I was a bit late to the party, but I finally got into home automation and bought a couple of connected power plugs. Price and curiosity decided for me: they can often be found online for really cheap and they are a great excuse to spend a week-end doing nothing …

I have just spent three weeks in Japan. What can you decently bring back from such a short trip? I have the feeling I have only touched this extremely rich and multi-millenial culture. A kaleidoscope of colours, smells, sounds, and faces come to mind when I try to look back …

• Hello Mr. Engineer, can you tell me what time it is?
• No I can't.
• Why?
• Well then. You see, my watch is an electronic and mechanic device based on the oscillation of a quartz that imprints a periodic movement to a set of cogs, which are then de-multiplied to lower …

I read somewhere in a math history book that numbers were actually invented to count camels. Someone wanted to send over a herd of camels to be sold on a market on the other side of the desert and they did not trust the camel escort. How would the receiving …

You called me quite late. Some time during the middle of the night, and for whatever reason I had left my phone on. I picked it up and was greeted by your anxious voice:

Part of my brain was still actively dreaming, but the part that …

Home networking can be a lot of fun: setting up a name service, a guest network, or traffic rules, leads to an endless joy of discovering new RFCs or creativity in the very active field of artistic configuration file syntax.

I thought I had seen everything until I tried to …

Just released this small piece of code a few days back:

https://github.com/nicolas31/wunder

I wanted to be able to bring up the weather forecast for the place I am currently visiting without having to yield my address book to a shady app, or suffer from tons of …

My first printer was a black-and-white Samsung laser device that caught my eye in a brick-and-mortar shop by sporting a brave Linux sticker on the front side. These were the early 2000s, mind you, and finding hardware that openly advertised Linux compatibility was quite unusual. The same sticker also showed …

A year ago, I thought I had upgraded my home WiFi to AC with the purchase of a cheap TP-Link Archer C5, but it only gave me trouble. The 2.4GHz band is working perfectly, the 5GHz not so. The first version of OpenWRT I installed had no support at …

Glad to announce that 2cca, the two-cent Certification Authority has now been ported to pure C with libcrypto (openssl) as single dependency. The goal was to make it available on openwrt as it seems pyopenssl is not available on this platform -- without a lot of efforts.

As always, I swear …