Posts
7A status page that survives its own death
A self-hosted uptime page for my home network — built on the one rule that makes monitoring trustworthy: 'no news' has to mean down, not up. The gadget is a Cloudflare Worker; the interesting part is the four ways it refuses to lie to me.
ReadI pasted the same crypto into four sites. Then I stopped.
Every self-hosted site I built needed the same login plumbing — signed sessions, password hashing, a constant-time compare. I copy-pasted it four times before admitting that's a security bug waiting to happen, and extracted it into one zero-dependency package that's public on purpose.
ReadTorrents by Telegram: a login that lies, and a rename button wired to SSH
A Telegram bot that adds torrents to my qBittorrent box — trivial. The parts worth writing down: getting a session that survives Cloudflare and doesn't trust its own login, and safely letting a chat reply rename files on my home server over SSH.
ReadTracking my own parcels: three carriers, three fights, one interface
Self-hosted shipment tracking for Indian couriers. Every carrier resists being tracked in a different way — one wants a phone call for API access, one only admits to its own shipments — so the real work is a uniform adapter over three hostile, inconsistent upstreams, plus a poller that only emails when something actually changed.
ReadGood Night Alert: an ESP32, an LDR, and three bugs I didn't expect
I wanted my Alexa to say 'good night' when I switch off the bedroom light. The gadget was trivial. Getting it reliable taught me more than the gadget did.
ReadA talking front gate: Sonoff door sensor → Alexa, and why it whispers at dawn
A door sensor that makes Alexa announce 'door open' — with a twist: it whispers between 6 and 9am so it doesn't blast the house awake.
ReadOne automation to watch every battery sensor in the house
A single daily Home Assistant automation that checks all my battery-powered sensors and only speaks up when one is actually running low — announced on Alexa and mirrored to Telegram.
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