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Николай Николов

About Николай Николов

https://root.bg/blog

Съпруг,Баща,Блогър,IT

Posts by Николай Николов:

Trip to Albena in February

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Hello and for many years!

Finding a muse to write on the blog in the last 2 years turned out to be quite a difficult initiative for me: /

During the time I did not write here, no interesting things happened. My days were spent mainly at work, playing on the playstation and with the children.

Today I decided to upload here some photos from our walk until Albena last week.

The weather was very nice for February – the sun was shining and it was not very cold, so we decided to change the situation a bit and jump to the sea.

It turned out that many people also decided to do the same and we were not alone.

Next to the “Ganvie” restaurant there was an open shop type “fast food on wheels” which offered hot drinks and something to eat and its owners had taken care of it and had put tables and chairs around it.

The February sun and the empty beach definitely charged us and we will definitely repeat 🙂

Smart Home mission

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Hi,

Before one year, my colleague inspired me to make my home smart (thank you Lyubak! 🙂 ). So I’ve started to experiment and today I can share, that my Smart Home mission is completed.

I want to tell that I did everything myself, and I did not give money to companies that do this service. That’s why I think that anyone with desire and a little experience in Linux can do the same.

I’m using mostly Apple products, but I guess most of this can be done with Android too.

Here are some of the things I can control from my smartphone at home:

  • I can turn on and turn off the heaters from my smartphone (just a normal airelec heaters)
  • I can turn on and turn off the lights (also normal led lights) from my smartphone
  • I can turn on and turn off all TVs (no matter are they smart or not) from my smartphone
  • I can turn on and turn off the internet access to some devices from my smartphone
  • I can allow and deny access to some websites – tiktok, youtube, facebook from my smartphone 😉
  • I can switch from my primary to my backup ISP from my smartphone
  • I can control the air conditioners from my smartphone

мисия "Смарт къща"

All of this can be automated – like every night at X pm all heaters will turn on and on Y pm all lights and TVs will turn off, etc.

 

Of course, these things do not cost thousands of levs, and are made with the help of several devices:

  1. Raspberry Pi
  2. Sonoff
  3. Apple tv/HomePod

Raspberry Pi is used as server with HomeBridge installed. HomeBridge is used to add not apple certified devices to HomeKit and we can control them from smartphone or Siri.

I use Sonoff plugs and switches (pow r2) for my electric devices (TVs, heaters, etc). Sonoff gives me opportunity to switch divices on/off and look at real time what is the power consumption, and with another plugin for HomeBridge I can see graphics of this consumption – it is very cool!

 

Why I need apple tv or HomePod?

Apple TV or HomePod are needed, because they expose our smart home to internet. Without them we cannot access our smart home if we are not at home. In my case I have Apple TV and two HomePods all of them are used for hub to the internet.

In my next posts I will share in details how and what is needed for configuration on our Smart Home mission 🙂

That’s it!

With children at sea – version 2020

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Hello

It’s been almost a year since I wrote on the blog. I’m alive, I’m healthy (thank God), but I seem to have lost motivation to write here: /

Today I will share some photos from my sister’s visit last week. I named the publication “With children at sea – version 2020” as a continuation of “With children at sea” which I wrote in 2017 🙂

The children are already 4 – all girls :))) We went to Albena to the pool with children’s slides and the sea. As always, we had a great time!

Timelapse video

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Hello, Last month with my colleague Andrey start Meteo station for Dobrich town (I will wrote about this next time) – and after this project, we decide to put cameras for timelapse video. Everything needed for timelapse video which I use is :

  1. Cron which downloads snapshots from the camera every 1 minute and saves it with uniq name (date-hour-minute)
  2. Script which merge every picture snapshots in one timelapse video
  3. Script which makes this video faster so we can get 1 minute video for the laste 24 hours

Here’s how things look like:

Cron:

*/1 * * * * root curl -s "http://111.112.111.33:8889/webcapture.jpg?command=snap&channel=1" > "/var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M\%S).jpg"
30 5 * * * root /root/scripts/timelapse.sh &> /dev/null

it’s important to mention that the script that makes the video is starting every morning at 5:30 to catch the sunrise!

Timelapse script:

#!/bin/bash
rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/timelapse.mp4
rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/out.mp4
cd /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/ ; cat *.jpg | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -r 1 -vcodec mjpeg -i - -vcodec libx264 out.mp4 ; ffmpeg -i out.mp4 -vf "setpts=(PTS-STARTPTS)/10" -r 10 ../timelapse.mp4
rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/*.jpg ; rm -f /var/www/cdn.root.bg/weather-pics/*.jpg.webp

To have no cache from the nginx web server, I’ve added a special rule to serve each time to a new one from the cdn timelapse.mp4

location = /timelapse.mp4 {
        # kill cache
        add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt;
        add_header Cache-Control 'no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=0';
        if_modified_since off;
        expires off;
        etag off;
        add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" "*";
        add_header P3P "Can I help you? Contact me via https://root.bg/contacts/, CP=CAO ADMa DEVa IND PHY ONL UNI COM LOC";
}

PS. The version of ffmpeg I use is: 3.4.6 – I had tried before with a new snap installed but did not work as I wanted.

And the result is :

That’s it!

Fix for Java 8 and iDRAC 6 Connection Failed for MacOS

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Hello,

I didn`t write soon (sorry for that).

I use MacOS and often I have to go to old Dell PowerEdge servers that use iDRAC 6, but I got into trouble – Connection Failed.

Fix for Java 8 and iDRAC 6 Connection Failed for MacOS

It turns out that the problem comes from a setting in Java security (SSLv3 has stopped by default – that is, it serves to connect to iDRAC 6).

To enable SSLv3, we need to open the java.security file with the text editor:

sudo vim "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/lib/security/java.security"

and to commend or delete the following two lines:

jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=SSLv3, RC4, DES, MD5withRSA, DH keySize < 1024, \
EC keySize < 224, 3DES_EDE_CBC, anon, NULL

And we can successfully run the iDRAC 6 console and get it done;))

That’s it!

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