By now we're all well aware of just how expensive energy is, and like all the other key attributes and data points in and around my house, I want my energy consumption and costs in HomeAssistant too, exactly as reported by my SMETS2 meters. In the UK however, our smart meters aren't quite as open as those you could find on the continent, so if we want to go about this in the … [Read more...] about How To Get SMETS1/2 Smart Meter Data into HomeAssistant the Easy Way
How-to
How to Install 7zip on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)
Sooner or later you'll download or will be sent something archived with the ever popular 7zip file compression software. Given it's popularity, probably to do with being completely free and open source (under the GNU LGPL license), as well as cross-platform, it's probably a good idea to ensure it's installed on your Ubuntu system, as it doesn't come with it pre-installed out … [Read more...] about How to Install 7zip on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)
How to Install the NewRelic MySQL Plugin
NewRelic is a great tool to get an overall view of your infrastructure, both to determine whether it's up or down, and to understand the load placed upon key resources such as your database. The database is usually the heart of any application, most web apps are glorified [tooltip content="Create, Read, Update, Delete" gravity="n" fade="0"]CRUD[/tooltip] interfaces for … [Read more...] about How to Install the NewRelic MySQL Plugin
How to Check NTP Connectivity and Function on the Command Line
Any computer needs to have accurate and accurate date and time, and keeping time accurately without the use of NTP nowadays is troublesome given CPU tics cannot be relied upon in the virtualised world, and falling back to BIOS clocks is long considered bad practice given secure communication relies upon having time within a threshold of whom it wishes to communicate with. With … [Read more...] about How to Check NTP Connectivity and Function on the Command Line
How to Perform a GET Request with CURL via the Command Line
This post is part of a wider series on CURL, a very useful tools utilised extensively either straight from the command line, or through scripting language specific variants. GET is one of the most commonly used HTTP methods, and is used to request data from a specified URL. When making a GET request, remember that the query string (as in, the key/value pairs) make up the … [Read more...] about How to Perform a GET Request with CURL via the Command Line