Acrylic Gingerbread House Templates
A few years back I bought some acrylic to use as a rack blanking plate, and I had a bit left over. It’s sad in the garage ever since we moved in here, as I’ve not had anything to do with it.
But when Sabriena does the gingerbread houses for Duncan’s Christmas party (sure to be even bigger this year, she uses some cardboard templates covered in clear plastic packing tape), and I thought it might be nice for her to have something more durable.
So this weekend I dragged some tools out into the sunshine and copied her templates, using what few skills I can remember from the latter side of my high school’s “metals and plastics” courses. I scribed and cut the templates out, then used two different sets of sandpaper on our orbital sander to smooth the edges. A bit of steel wool to polish, and then with the protective film removed, they look pretty nice.
They’re not food-grade by any stretch of the imagination, but they don’t have to be… and they should last quite some time.
Unifi Camera Upgraded!
Ages ago, we stuck a surveillance camera sweeping our driveway… aimed and configured rather carefully to maintain, as best we could, the privacy of our neighbours and fellow citizens whilst covering as much of the identifying area - our front yard and driveway - as possible. We were rather happy with this setup: Unifi cameras seem, to me at least, to be a tiny bit overpriced, but we’re able to avoid sharing video feeds with any government (foreign or domestic) without them asking and I’m not unhappy with how things have worked thus far.
Sabriena wanted one for the back yard though, specifically to catch the various bird life that visits. I could have bought another G4 Bullet, however these are getting a bit long in the tooth now. I could have spent a bit less on some of the G3 cameras, but all the same problems as before arise.
Instead, we figured that we could upgrade the driveway camera, and then use the old G4 one on the backyard. Apparently the night vision (while not as good as some other brands) has improved dramatically in the couple generations since this one. So I bit the bullet, ordered a very expensive G6 Pro Bullet with all sorts of stupid AI detections on it, and then went to work.
It arrived, so I just removed the old one, put the new one up, and yeah… it’s pretty impressive. In particular, the “AI audio detections” pick up dog barking as an event. That works out pretty good for us, Tiabeanie barks and we have a recording of what she barked at.
I was pretty happy with that, so we waited for a cabler to come run the plug out for the G4, when I realized that I’d neglected to slip the silicone gland over the cable before it was terminated. This was a problem getting it off too (the G6’s silicon plugs are split and then forced together by compression), but it was much easier getting it off over an RJ45 plug than getting it on over one.
But after much cussing, we managed to get it installed, adopted, configured, and yeah… it’s nice. No hits on the birdbath yet, I’m not sure if this is because nothing is using it or I haven’t configured it correctly. It took a bit of experimenting with the camera on a temporary cable out the door and me on my tippie-toes to make sure it would be in a place that would both sweep all the bits of the yard we want and not sweep the back window of our neighbour to the north, and I was briefly worried after the cabler left that maybe it wouldn’t be in the right place, but we actually nailed it.
With the two cameras side-by-side it became very clear however that the new camera’s night vision was substantially better, except I can’t get it to focus. I tried to click the auto-focus and no, that made it much much worse. The next morning, in the light of the day, I realized the problem: the camera has condensation on the inside of the lens! It’s installed in the same place, exactly as per specifications, in a place that the old camera has had no issues for the past 3 years, what the hell is going on?
I took a quick look on big-G and found a bunch of guides and videos talking about replacing the dessicant in the camera, but this is a brand new unit, so I instead reached out to Unifi’s support. They advised me that basically sometimes “this just happens” (my words, not theirs), and recommended I turn the IR illuminator on 24/7 for 48 hours to raise the internal temp of the camera. Some folks on Reddit reckons this doesn’t work, the condensation will leave marks on the lens, but I figured I’d give it a go.
It did indeed dry it up, and there are no marks, so I’m satisfied - if annoyed - for now.
Thinking more about it, I assumed it’s because when the other camera was installed it was because it was warmer when I did so - but that’s not the case, I installed it almost exactly three years ago (in July instead of June, no less).
But assuming the problem does not come back (if it does, can it please come back before the warranty period is up?), the only question left now is do I look at buying an IR illuminator for the backyard camera? I don’t think there will be much to see on it, but it’s jarring just how much better the front yard’s one is.
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House Clip Show: Five years!
As mentioned in the previous episode, there would likely not be very many big-ticket items ticked off this year. I did manage to fill the hole in where the doorbell/intercom was, and just this week we replaced the exhaust fans in both bathrooms as one had packed up irreparably.
The front lawn still looks like a disaster, taking longer than expected to recover from the biological wasteland that was gravel on top of plastic sheeting. If you’re down the street looking at it, it appears to be a lawn, but when you’re up close it’s still very patchy, and the NBN trench line is still plainly visible despite a couple of attempts at overseeding. Sabriena decided to switch from the Ryegrass combo we had good luck with in the back of the back yard to Kikuyu, which is locally divisive but I actually quite like it as you need stuff-all water for it to stay green, but it’s slow going. We do have a rather nice crop of clover in one portion too, which the bees enjoy.
Unfortunately the Pittosporum and the Yucca on the south side of the front yard will have to come out, but as yet that hasn’t happened and I’m not excited at the prospect of digging out a significant stump or two near our gas line, so I just try not to look at them. We did buy a bird bath for the back yard, but irritatingly the local magpie clan continue to prefer the dish under the tap instead, and I still haven’t put a camera out on it.
Sabriena painted the back toilet - she opted for “watermelon pink”. We weren’t sure about it, I figured it would look like an old lady’s house, but it actually came out okay and is a fun little splash of colour for an otherwise tremendously serious room.
