and a JBOD array of 4x10TB…
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Home Assistant Upgrade
Well…it’s been a while. I’ve been mulling on several projects, researching, taking lots of notes, watching ebay auctions for just the right pieces… One of those projects is to upgrade/overhaul my home automation. It is a disparate wasteland of many different vendors, protocols, topologies, etc. I need something to organize this mess! Enter – Home…
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LED Under Cabinet Lighting Upgrade
I installed simple single color “white” LED’s under the cabinets/island in our kitchen around ~2017. They were 12v, and using home automation to switch a smart outlet the power supply was plugged into, they came on at dusk and off at dawn. No frills. They worked, mostly. There was a short in one of the…
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Password best practices
Every week in the news there’s a report of a data breach of a website: exposing personally identifying information (PII), financial details like credit cards, bank accounts, etc, and passwords. The matter is further compounded when most folks use the same password for many different things. As such, even if the data breach was for…
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NFC Tags/Automation
I’ve recently started playing with NFC tags for automation, and the possibilities are as vast as your imagination. I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface, but already I can see the potential. I suffer from IBD and as such my doctor(s) will often want to know how my symptoms have been, if any particular…
Do you know something I cannot live without knowing?