GODFREY.ONLINE

Making a Dumb Dehumidifier Smart! Adventures with UART and ESP-32

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:28:19 +0100

Preface

So, I live in a fairly damp London home. We try and run a dehumidifier reguarlly but we have diffrent rates of electric. So natrually, I wanted to mess around with it and see if I could hook it up to home assistant…

I was orignally planning just to connect up to a button on the controller board but it used some dumb touch sensors which are just a pain to deal with. I also wanted the humidity reading for my home assistant dashboard. So I decided to find another way!

Transmission through Wireguard on Docker Compose

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 15:23:43 +0100

Preface

I’ve wanted to setup transmission on my server for a while. I just wanted to make sure no one could see the linux iso’s I was downloading. I’ve tried before but for some reason always struggled. I mean I had it working a few years ago but that was without docker. Now I have a little bit of a diffrent approch. I want to talk about that today.

Introduction

Torrenting over a VPN is fairly simple, it is the seeding that is the problem. Lots of VPN services either block outright the ability to see or open a random port that you have to figureout and add to your client. The worst part, it changes when you restart the VPN. So… how do I go about fixing that? I will be using the LSIO container for transmission. LSIO has the amazing ability to run “Private Custom Services”. This allows you to run a script along side what ever service is starting. So lets start some of the configs and scripts.

Adding Comments to your Hugo Blog using Mastodon

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:35:50 +0100

Introduction

Recently, I posted about a new blog artical on Mastodon and got a response which made me think maybe I should add comments to the articals I am writing. Now I didn’t just want to add some random box that anyone can post in, rather I wanted to display any comments I get Mastodon on my website.

One thing to note, I am using Hugo with the PaperMod theme. This guide will be dependent on PaperMod as it has a built in way to add comments, it might work on other themes but you will need to check.

Deploying K8s on Xen-Orchestra/XCP-NG with Terraform and Ansible

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 10:40:05 +0100

Preface

A little while ago I wrote a guide on how to deploy a k8s stack using Terraform and Ansible on a XCP-NG host runnign Xen Orchestra. While I think the guide was OK, I did cut quite a few corners on it and I want to put that right. Also, I was working ok K8s stuff again and wanted something that was a little easier to re-deploy, just incase I messed something up real bad. Like setting the pods network to my home network’s subnet causing the servers to stop responding… Doh.

DIY Smart Lights - Part Two!

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Preface

Firstly, this isn’t a guide and if you don’t know how to be safe with mains electronics then I do not recommend trying this your self. Electric is dangerous and if dealt with improperly can hurt or even kill you.

If you missed the previous post about this topic, you can find it HERE.

Ok, this took me a little longer to get to than I wanted, but I have now completed my desk lamp and my partner’s desk lamp. While small victories, it can be really useful. I no longer have to get up to turn off my desk lamp when I am on the couch, nor do I have to reach round the back of my desk to turn it off. When I don’t want to open home assistant to turn on a light, though, it is supper easy to use the switch as normal. With my partner’s lamp, I had to make two custom models which I will go into a little more detain on.

K8s Homelab Load Balanceing with MetalLB

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Preface

In this article I am not going to be going through all the ports you need to configure on your firewalls, for ease of following this guide I recommend disabling the firewall. That being said, you should never do that for production! I want to focus on the k8s stuff here, so decided to skip this for the sake of brevity.

Flannel Setup

First we are going to set up the network stack. There are lots of different choices, but I went with Flannel due to the ease of setup. You just need to apply the file from the URL. If you want to change the default subnet from 10.244. 0.0/16 you will need to download the file first and edit it. That being said, for most people that shouldn’t be required.

Fags Bash Back

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:53:55 +0100

Danger Men Working!

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:42:14 +0100

Good head

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No No

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

X230 Forced to Finish, OwO

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After a long time of leaving my beloved Thinkpad X230 in a draw I was forced to bring it back out. Since the political changes in the USA, me and my partner thought it best to leave our personal devices at home and bring wiped ones. Also, I wanted to run the open-source BIOS replacment HEADS, so like two birds one stone. My x230 was the perfect fit! I dusted it off and hit that power button, after realising it was dead on battery and plugging it in, it just powered up! Fans spun up, and the screen… well. If you have read my previous X230 blog post you will know originally I had issues getting it to work reliablly. It did work for a while but eventially just died on me.

Don't Replace your Lights with Smart Lights - DIY Smart Light

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:12:13 +0100

Smart lamps are expensive and there are very few out there! Throwing smart bulbs in might be great but when someone turns off the light at the switch it makes them useless. Since starting the home automation adventure, I have wanted to find a relatively cheap solution to this problem. Armed with a 3d Printer and some Shelly 1 Plus devices, I think I have found the solution.

