Tailscale is a virtual private network (VPN) service that allows secure remote access to resources across different networks. It offers a feature called MagicDNS that enables you to access your resources using a domain name instead of an IP address. Additionally, you can use HTTPS certificates to encrypt traffic between clients and servers, ensuring secure communication. In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to enable MagicDNS and HTTPS certificates in Tailscale and how to add a TLS certificate to Home Assistant using Tailscale. The most practical benifit for using Home Assistant within a Tailscale network is that it removes the requirement for network port forwarding and exposing services publicly, whilst still allowing your devices to access it from outside your local network. This blog post aims to give you the starting stes required to setup MagicDNS and HTTPS certificates in Tailscale, create a certificate on your home server and install that certificate in a Home Assistant docker container. ...

Note: Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and discontinued the free ESXi hypervisor tier. The steps in this article remain technically valid for licensed VMware vSphere. If you’re running a home lab, Proxmox VE is a capable free alternative worth considering. ESXi is a powerful hypervisor that allows for the virtualization of multiple operating systems on a single physical machine. However, there are times when you may need to pass through a physical device, such as an NVMe drive, to a virtual machine. In this blog post, we will explore the steps required to pass through an NVMe drive to an ESXi virtual machine. ...

Introduction Uptime-Kuma is an open-source, self-hosted website monitoring tool. It can check the uptime and response time of websites, APIs, and other services at regular intervals and alert you if any of them go down. Uptime-Kuma can be installed on your own server and customized to suit your needs. In this article, we will explore how to set up and run Uptime-Kuma using Docker Compose. The Docker Compose File The following is the Docker Compose file for the Uptime-Kuma service: ...

A new beinging for this blog… The ExitCode0 blog is currently migrating. Welcome to the site, please hang tight for more content, coming soon. This site should now be in hosted on GitHub pages!

Windows 11 became available on the 5th October 2021 and for those people with compatible machines, this guide will help you jump the queue and force the Windows 11 upgrade. Before you start… Take a backup all all important data onto an external storage device/location. set aside at least 1 hour for the upgrade – maybe longer, depending on your internet connection speed. Make sure that your Windows 10 installation is up to date with no pending updates. Compatibility You might have seen a number of articles and news stories floating around about Windows 11 dropping support for a large number of computers, particularly older systems. The quickest way to test your system’s compatibility with Windows 11 is using the Microsoft WindowsPCHealthCheckSetup tool: https://aka.ms/GetPCHealthCheckApp ...

The HS100/HS110 LED can be bright and obnoxious. If you are looking to turn off the LED status lights on the TPLink Kasa smart plugs, then look no further – the solution resides in this post. It does involve some Python interaction, but I promise that it is a gentle passing with the programming language. This solution works for: HS100 HS103 HS105 HS110 The only real drawback is that when the LED is disabled, you can not see when the device might have become disconnected from the wireless network – this is normally indicated by a RED or orange LED status. ...

Depending on your reason for using the PowerShell prompt at it, it might be useful to include data such as timestamps in your recorded output, to enable better auditing. This post will walk you through the simple steps needed for customising the PowerShell prompt, including how to show the current date and time. What exactly do I mean by the PowerShell prompt and what does the typical prompt look like by default? Well let me dial it back to default and show you: ...

I own a basic VW Caddy MK3 (2009) which was equipped with a RCD 300 head unit. It did not come with the aux function/connectivity and this post explains how I added Bluetooth connectivity. This was a very simple installation with no requirement for VCDS coding; the Bluetooth adapter replicates a CD changer. At the time of writing this article, I was able to purchase this adapter on Amazon UK for ~£35 – https://amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0773P8HM5 ...

Note: NVIDIA has since patched the RTX 3060 hash rate limiter across multiple driver versions. The developer driver 470.05 used in this article is no longer available from NVIDIA. Crypto mining on consumer GPUs is generally no longer economically viable. This is part 2 from my previous post on RTX 3060 Nicehash overclocking settings. I don’t want to edit the previous article because the content still stands to be accurate for the hash rate I achieved. However, I have since learned even more about the card and managed to improve my Nicehash quick miner hash rate by a further 10%! ...

Note: NVIDIA has since patched the RTX 3060 hash rate limiter across multiple driver versions. The developer driver 470.05 used in this article is no longer available from NVIDIA. Crypto mining on consumer GPUs is generally no longer economically viable. I recently managed to buy a Gigabyte RTX 3060 without lining the pockets of a scaler, lucky me! I recently discussed how I was able to circumvent the Nvidia crypto mining limitations: Unlock RTX 3060 mining hash rate (that post also includes access to the driver). This doubled the RTX 3060 Nicehash mining rate using the ‘unlocked’ Nvidia beta driver – going from ~22MH/s up to ~40MH/s. Impressive! ...