OpenHAB

I’m currently running OpenHAB as well as domoticz. OpenHAB surprised me with support for Belkin WeMo with a click of a button (downloading an add on). OpenHAB items and rules are a little bit more complicated but there are several tutorials online. As I get further into OpenHAB I’ll post more information and possibly a comparassion between the two platforms. 

Domoticz Home Automation

Domoticz is a great home automation software package which can easily run on a Raspberry Pi.

Domoticz can integrate into existing home automation hardware, some of these are: RFXCOM Transceiver, Z-Wave, P1 Smart Meter, YouLess Meter, Pulse Counters, 1-Wire, EnOcean, and a lot more. We have configured Domoticz to talk to the Belkin WeMo light switches as well as set up 2 x DS18B20 temperature sensors on a 1-wire bus (using GPIO pins of Raspberry Pi). MySensors is another great project which can be integrated into the Domoticz setup.

domoticz_main

Authenticator App for Outlook

I recently set up a friends iPhone so that they could access their hotmail account through the mail app. Everything went well, until we decided to set up 2-Step Auth. Outlook uses the authenticator app from Google to supply the code, however, this would not sync with the Outlook server for quite some time. I eventually figured out that the lag was because the iPhone was not synced with a time server (through cellular network time) and therefore the app would not sync with the outlook server. Consequently, once I updated the setting on the iPhone, access was obtained with the code from the Authenticator app.

 

Save chrome page as PDF

Rather than install an extension into Google chrome to save a page as a PDF, you can easily save the webpage you’re on in a few clicks.

After some researching I found a lot of these extensions available were sending the webpage you were on to a third party for processing (which I wasn’t too happy with for security reasons).

Then I found the simple way!

For Windows users – Hit print ( Ctrl + P) and under destination choose “Save as PDF”.

It’s that easy!

saveAsPdf