
How to Secure a Python Project Against Supply Chain Attacks: Dependabot, pip-audit, and Branch Protection
I built a small Python TUI to help manage power consumption on my aging Dell laptop. The battery is at 37% health - 18,992 mWh left from a 51,999 mWh design capacity - and the Windows power settings are buried three menus deep. Nothing complicated: a couple of hundred lines using Textual and psutil, showing real-time discharge rates from WMI and letting me cap the CPU speed without clicking through Settings every time. ...

Visualising Temperature and Humidity in Home Assistant with Mini Graph Card
Home Assistant’s built-in history graph and gauge cards get the job done, but they’re fairly plain. Mini Graph Card by kalkih is one of those HACS cards that immediately makes your dashboard look like something you’d actually want to show people - dynamic colour thresholds, dual Y-axes, configurable aggregation, and a clean minimal design. In this post I’ll walk through installing it via HACS, then build up a card that shows SwitchBot temperature and humidity data with colour-coded thresholds and both sensors on the same tile. If you’ve not yet got your SwitchBot sensors talking to Home Assistant, start with my earlier post on ESPHome Bluetooth proxies - that covers the sensor setup end to end. ...
Give Claude Code Eyes Inside Your WSL2 Docker Containers
If you run Docker inside WSL2 on Windows 11, you’ve probably hit this wall: you open a Claude Code session in Windows Terminal, something goes wrong with a container, and Claude starts asking “can you paste the logs?”. Every. Single. Time. It breaks the flow completely. The whole point of an agentic coding tool is that it should be able to diagnose problems itself, not act as a fancy chat window that waits for you to do the investigation manually. ...
Running Ollama in a Proxmox LXC with NVIDIA GPU Passthrough
Running large language models locally is genuinely useful — no API costs, no rate limits, and your data stays on your own hardware. The catch is getting GPU acceleration working inside a Proxmox LXC container, which involves a few non-obvious steps around driver installation and cgroup device passthrough. Why LXC and not a VM? VM GPU passthrough wasn’t an option here — no iGPU meant the host would have had no display output once the card was handed off. LXC was the practical solution, and it turns out to be a good one anyway: containers share the host kernel directly, so the GPU stays bound to the host’s NVIDIA driver and the container accesses it via bind-mounted device nodes and cgroup permissions. On top of that, LXCs are lighter weight than VMs, with less overhead and near-instant startup times. For a dedicated service like Ollama, it’s a solid fit. ...
How to Migrate VMs Between Standalone Proxmox Nodes Without Clustering
Moving virtual machines between Proxmox hosts is straightforward when you have a cluster configured, but what if you’re running standalone nodes? This guide walks through the process of migrating VMs between two independent Proxmox servers on the same network, without needing to set up clustering. [IMAGE: Diagram showing two Proxmox servers on a flat LAN with an arrow indicating VM migration between them] I recently needed to migrate several VMs from an older Proxmox host to a newer one with faster storage. Both systems were on the same network but not clustered, and I wanted to avoid the overhead of downloading backup files through the GUI. The solution? Streaming backups directly over SSH using Proxmox’s built-in vzdump tool. ...

Home Assistant With ESPhome Bluetooth Proxies
Setting Up a SwitchBot BLE Thermo-Hygrometer in Home Assistant with ESPHome bluetooth_proxy In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how I set up a SwitchBot BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer in Home Assistant (HA) using an ESP32 running ESPHome as a Bluetooth proxy. If you’re working with Home Assistant in a containerized environment (as I am), you might face challenges with Bluetooth connectivity, in particular, passing through a bluetooth adapter. This approach solves that elegantly and opens the door to other Bluetooth-based projects by providing extended bluetooth connectivity over a WiFi backbone. ...

Sonoff ZBMINIL2 Wiring Guide
This setup involves a Sonoff ZBMINIL2 (Amazon) smart switch being integrated with a standard “dumb” wall switch. The Sonoff MINIL2 allows the existing wall switch to control a smart device while adding remote control functionality. If you are unsure of what you are doing at any point, please contact a qualified electrician and do not attempt any electrical circuit modifications without properly isolating and de-energizing the circuit Video Guide Wiring Diagram Wiring diagram for the Sonoff ZBMINIL2, retaining the dumb switch ...
Complete 2024 Guide: How to expand a Ubuntu LVM LV to use all space on the PV
2024 Update - I found myself stuck in this situation again, my Ubuntu root partition was completely full to the brim… I’m scrambling to remove apt chache and pruning and and all docker images, but then I run vgdisplay only to reaslise that my LVM LV isn’t even using the full amount of physical disk space (this is a VM and I have just expanded the VMDK file). Thankfully I wrote this blog post 4 years ago as a how-to. Well now I am going to give this post a refresh and this includes some extra details which I needed during the panic of a full disk. ...
Testing Llama3.1 (8B) With LM Studio
MetaAI have done it again… Dropping llama3.1 under the (mostly) open source license and I have been putting it through its paces and benchmarking to find out how well it performs to models preiously tested: Testing Llama3 With LM Studio. Previously we took a look at llama3 in LM Studio which has made self hosted LLMs that rival paid services like ChatGPT and Claude possible; this time we are taking a look at llama through the lend of GPT4All. ...
Feeding My Cat With Home Assistant
Let’s face it, cats are demanding creatures. They expect their food to be served on time, and they’re not afraid to let you know when it’s late. But what if you trigger the feeding action to our Home Assistant dashboard? In this post, we’ll explore how to use Home Assistant to control a Tuya-compatible cat feeder, ensuring your feline friend never goes hungry. Get ready to unleash the power of automation and give your cat the royal treatment they deserve! ...