I know a few folks who think puns are for children and not groan adults, but me, I’ve always enjoyed a good play on words. She continues on for a few more tweets, all playing off CSS units of measurement, and other people chimed in with their own.
As I said, I like a good play on words, but one thing was bothering me, “What’s this ‘fr’ thing?” One Google search later, I now know it’s a unit of measure meaning, to use an automatically calculated fraction of the space in a container. It’s used in grids and flexboxes and solves some problems where you accidentally use more than 100% of the available space.
Last week, I spotted this tweet from the official Home-Assistant account.
In the name of security we get locked out of a local API yet again. Shame on you TP-Link. Got an alternative lined up that isn’t cloud based? https://t.co/fbNnWk2KGL
In short, what’s happened is that TP-Link issued a firmware update that turns off the ability to control their smart plugs (and, one assumes, smart switches) from a device on the local network (e.g. Home Assistant), leaving the cloud-based API, and their official KASA app, as the only way to control the devices.
I use TP-Link smart plugs myself. Currently to automate some lamps in the living room, but I’ll also be using them soon to automate the Christmas lights. (Sure, I could use a lamp timer, but I want the lights to go on right at sunset, not “sometime near sunset.” 😁) For me, key parts of the value proposition were (a) It worked with Home Assistant (b) It didn’t require using someone else’s cloud (i.e. my usage patterns remain private).
Digging into it a bit… Turns out that there really is a legit security flaw with these devices. I haven’t seen any official details from TP-Link, but I found other reports of problems (Which?, October 2020; Fernando Gont, March 2017) involving weak encryption and the ability for other people to control the device.
So, it’s a legitimate concern. Ideally, the fix would be a locally accessible API with authentication. Turning off local access altogether is rather “ham fisted.”
Now that I know about the problem, I’ll have to weigh the risks of leaving the firmware out of date against losing my automations. I like the TP-Link plugs, they’ve been pretty reliable over the past several years, and the Home Assistant integration is about as simple as they come (you add a plug to your network, Home Assistant adds it to the list of devices…. easy peasy).
I’m working on a project where I need to send email from my Raspberry Pi. Installing a full-blown SMTP server would be overkill, I just need something where I can send messages from a bash script.
A brief search led me to a forum post from 2013 which talked about configuring the ssmtp package. That post in turn referenced a step-by-step guide from 2009. Unfortunately, both seem to be out of date, and the latter is for installing it on CentOS?RHEL/RedHat/Fedora. So here’s my attempt at an updated version for the Pi (which should apply to any Debian-based Linux distribution).
Notes
These instructions send via Gmail. If you’re using two-factor authentication (and you really should), you’ll need to set up an application -specific password. Otherwise, you’ll get authentication errors.
The password is stored in plain text. This solution is not suitable for use on a shared system.
I also set the root= setting to my email address. I don’t believe this is necessary, but it does allow me to get notified when something goes wrong with one of my messages. (The way I first found out my configuration was working was a message from a cron job which had some unexpected output.)
Testing
Part of the installation is to set up a symlink so that sendmail becomes an alias for ssmtp. You can use either command.
The ssmtp command doesn’t seem to include command-line options for specifying the subject line or the name of the recipient..
So, here’s a command line you can use. Edit the email address as suits your needs. (The sender name and email address will be embedded by GMail.)
Ignore the word-wrap, this is all one line.
echo -e "Subject: Test Message\nTo: Your Name Here <you@example.com>\nThis message was sent via ssmtp." | ssmtp -t
Alternatively, you can put the recipient’s email address on the command line (the message will then be received as a BCC).
echo -e "Subject: Test Message\nThis message was sent via ssmtp." | ssmtp you@example.com
Troubleshooting
Four files are written to /var/logs
mail.err – contains an entry for each time there’s a problem sending a message.
mail.info – contains an entry for each attempt (successful or failed) at sending a message
This is one of those posts I’m writing for myself as much as for anyone else. 😁
Someone from the local Buy Nothing group had some older webcams they were giving away and I was able to get one. My long term goal is to eventually set up a camera with a Raspberry Pi and do some motion-activated photography of whatever wildlife comes through our backyard. (Previous attempts have revealed deer, a fox, and various stray cats.)
For now though, I put it in my office window and set up the Windows 10 camera app to take photos of the front-yard flower bed once every ten seconds. After about 90 minutes, I had 504 photos. Now, what to do with them?
Stepping through them quickly in the image viewer made a day of gentle breezes seem quite windy. So I decided to turn them into a time-lapse.
The VLC player is my go-to for playing videos, and I’ve had some luck using to convert between formats as well, so I wondered if I might be able to use that. I found some tips for using it to create “slideshows”, but nothing for saving the slideshow as a video file.
But I did notice that a lot of the comments mentioned using ffmpeg.
That’s a Linux program, so I opened a I opened a Windows Subsystem for Linux prompt and installed it.
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg
The ffmpeg program has a rich set of command line options to learn, but for now, I just wanted to convert my photos to a video. After a few false starts, I found some helpful tips in this Stack Overflow answer and tried it out
The first pass, with one frame per second, wasn’t quite what I was looking for. It was a “slideshow as video” but too slow paced for what was really 504 nearly identical images.
The next pass was 10 frames per second, followed by 30. I finally settled for 60 frames per second:
I’ve been experimenting with a Pi-Hole for the past two weeks. This evening I reconfigured the home network so all of our devices will default to using the Pi-Hole for IP address assignment and DNS.
Next, I set up a group so my wife’s work computer will be exempted from DNS filtering. A web-based application shouldn’t break because of a blocked tracker, but I don’t want to troubleshoot any collateral damage.
Finally, I reconfigured my phone and desktop to get their IP and DNS information dynamically instead of the static settings they’d been using while I evaluated the set up.
If all goes according to plan, I just sit back and relax and no longer have to deal with ads for an item I bought last week following me across the web for the next month.
