Home Assistant runs frequent speedtests, perhaps too-frequent. One of the components I’ve configured is Fast.com, provided by Netflix. Over the last month, we’ve consumed 385 GB just for Netflix:
Nearly 56% of our Netflix traffic comes from speedtests! 😳
Recently, as part of my ongoing quest to self-host as much as possible, I found myself in need of an image proxy. A service I’d installed on an HTTPS-only URL was requesting HTTP-only images, making for a very poor experience.
To anyone who follows my posts here, my love of open-source software is well-known. Open-source alternatives allow me to host my own nameservers, email, website, and GitHub alternative, and I’ve now supplanted Slack and automation tools like IFTTT and Zapier.
Two weeks ago, I noted that I was preparing to switch from PHP 7.0 to 7.1. It took me a bit more time than expected, thanks to a segmentation fault that appeared in 7.1 when using OPcache.
I’ve been using PHP 7.0 for just over a year, and the 7.1 branch reached its first stable release last month, so I’ve begun thinking about what the switch will entail. Fortunately, my needs are fairly simple, so I only require two additional modules: Redis and GeoIP. I’ve made one hasty attempt to build 7.1 with support for these features, which failed spectacularly; fortunately, the chance that it was an error on my part is quite good, so things may just work when I try it again.
Sadly, I’m not yet able to drop PHP 5.6 support from my VPS as a few necessary applications still don’t work as expected under newer releases.
KeyCDN is rather spectacular. I’ve used them for more than two years now, and their features-for-price are unmatched. Of greatest importance to me, they support custom SSL certificates as part of their basic offering. Given my obsession with HSTS and HPKP (see also), this was essential.
In the last six months, they’ve spared my VPS appreciable traffic:
I can’t recommend KeyCDN enough. I’m told that Brotli and IPv6 support are coming in the first quarter of 2017. 🎉
While it’s no longer necessary because Home Assistant 0.35 introduced native support for Flic buttons, I’m still using the controller I released just before Home Assistant updated. In part, this is because I haven’t taken the time to switch the integrations over to Home Assistant automations. Also, having spent some time on the controller, I am not ready to abandon it.
Continue reading Flic controller for Home Assistant updated with breaking changes
Last year, Google released a successor to the deflate compression algorithm, Brotli. Chrome adopted it in version 51, and Firefox in version 44 (see Can I use…). That said, from the webserver side, nginx doesn’t support it natively, so Google provides the ngx_brotli module, making it just a matter of compiling nginx.
Flic buttons are Bluetooth-powered smart buttons that can be used to control other devices via their smartphone apps (Apple, Android), or using any number of integrations they provide on GitHub: https://github.com/50ButtonsEach/.
I'd much rather an ASCII-art duel in response to `git submoduel` than `git: 'submoduel' is not a git command.`
— Erick Hitter (@ethitter) December 17, 2016
