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
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
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
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