Colorful custom action buttons on the right side of a SteamDeck held up to the camera

Custom SteamDeck Buttons

Update from 2023-02-02 To answer the most common question I’ve gotten after publishing this right away: No, I do not plan on selling these. This is something I did for fun and out of love, I’m not interested in making money off of it, and I frankly already have my hands full enough as is without adding a custom button business to the mix as well. I’ve provided this write-up to give you an idea of how to do it yourself, and I hope you’ll enjoy it....

January 19, 2023 · Updated February 14, 2024 · 13 min
A TFA Dostmann CO2 sensor

TFA Dostmann meets ESPHome

I attended RC3 from December 27th until December 30th. While it was (once again) only a virtual edition of the Chaos Communication Congress, at least this time around I managed to have a similar experience to 36c3, as in, I spent the last two days mostly hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks in a fun location (a jitsi conference that also included a camera pointing at an aquarium full of fish) and nerding out while tinkering around with electronics....

January 3, 2022 · Updated January 27, 2022 · 4 min
Two crutches leaning on a couch

Being patient with yourself is hard

I’ve been having knee issues all my life. I can’t remember a time when the occasional pain, stiffness and crunchy noises in both knees weren’t part of my regular experience. The past three years however the left knee got a ton worse, frequently hurting for days on end, getting hot, and overall just being a literal pain. That is why earlier this year I finally decided, enough is enough, got another opinion from my orthopedist and we scheduled a key hole surgery to fix what was suspected to be a very active plica syndrome....

September 28, 2021 · 4 min
My two Kratky grown Basil plants, next to the two Kratky grown Oregano plants

Hydroponics the Kratky way

Since my partner loves spicy food, earlier this year I got us a chili growing kit. What was meant as an experiment has since become a full blown pepper growing operation that has taken over my livingroom window sills and half the balcony and already yielded its first fruits. And because whenever I try something new I also tend to do way too much research on it, while getting the plants started the normal way in soil (and then promptly running into the first issues with fungus gnats) I started to look deeper into hydroponics....

September 12, 2021 · 5 min
The screenshot showing the issue -- a rendering defect in OctoPrint's GCode viewer

A debugging story

About a week ago I got a new bug report on OctoPrint’s issue tracker: GCode Viewer Visualisation Problem The problem The visualisation in GCode viewer ist not correct. The print is OK. See gcode file (zip) on Layer 43 to 47 and 49 And screenshot You already saw the included screenshot, and it shows that there was a spike being visualized in the GCode Viewer that wasn’t actually there. My first attempt at reproduction failed spectacularly – the file looked exactly like it was supposed to....

May 9, 2021 · 5 min
My networking dashboard in Grafana with speed and latency monitoring

Homelab uplink monitoring

For a bit more than two years now I’ve been closely monitoring my network uplink. In the past I had a ton of issues with up- or download speeds not being what I paid for, packet loss issues and outright full blown outages. In order to put myself into a better position when reaching out to the ISP’s support hotline I figured it would be good to be able to proof not only the existence of these issues but to also be able to determine the exact times they happened at and also to verify and show that in fact it was only external connections that were suffering and it was not an issue with my own internal network....

March 28, 2021 · Updated March 31, 2021 · 7 min
A shot of the screen displaying the diff of the fix

On wrong assumptions

The original version of this post was published as a Twitter thread on March 23rd 2020. I figured I should give it a more permanent home here since IMHO it was a quite fun story. Since everyone can use some entertainment right now, how about a battle story on how a year ago I spent almost two weeks trying to wrap my head around a really weird issue of a lagging GCODE viewer and overall print progress reporting in OctoPrint and finally figuring it out?...

March 19, 2021 · 6 min
My workplace - three monitors, desk, chair, keyboard, mouse, trackball

My workplace setup

I’ve been working full time from my home office since mid-2014 now. At the time of writing this post this is nearing 7 years. Naturally, considering how much time I spend there, I’ve also spent a lot of thought and money on making sure my workplace helps to keep the usual side effects of the mostly sedentary lifestyle of a developer at bay. Over the years I’ve had some run ins with RSI and backpain....

March 13, 2021 · 7 min
The autumn sun seen through some trees, with the bottom covered in leaves

Hello World!

It’s been a couple years since I last tried to maintain a blog. Back then I was still living life as a corporate drone, employed as a Software Architect to consult other people on their IT problems. I rarely had anything I could blog about – either things were under NDA, or they were simply uninteresting. Since then my life has been turned completely on its head. In late 2012 I got myself a 3d printer, spent my Christmas break to develop a small web interface for it, that grew into a full sized Open Source project called OctoPrint and these days I work full time on it....

March 12, 2021 · 2 min
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