Just what i find

The Two Email Rule: When to Escalate from Email to Real Conversation

When i think back to the deepest of the many deep holes i’ve dug myself in to over the years, they almost all start with an email. When working through my inbox, it’s all too easy to just bash out a reply and hit send. Usually, that’s fine – a quick email is all it Continue reading →

March 15, 2021
How to: LetsEncrypt in standalone mode for Unifi on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

This is an update of my previous post, now that cert-manager is more mature, and i’ve rebuilt my server on Ubuntu 20.04 (from 18.04). Install certbot Certbot installation instructions are at online of course but here’s a summary: Create a new certificate using LetsEncrypt We’re going to use standalone mode, and first we’ll get a Continue reading →

January 8, 2021
Can you do that new job?

Generally when evaluating someone for a role, I look for 5 things: Behaviours – how do they operate in a team? Do they admit to mistakes and learn from them? Do they help others? Communicate and live to their personal values? Are those values ones I want people in the team to live to? Accountability Continue reading →

December 22, 2020
Fix: AccessToKeyVaultDenied when using KeyVault with Function App application setting

After following the instructions on the MS website to establish a KeyVault reference and place that in my App Settings, I set up a Managed Service Identity and grant that identity access to my KeyVault key. Next, wishing to follow Microsoft’s advice and secured a firewall around the KeyVault, ensuring that I checked the Allow Continue reading →

September 1, 2020
The 9 Ps

I often have conversations with friends and colleagues about their careers. And many times, i point people to a great blog post by my colleague Liz Aab, about the “7 Ps”. But i always find myself adding two to the list, so i thought i’d just post it here. There are lots of factors which Continue reading →

August 26, 2020
Fix: This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied

Some repos, such a the one for the Unifi Controller, use different ‘field’ values to tie a release and require manual updates. For someone like me who has a standalone, automated controller setup designed mainly to keep the firmware up to date without much intervention, this is a hassle. It looks something like this: It’s Continue reading →

August 9, 2020
Fix pyodbc.Error: (‘01000’, “[01000] [unixODBC][Driver Manager]Can’t open lib ‘ODBC Driver 13 for SQL Server’ : file not found (0) (SQLDriverConnect)”)

I was connecting from my macbook to a SQL Azure Database when i hit the following error: The solution was to install the ODBC driver, following the instructions on the Microsoft website: Continue reading →

May 25, 2020
Fix: unable to kmem_alloc enough memory for scatter/gather list in ZFS Solaris 10.5

The ZFS Pool on my server was showing degraded state. After checking the SMART status of the constituent drives and finding no problem, I discovered that there’s a bug in Solaris 10.5 where the system reports a growing number of errors and eventually fails the pool. dmesg shows an error unable to kmem_alloc enough memory Continue reading →

December 19, 2019
Powering a Yale Smart Lock with Mains Electricity and Backup Battery

For various reasons, not least because I wanted to play with it, we have a Yale Keyless Connected Smart Door Lock with a Z-Wave module (we have the v1 module which works fine). This lock has a couple of key features that we liked: It’s connected to our Samsung SmartThings hub, and i run the RBoy Continue reading →

December 16, 2018
Amazon: ‘Soon we won’t talk about the smart home but a world of smarts’

Daniel Rausch, Amazon's Vice President of Smart Home, reveals that it took 3 years to get to 4,000 Alexa-compatible devices on the market, but in the past 9 months that number has risen from 9,000 to 20,000, helped in no small part by Amazon's efforts to simplify OEM vendor adoption through SDKs, hardware development training, Continue reading →

September 7, 2018

About me

I’m rob. I spend my time exploring the world, playing board games with my family, solving complex technical problems, and learning new things. Sometimes i write about them here, or code them on GitHub. I believe a few things that guide what I do and how I do it:

Hard things are hard. It takes time, effort and practice to be good at them.
Everybody can learn something new every day. When we’re born we know how to eat and cry and that’s about it. Everything else we’ve learnt, and we can keep doing that all our lives.
Great teams are fun to work in, and great teams achieve great outcomes. The wider the range of people and perspectives in the room, the better the work.

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