Lets start with a warning though, this is a fairly simple process, but you will be touching mains electronics… if you mess up you could have 240v running through you. That can seriously hurt you or even kill you. While I will be walking through the process, this is not intended to be a guide and I take no responsibility for any harm or injury. I am just an idiot with no respect for my own safety.

Plausible Analytics PHP Proxy for Shared Hosting Environments + Hugo integration.

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:51:40 +0000

Plausible is a fairly simple analytics company. Unlike google, which takes every scrap of data they can, plausible respects their customer’s visitors. They are an open-source and affordable provider. I started using them recently to see who is visiting my site and from where. The only problem most of the people that go to my site are nerds like me… so they run an ad-block. Most ad-blockers unfortunately block plausible.

Automate k8s deployment with Terraform and Ansible on XCP-NG (Rocky Linux/RHEL Based distributions)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 13:10:18 +0000

DON’T USE THIS GUIDE

I wrote this a little while ago, in a bit of a rush and have since updated it. You can follow basicly the same guide HERE

In this guide, I will show you how to automate the deployment of k8s on a XCP-NG server. We will use Terraform and Ansible to deploy and configure the hosts.

This guide still largely applies to other distributions of Linux, the main section you would have to change is the adding the repos and installing the packages. You will need to find the repos and the package names might be slightly different. If you search for Ansible repo/package management for your distribution, you should find it with little issue.

Why Deplatforming will never fix the problem

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:30:30 +0100

A quick side note, this was a artical I started writing back in Febuary last year when returning from Fosdom 24. I have worked on it since some about but this is more a capsual of what my brain was thinking and isn’t a complete argument. There is lots more I want to say on the matter which I maybe will someday. For now, I thought I may as well post it.

Means TV RSS

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 12:32:13 +0000

Means.tv rss feed

Another service which dosen’t provide a rss feed… so I ended up creating one. The git repo is below and you can find a list of all the creators feeds (including floatplane): godfrey.online/rss

For means.tv I generate Atom, json and standard RSS feeds.

Git repo

Vim Notes

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just a simple vim notes file. Nothing of much intrest but I want to be able to refere to this and it might be a bit useful?

Tabs

:tabe (file) This will open a new tab.
gt is next tab
gT is for previous tab

Splits

CTRL-w + HJKL Movements around splits.
CTRL-w + V Vertical split of the same type as you are on already
CTRL-w + < Resize split to the left. Though it only moves it a little, you will need to change that in the config
CTRL-w + > Resize split to the right (same as above)

Thinkpad X230 QHD MOD and Lots More (A brain dump)

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This artical was written a long time and left in a very uncomplete state. I still need to add links but I thought I would post it otherwise I will never post it. Please excuse the state this is in. I have since moved onto a framework and then a surface tablet since I completed this mod.

My thinkpad is now dead, the screen flickering returned. I have a feeling this is because the cable died. These modes can be very unraliable, they are attaching to parts of the machine that were not ment for a 2k screen. They rely on hacking the bios to trick it into displaying only out of a docking port. Also, the parts will not be QC’ed as well. This can leave the hardware in a very unreliable state.

Why I love RSS (Move away from Youtube!)

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:56:22 +0000

AUDIO VERSION

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Introduction

I am guessing you probably are the sort of person that checks YouTube for your video needs, twitter for news articles you might like and so on. I was once like that and I didn’t see any problem at all with it. Honestly, I liked it… Check one place for when I want videos and one where I follow along with what is going on in the world.

Better Floatplane RSS

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some time ago, I created an RSS feed for Floatplane using bash scripting. Initially, all the channels were combined into a single feed. However, I have recently rewritten the script in Golang and made it accessibe on my site link.

The updated version of the RSS feed now includes several enhancements. These include image thumbnails, channel icons, and separate listings for channels with sub-channels.

PGPP: A hack on the broken and privacy invading network?

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 18:12:57 +0100

PGPP is a new mobile carrier that aims to provide increased user privacy and security. It is designed to use already existing infrastructure with clever techniques that reduce the usefulness of the 3 main tracking tools used by carriers. This project is intended to hamper bulk data collection, but does not claim it would withstand a targetted attack from a state actor. This is because a state actor could and probably would have full visibility of the network.

We have TOR support, and you can too!

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 10:21:52 +0100

OUTDATED! I have not intention or want to update this. The bellow is basicly ripped strait from the tor site but I thought I would rehash the apache stuff. This is basicly just me announcing that my site is now avalible through tor. I have also configured apache to put a coustom header that displayes on the tor browser that my website is avalible via tor. If for any reason I lose my domain, my words are still avalible there. Happy reading!

RSS Floatplane

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 21:32:23 +0100

EDIT: this is now old! Please refere to my newer blog post. I created a simple script that exports both LTT and Level 1 Tech RSS feeds for floatplane. Please feel free to use it. Just to be clear this gives no access to any video’s with out a subscription.