Technology Solutions for Everyday Folks

Matt Zaske Online Blog

Hotend Thermistor With A Silpat, Revisited

I decided to post a quick follow-up to the original fix I'd implemented about ten months ago.

The $1M question was...

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Back to a Regular Schedule?

Gif of a "retro" television powering up to a white screen/noise.

Man, it's embarrassing to see that I haven't published anything really technical (beyond my MMS Miami Beach recap) since the end of July...and before that anything on a regular schedule since April! Despite my best intentions, some aspects of life got complicated.

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MMS Miami Beach Recap

Rudy (at left) and Matt take a quick picture from the speakers' angle of the "Big Room" at MMS Miami Beach as we begin our 8 a.m. session.

I had the great honor and pleasure of being a speaker at MMS Miami Beach Edition at the end of October. It was the first speaking event I've had since 2019, largely due to the pandemic, and the experience was marvelous! The entire team behind MMS is outstanding, and their attention to detail really makes a difference in the experience both for attendees and speakers.

The Overall Experience

The speaker attire this edition was pretty rad: lots of flamingo gear!

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Enabling Pi-hole DNS Across Multiple VLANs

Screenshot of the "Top Clients" dashboard box of the Pi-hole admin interface, showing six clients with their local dns addresses and activity.

I recently (and finally) upgraded my home network to a UniFi system after years of consideration and an incorrect assumption it would cost a small fortune to enact. My existing "core" router was reaching the end of its normal life, though, and I wanted a real mesh network with better outdoor coverage instead of using the range extender during the "not winter" months and connecting to a different SSID.

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Turn off the fan already! Tales of an automation modification

Snip of details when creating a Home Assistant helper entity for a timer object.

It's been a couple months since my last post, and while I had some things in the queue I have lacked time to finish them out due to MMS in early May, being involved in a community theatre production that just wrapped up a couple weeks ago, and for random reasons building a chicken coop of all things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's to a return of more regular posts, assuming I have adequate time to write and revise them!

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Addressing Firmware Updates for Dell Latitude 54X0 in a Task Sequence

Screenshot of a child task sequence for updating firmware in Full OS mode, with a Run PowerShell Script step highlighted with package and script information.

For about two years we fought with getting firmware (BIOS) updates to install on our Dell Latitude 54X0 models during their build/rebuild using a MEMCM task sequence. No matter what random trick I tried or thing I read, I just couldn't get the update executable to successfully apply the update in our primary build/refresh task sequence. Our techs (self included) would have to apply the update manually after devices were [re]built.

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Semi-Automatically Offering Dell BIOS/Firmware Updates

Photo of Dell firmware update in progress instructing a user not to power down the system and showing a progress bar with basic status information.

Several years ago I implemented a mechanism in our primary [re]build [Configuration Manager/MEMCM/SCCM] task sequence to address upgrades of our fleet's firmware (BIOS). On the whole, the process has worked very well and definitely helped keep things updated.

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Creating a Reference Sensor Template in Home Assistant

Snip of a Home Assistant Dashboard item identifying two sensor states: one for bathroom humidity at a level of 44.6% and another for bathroom humidity target at level 49.0%.

It's been a while since I wrote about any Home Assistant stuff so I figured this was as a good time to write about something I'm super happy with: custom/reference sensor templates!

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Going Dual Camera with OctoPrint

Almost as soon as I started using OctoPrint, I also set up an old webcam to let me remotely "see" things since I keep the printer in the basement. That whole process was an adventure, because I don't use a Raspberry Pi for OctoPrint like most folks; I have an old Intel NUC (also used as a local dev server) running Ubuntu on which I installed OctoPrint.

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Creating a Practical and Automatic Server and Data Backup Solution

If you had disk/storage failure (on any of your important devices/things/places), would you be "up the creek?"

For many folks, the answer to that question is "absolutely."

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Upgrading All The Things to Ubuntu 22.04

One of my "winter break" projects this year was to get all of my disparate Ubuntu server instances upgraded and into parity. Last year I wrote about my adventure moving WSL Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, which happened before 22.04 was officially released.

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Mister Thermistor, Fixed With a Silpat

Screenshot of OctoPrint's temperature graph illustrating a consistent hotend and heated bed temperature with only minor +/- 0.5 degree variations over the course of the previous 30 minutes.

