Weeknotes 248

Broke another tooth eating sweets I don’t even like. Cool.

I discovered why I struggle so much to connect to WiFi in my local coffee shop – NextDNS. Shot myself in the foot, it seems. Captive portal’s are essentially man-in-the-middle attacks, so they fail to appear when using NextDNS as it is encrypting DNS requests. Stupid security.

This is the problem with fancy networking. You forget and then basic Internet needs are not met. It won’t do. The solution, for now, is low tech. Turn if off, connect to WiFi, trigger the captive portal, turn it back on.

Musicfetch – this is cool.

Fetch song, album & artist data from 30+ platforms in one request

Ubiquiti released their long awaited, insanely large, expensive, new doorbell, the G6 Pro Entry. This thing is £360+! To be fair to the price it isn’t your common or garden doorbell, it does much more. I am uninterested in most of the fancy features though. I don’t want it to recognise my face, or unlock the door using NFC. I want it to tell me when people are at the door.

I think I’m going to get a Doorbell Lite instead, much more reasonably priced, and fits into the UniFi ecosystem still (I printed a model to see how it might fit, I’m cool). I need to figure out how to get a cable to it though, and I’m scared to drill the panelling around our front door.

Elgato Stream Deck Plugin for Unifi - Unifi Monitor

Toys for those of you with both Elgato and UniFi gear.

We had an EICR carried out to see what sort of state the house electrics are in. I’ve yet to receive it. They were very quick to send the invoice through though. Hopefully the place isn’t condemned.

The bills in this house have been pretty astronomical since we moved in. I initially put it down to having lived in a much smaller place before, so of course the bills would be more. Still, I think we should attempt to do what we can, and the “easy pickings” for that is various insulating.

I decided to go into the loft for the first time to investigate and was rewarded by finding not one, but two, wasp nests. I am lucky. It might seem strange to have not gone in the loft in the last two years, but it’s a weird setup where the hatch is very small and screwed shut like it’s warning you to not enter. I should’ve listened.

The ol’ brain is kicking up a load of new loft related projects now. YouTube makes it looks so damned easy. I’ve been doing a load of research into insulation materials and as a result I’m now anxious about the fire and toxicity risk of said materials.

Strongbox – Another 1Password alternative?

DNS-PERSIST-01: A New Model for DNS-based Challenge Validation

DNS-PERSIST-01 approaches validation differently. Instead of publishing a new challenge record for each issuance, you publish a standing authorization in the form of a TXT record that identifies both the CA and the specific ACME account you authorize to issue for this domain.

Another way to get your DNS certs is coming!

Some slight lurgy again this week caught from the holiday I didn’t even go on.