Open Source

WireGuard is a modern VPN that’s designed to be easy to configure, performant, and secure. The ease-of-configuration is really important. If you’ve ever set up IPsec, you know what I mean. OpenVPN isn’t awful, but it isn’t good, either. WireGuard has both a Linux kernel implementation as well as a Go-based portable implementation that works on Mac and iOS. Official Windows support doesn’t exist yet, but is on the way. [Read More]

I’ve been playing a lot with home automation recently, and in particular I’ve been installing a lot of cheap ESP8266-based Wi-Fi relays, such as the Sonoff Basic, Sonoff SV, Sonoff S31, Sonoff iFan02, and Shelly1, which have all been flashed to run the open-source Tasmota firmware. These communicate with Home Assistant through an MQTT message broker over Wi-Fi. Home Assistant, in turn, allows the devices to work with schedules, timers, voice-activated cylinders, and so on. [Read More]

One of the 4TB external USB hard drives I use for local backups started randomly disconnecting a few days ago. Today it failed completely. It’s a Seagate Backup Plus model, where the bottom of the enclosure consists of a small, removable shim that contains the USB & power connections and the USB to SATA converter chip. After trying different USB ports and cables without success, I decided to hook up the drive directly using SATA. [Read More]

Back in 2000, I created my first open-source hardware: An RS-232 to OBD-II interface. I’m no longer interested in this project, but it gets a surprising amount of traffic every day. I’m keeping it available for those who want it. Today there are far better approaches for connecting computers to cars, so please keep in mind that this information hasn’t been updated since 2002. [Read More]