Inspired by this post.

I was a sophomore in high school in 2005; just a couple of years into my hobby of technology. I wasn’t yet an Apple user (or even Linux, that would come in 2006), so my list of applications I was using 20 years ago is almost entirely Windows-based.

My bookmarking service tells me that I saved this video in April 2016. I’m not joking one bit when I tell you that I have thought of this video every single time I have washed my hands in a bathroom with paper towels. Give it a watch, it’s a quick 4 minutes.

“You will, for the rest of your life, remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel.”

I lap swam a handful of times last summer at our local outdoor pool, and my goal is to get there at least 3 days a week this year. This is mostly a note for my future self:

To pause a Swim Workout, Apple says “press the Digital Crown and side button at the same time”.

Here is a simple way to use the “PS” button on a Playstation controller to launch the PS Remote Play app on macOS. This requires Keyboard Maestro.

First you must disable the “Press Home button to open Launchpad” setting. This is on by default after you pair a controller to macOS. You can find it in System Settings -> Game Controllers. Turn this off. Now when you press the PS button on your paired controller, nothing should happen.

Intro

I don’t remember if I figured this out myself or found the suggestion elsewhere, but I just searched and couldn’t find anything online so I decided to document this neat trick.

I use Bartender on all my Macs to clean up my Menu Bar. However I missed being able to glance up and look at the Wireguard icon to tell if I was connected to a Wireguard VPN or not. Bartender has a “Triggers” feature that makes it possible to show certain menu bar icons based on the output of a shell script.

I have a couple of Linux servers whose main purpose is to serve as a Wireguard server. The peers on these servers are a combination of pure clients (like a mobile phone or laptop) and more traditional site-to-site tunnel connections (like a router at a remote location). The site-to-site connections usually are routing a remote network over the wireguard tunnel, something like a /24 network so you can access the far site’s local network.

I have been using a Palo Alto PA-220 firewall for my home router for years. It is my DHCP server for my LAN. I often find myself needing to view the DHCP leases to see what IP address some random device (WLED, ESPHome devices, etc.) has. The web interface for the PA-220 is unbearably slow and the SSH CLI takes 30+ seconds after login to give me a prompt.

To speed up this task, I wrote this fairly simple script using python3. It uses the REST API that PAN-OS has to retrieve the DHCP leases. This script completes for me in less than 1 second. It outputs a JSON object. This works best for me as I find JSON to be humanly-readable and also allows me to pipe it to a utility like jq to filter it quickly.

I realized today that the most used “smart home” project I have done is both 100% battery powered and not connected to WiFi or the internet at all. I added a light to my dresser drawers that turns on when the drawer is opened and off when it is closed, just like the inside your refrigator. The idea is so I can grab clothes in the morning without waking up my spouse by turning a bright light on. It’s been working every time I open my dresser for over 18 months now. It is a very simple idea but I had never seen it done before, so here is a quick run-down of how I made it work.