Jack Pearce

Exploring home automation, cloud architecture, and artificial intelligence.

Home Automation

Controlling Eight Sleep with an ATOMS3 Dev Kit

A hardware interface for Eight Sleep temperature control using an ATOMS3 Dev Kit, displaying current bed temperature, sleep stage, and bed state on a small screen with button control for temperature adjustments through Home Assistant.
Home Lab

Using Trooli FTTP with a Ubiquiti Dream Machine (IPv6)

A technical guide for configuring a Ubiquiti Dream Machine to work with Trooli's FTTP service in the UK, including steps to obtain PPPoE credentials and set up IPv6 connectivity by bypassing the provided Technicolor DGA4134 router.
Home Automation
· Language Models

How I Automated Home Assistant Updates with GitHub Actions

A GitHub Actions setup that automatically updates Home Assistant Core and OS versions when new releases are available. Uses Renovate for version detection, Tailscale for secure remote access, and the Home Assistant CLI for executing updates.
Home Lab

Automating Docker image updates in a Home Lab

In this post I explain how to introduce Renovate into your docker-compose setup, this allows us to pin docker image versions in our docker-compose but also declare them as dependencies that Renovate will raise pull requests for when a new image is published.
Cloud Architecture

Running Rook / Ceph on Kubernetes

In this guide we will deploy a Rook / Ceph cluster and give some working examples of consuming RWO Block and RWX Filesystem storage.
Home Lab

Dell Wyse 3040 as a WireGuard Router

A guide to repurposing a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client as a WireGuard VPN router with AdGuard for DNS and DHCP services, achieving speeds up to 850Mbps.
Home Lab

1Gb Internet at home - Cuckoo broadband & Ubiquiti Dream Machine

I recently switched from using a HP T730 Thin Client running OPNsense as my home router to something more 'off the shelf'... a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Special Edition. My OPNsense router ran absolutely fine and I absolutely loved the reliability and performance it gave me.
Home Lab

Running cloudflared on OPNSense

I use cloudflared to provide a secure tunnel to my home resources. I struggled to find any instructions for running cloudflared on OPNSense so here is a quick how-to.
Home Lab

Replacing 'ring ring' with the Jurassic Park theme song using a PBX

Today I learnt something new. The ‘ring ring’ you hear when you make a phone call isn’t generated by your phone, your network or even the country you’re in, that noise is generated by the receiving ends phone system, and this means it can be customised.
Home Lab

Sky Broadband - Transparent DNS proxy

Unfortunately this means they now proxy all your DNS traffic using a transparent DNS proxy, regardless of what DNS resolver you have set on your client.
Home Lab

IPv6 over IPv4 at home, today

In this article I explain how to enable IPv6 connectivity from any desktop in less than 5 minutes.
Cloud Architecture

Have a lightning fast blog and host it for free

I recently migrated my blog from Wordpress to Silvrback to Ghost. I was very happy with Silvrback, it’s an excellent writing platform. In the end I got fed up not being able to change how my site looked (no theming), so switched to Ghost.
Photography

Organising a massive photo collection

Organizing my photo collection has been incredibly liberating these past few days. I set out to de-duplicate, sort my photos into some sort of folder structure, shrink their file size down somewhat without affecting the quality of the images and then finally automate this for the future.
Home Lab

Virgin Media, why are you manipulating my traffic?

Virgin Media why does www.google.com resolve to host-62-253-8-99.not-set-yet.virginmedia.net? What a funny name for a PTR record, but seriously, why are you manipulating my traffic?
Cybersecurity Insights

Securing your digital world

Everything requires a password. A long time ago it bugged me that I couldn’t think of something secure so I visited a web page that randomly generated passwords for you and I used the same 8 character password ever since, it contained 1 number and 7 letters one of which was uppercase.
Cybersecurity Insights

YubiKey and Mac OS X FileVault

If there’s one thing I seem to be obsessed with lately and that’s security. I’ve never had any of my accounts hacked but that doesn’t stop me. It happens all the time though and working in IT I should know how to prevent it.