Cheap Bits, Solid Data: Building a Whole‑House Climate Monitor Cheap Bits, Solid Data: Building a Whole‑House Climate Monitor Turn a cheap DVB-T USB stick and €20 wireless sensors into a reliable, real-time climate monitoring system for your entire house. This guide walks you through setting up tfrec on Linux, collecting temperature and humidity data over 868 MHz, and integrating it seamlessly into OpenHAB, Home Assistant, or any MQTT-capable platform. No cloud, no vendor lock-in—just efficient, low-cost data from every room. Read
Securing Your LAN with SSL: A Comprehensive Guide for Home Servers Securing Your LAN with SSL: A Comprehensive Guide for Home Servers Secure your local network with trusted SSL certificates that are recognized by every device. In this guide, we’ll explore how to set up out-of-the-box SSL for your LAN projects, highlight the advantages of owning a personal domain, and discuss how even a modest investment can elevate your web presence. Read
What's the Most Reliable Way to Run Jobs Every Minute? What's the Most Reliable Way to Run Jobs Every Minute? Running jobs every minute might sound simple, but there’s a lot that can go wrong. From overlapping tasks to missed executions, choosing the right approach is crucial for reliability. While tools like cron and systemd timers are great for most use cases, I’ve found that a custom PHP daemon strikes the perfect balance of control and flexibility for certain scenarios. Read
Ultimate Guide to Configuring Samba for Time Machine Backups on Debian Servers Ultimate Guide to Configuring Samba for Time Machine Backups on Debian Servers Setting up Time Machine backups for Apple devices on a Linux-based NAS has become significantly easier and faster thanks to Samba’s new features. With a well-configured Samba server on Debian, you can seamlessly backup macOS devices over the network and access your NAS with minimal setup. No more manually creating sparsebundles or struggling with complex configurations. Read
How to Create and Serve Europe’s Maps with OpenStreetMap How to Create and Serve Europe’s Maps with OpenStreetMap Ready to take your OpenStreetMap skills to the next level? In this post, we walk you through creating a custom tile server for the entire European region—from setting up powerful hardware to generating map tiles and serving them on your own web server. Read
Map Mastery: My Journey to Building an OpenStreetMap Server Map Mastery: My Journey to Building an OpenStreetMap Server Ever wondered what it takes to create your own map server using OpenStreetMap data? Spoiler: it’s a long, winding journey filled with challenges, retries, and valuable lessons. In this post, I share my experience navigating the complexities of OSM. Read
Airplane Tracking Made Easy: My ADS-B Adventure Airplane Tracking Made Easy: My ADS-B Adventure Airplanes have always fascinated me, but the ability to receive and track their signals took this fascination to a new level. With a simple DVB-T stick and a bit of DIY enthusiasm, I built my own ADS-B antenna and dove into the exciting world of flight tracking. Read
High-Precision Time with GPS on a Raspberry Pi and providing it via NTP High-Precision Time with GPS on a Raspberry Pi and providing it via NTP Ever wanted to maintain high-precision time in your local network, independently from public NTP servers? Whether for projects like an ADS-B airplane tracker or just to have an ultra-precise time source, setting up a GPS-based NTP server on a Raspberry Pi can be the perfect solution. In this detailed guide, I'll walk you through every step of the process. Read