It’s not really house-related, but I’m stretching here… I mounted an external GPS antenna under the TV antenna and our time server performance improved dramatically. I also got rid of the giant Telstra desk I had and put a wrap-around countertop in my office which also isn’t quite finished yet. Furthermore, I put two small shelves on the rear wall, which has me thinking that I may end up putting the closet doors back on and using the closet for hidden storage instead of a display? Undecided yet. A blog entry was forthcoming on my office but I’m still not quite happy with it enough to show it yet.
Finances: We’ve stuck pretty well to the plan, assuming the house value has not moved we now own approximately 57% of it, and if by some miracle we can continue doing exactly what we’ve been doing we have about 6 years left to pay. Each extra month we manage to pay more than the minimum pushes the stick forward on the nosedive of the graph that makes me very happy to see.
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ERR_ECH_FALLBACK_CERTIFICATE_INVALID
I’m not sure if I’ve blabbed about it before, but I have a collectd instance running in a container which shits RRD files into a shared directory, then I have another container that runs a Python script which spits out a bunch of MRTG-style graphs and a static HTML page to view them in. I do this because sometimes I want to show random people on the internet my graphs, and something like Grafana is actually a bit of a security nightmare when all I really want is a modern MRTG.
Occasionally, I want to look at one of these graphs from my work Mac, and in some cases I’ll get the error ERR_ECH_FALLBACK_CERTIFICATE_INVALID and it will refuse to load. After a time, the error goes away, and everything’s happy again.
I finally got to the bottom of it today, from a post on the pihole subreddit of all places!
ECH is “encrypted client hello”, which I don’t really give a shit about, but one of the hints that it’s usable is the HTTPS record type (which is DNS record number 65). Let’s back up a bit - one of the ways I make sure things will work even if our internet breaks is local services, such as Mastodon, etc, all have DNS overrides at our router - effectively split-horizon DNS, so when you’re on the public internet, I see an internet IP (either a Linode VM or CloudFlare, depending on the service and how much I care about people walloping it), when you’re in my house, you seen an RFC1918 address going directly to the service.
To accomplish this, I have a series of overrides in the dnsmasq configuration, so which one you see depends entirely on which DNS server you’re using.
But these DNS records don’t override the HTTPS request type, which occasionally gets passsed through to the upstream provider, and since that domain is hosted at CloudFlare, they do ECH on the free plans and you have to pay to turn it off, they return a happy response. Chrome (on my work machine, I’m a Firefox user otherwise) happily obeys, and then screams that the certificate isn’t the one specified specified in the HTTPS record (I think that’s what the base64 ech value is anyway) and refuses to connect. After a time the TTL of the HTTPS record expires, and the issue goes away.
Adding additional entries for each hostname dns-rr=some.hostname.fwaggle.org,65,000100 tells dnsmasq to respond to HTTPS queries with a record that’s a zero entry, one byte in length, with only a null byte for the contents.
And it appears to work?
There are apparently other ways I can turn off ECH at the browser level, but this is just for one specific domain so I think it’s fine. Is it the right way to do it? Probably not, “yeah we have a record for this” “jokes, it’s empty” is not really being conservative in what you send but as long as browsers do the right thing and silently reject it it’ll probably keep working.
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Bathroom Fans
When we bought this place, the exhaust fan in the main bathroom didn’t work. I had a quick look in the ceiling and found them to be hard-wired (at least I was fairly sure this was the case), so I just swung it down, put some machine oil in the back of it into the bearing/bushing, spun it by hand a bit and it started working… but I was reasonably sure it was going to need replacing sooner or later, because what I’d done was not a permanent fix in my mind.
Fast forward almost five years and that fan’s actually still running - but the other one ceased functioning during the summer. Unfortunately the same thing that fixed the main fan did not fix this one - try as I might I just could not free this one up and there was zero free-spin in it after some 15 minutes of trying to lubricate it. Sabriena prefers that shower (the small tiles on the floor of the main shower are not pleasant on the feet, the en-suite shower has a textured plastic floor), but she was showering with the window open and it was fine, there wasn’t really any moisture build-up.
But we’re in the part of the year where that’s not really tenable any more, so I texted our electrician about it… the first thing he said was “those should have a socket, you should be able to replace them yourself?” I reiterated that I’m about 99% sure that they’re actually hard-wired, so he agreed to come out and could squeeze us in the next Monday, ie today.
He also said it’s better if we buy them, that way he can just drop them straight in, so I measured the hole (about 300mm) and went looking at Hammer Barn’s website and found… nothing. Everything was 250mm, that can’t be right! So after work one night we went in to look, taking the cover of one of them with us, and found that the actual size is apparently 290mm.
The next thing I wanted in them was I really kinda wanted one that had a damper flap on them, because in summer you can feel the heat radiating down, and in winter there’s a bit of a draft under them too. I also wanted them to move a fair bit of air. We found the Mercator BE4300SPWH which looked like it’d do the job, so we picked up two of them… they’re a bit spendy compared to the others (a cheap 250mm unit can be had for about $30, these were $105), but like I said I really wanted to start looking into doing something about the draftiness of the house and this seemed a reasonable way to start.
A pretty quick job to cut the old ones out, put the sockets in, test the sockets and the RCBO they’re attached to and we’re away.
I didn’t realize until afterwards that these actually have fairly poor reviews (primarily complaints about not moving enough air, or not removing moisture, with one instance of them dying prematurely), but they appear to be doing the job… but now that there are sockets in the ceiling I don’t need an electrician to replace them if they end up packing up.
I’ll keep the boxes for a few weeks just in case…
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