Author: Johannes Ernst

  • How to diagnose Time Machine / Time Capsule issues

    My Time Machine backup suddenly stopped working. Apple support has been helping (and Chris has been nice!). Here’s the command by which Apple collects all info they want to debug this, and what it echoes to the terminal (slightly abbreviated). I figure I post this for the geeks among us; perhaps it helps somebody in […]

  • How might my temperature-driven attic fan look in a Web-of-Things world?

    Context When I remodeled my home office, I moved the servers into a closet to get them out of the way. That closet can get quite warm, particularly in the summer. To get the heat out and the servers running, I cut a hole into the ceiling of the closet, and added bathroom ceiling fan […]

  • Self-hosting my slides

    I should have done that a long time ago, but finally here we are: Slides and links to recordings are now at upon2020.com/talks. This includes my most recent talk about “How I automate my pool with a Raspberry Pi and some open-source software” from the Seattle GNU/Linux user conference (SeaGL) this past weekend.  

  • When things go (not quite) web native — thoughts on Mozilla IoT

    Updated 2018-11-07 with a few clarifications from Kathy Giori on the Mozilla IoT team. The Internet-of-Things landscape is a mess. Everybody is trying to build the dominating IoT castle in the cloud, collecting (and almost never giving back) as much user data as possible; user wishes and needs be damned. It’s no surprise that consumer […]

  • Pond’rin’ Sovrin

    The Sovrin system for “self-sovereign Identity” the latest kid on the digital identity block. It follows many other initiatives for “solving” digital identity in the almost 20 years since Microsoft Passport, which arguably was the first one, implemented so badly that is spurred a lot of people into action :-) Some of them were Liberty […]