Howdy, stranger!

I am not at all into cars, but today I had to say "farewell" to my old lady I spent the last 15 years with until the TÜV us do part (TÜV = technical check department). It happened last week. I checked out a new (used) car then, bought it and today acquired it finally and here it is. Again, a Czech car which I am very satisfied with again. The Octavia is the most popular [...] 

Since I always forget about the timezone settings when spinning up Domino in a container, I just wanted to document it here for my own records. The key here is to provide an environment setting directly when issuing the run command. For me this would be the Central European timezone like so: docker run -d --name domdev -v /local/notesdata:/local/notesdata --hostname domdev.local --cap-add=SYS_P [...] 

Today marks my 25th anniversary working in the IT industry and esp. with a product which once was called Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino. My first contact was Notes 4.5.x which came with the Designer part integrated, not as a separate app. It was fast. Holy cow, how fast it was! I made my first certificates using the brand new version R5 (“Super Human Software”) and one year later in N [...] 

It’s 2025, I was thinking about a new webcam. I was using a Microsoft (!) 1080p webcam for ages and it’s crap - esp. on a Mac. I had to use a utility called WebCamSettings to get this even working with Teams etc. Webcam My decision was buying a “real” webcam like an OBSBOT or an Insta 360 Link. These are not cheap and these are “only” webcams. Since iPhone [...] 

In my recent post I mentioned a new (beta) voice assistant device for the use in your Home Assistant system. There are others available on AliExpress based on ESP32 etc. but this one is "the official". More information here. Today it was delivered. Yes, it is not the sexiest device on earth, it attracts dust as crazy and I absolutley want to hide it (and you could because mics and spe [...] 

This post is about on how I managed to transform my Smart Home from using vendor-based solutions to open-source and local-only systems. I am actually cheating. Although my solutions work entirely local, the fact that I want to use it remotely, also requires a cloud account to access it, namely the Nabu Casa account which is 75 bucks per year. Where I came from My first Smart Home steps based [...]