I got hooked into 3D printing late last summer. A problem that cropped up after the first couple months of tinkering and relatively error-less printing was an issue with thermal runaway. Something I could correct for short periods of time, but never make totally go away...

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Powershell String Manipulation - A One-Liner

See also: asking a friend for help can save oodles of time and effort.

Around Thanksgiving 2022, an friend of mine asked to talk through a problem he thought might be solvable with Powershell, but he'd been stuck on the design. Naturally, I agreed to help out if/where I could and it provided an opportunity to chat via Zoom which I am not one to turn down.

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Smart Control of a 1940's Three-Way Switch with Shelly 1L

Snip of Home Assistant dashboard card for Stairwell/Stair Lights with status data

Once I settled on jumping into home automation and Home Assistant (HA), the first "practical" thing I wanted to address was the issue of lights being left on at random throughout the house.

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Jumping into Home Assistant: The Installation (and Hiccup) Process

Screenshot of Home Assistant Initialization/Setup Screen at the user account creation step

About a month ago, I took the plunge.

After considering it for a long time and hearing about some cool stuff folks were doing with home automation, I decided it was time to start my own dabbling adventure. A warning to folks: home automation is a little bit like owning horses. There can be a bunch of expense in the process for little obvious reward.

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Adding Push Notifications to the Tempest WeatherBot

Slack Tempest WeatherBot alert notification for a close lightning strike

This is the "final" installment of my summer 2022 blog series about the development of my Slack Tempest WeatherBot.

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Adding External Data to the Tempest WeatherBot

Slack Tempest WeatherBot in-channel alert notification from NWS API data for a Dense Fog Advisory

This is the third in the short series of my journey building the Slack Tempest WeatherBot. In this post I'm walking through the steps to incorporate external data from the National Weather Service (NWS) API for alerts and forecast options.

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Expanding Interactivity with the Tempest WeatherBot

Slack Tempest WeatherBot App Home tab display with current conditions and daily statistics

In the last post I wrote about the basics of building the Slack Tempest WeatherBot and its basic set of command arguments. This post builds on those commands with an overview of expanding the Slack interactivity by adding a bot app home tab.

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Creating a Slack Bot for Tempest Weather Station

Image of Tempest weather station with device features highlighted

In summer 2020, I picked up a WeatherFlow Tempest station...a purchase I'd been considering for the better part of a year. It's an awesome and compact little thing, and on the whole I've been super happy with it. In my location it tends to over-report rainfall as the haptic rain sensor is also sensitive to vibrations on the mounting point (a pole in my yard).

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DMARC: Moving to a Monitor-As-Necessary State

After a year-and-a-half of implementation (mostly monitoring), it is time to switch to a 'steady' or 'monitor-as-necessary state' for all of my things DMARC. I've written about this journey before, with the last major summary in November, 2021.

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Upgrading an Old Application to 21st Century Passwords

I have a confession to make: I've ignored a Really Bad Password Form on an inherited web application for about at least a decade too long.

I'm not proud, but every time I considered changing the password mechanism to something more modern (and more secure), decision paralysis would set in...in great part due to the design challenges I anticipated in quietly upgrading this for users of the app in question.

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An MMS 2022 Recap

Gif of 'secret' high-five handshake between characters Abed and Troy from the series Community

Two weeks out from the last MMSMOA and the technical overload hangover lingers on...but in a Good Way. This post isn't terribly original, but it's my own highlights/recap/pitch of MMS.

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The MMSMOA Retweet Bot in Action

Cartoon robot image of the @mmsmoabot with breastplate advertising MMS and the bot Twitter handle

Hot on the heels of last week's triumphant return of the "MOA" edition of MMS, I'm writing up a post-conference review of my somewhat-accidental creation: the MMSMOA Retweet Bot.

I shared the bot's story with a number of folks during the conference, often while peddling the bot's stickers, but several folks also encouraged me to share the details via blog post as well so here it is!

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In-Place Upgrade of WSL Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04

About two months back (early March to be exact), I had the opportunity to finally deprecate some old versions of applications and packages due to planned retirements and upgrades. Most specifically a full-on move to PHP 7.4 was in sight, though there were other bits.

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