Welcome to my corner of the internet. I write about technology and projects I’m working on.
Two Drivers, One weewx: Adding MQTT Sensors Next to the Weather Station
weewx runs exactly one station driver. I wanted the Vevor station’s data and an indoor sensor that only exists as MQTT messages from rtl_433. weewx-metadriver runs both drivers side by side, and an old MQTT driver needed a rewrite before it would work with weewx 5 and paho-mqtt 2.
Tricking a Weather Station Into Uploading to a Raspberry Pi
A Vevor weather station that can only upload to Weather Underground, a Raspberry Pi 3 pretending to be wunderground.com on its own isolated wifi network, and weewx-interceptor catching the data. Plus the WPA2 handshake that failed nine times out of ten, and the console clock that was an hour fast.
24 Days of Nobody Noticing: A DNS Record Pinned to a DHCP Lease
My GPS-disciplined time server dropped off the network and I didn’t find out for 24 days. The cause wasn’t the hardware, and it wasn’t what I assumed twice along the way — it was a permanent DNS record aimed at an address the router was free to hand to somebody else.
Getting Fan RPM Out of a Lenovo M900 Tiny via lm-sensors
lm-sensors’ nct6683 driver silently refused to bind on a Lenovo M900 Tiny running Proxmox — no error, just no fan data. The cause was a vendor/build check in the driver tripping on this box’s EC firmware, and the fix was a one-line force=1 module param made persistent.
Turning a Home Network into Real Infrastructure
A small Proxmox cluster, a managed switch or two, some IP cameras, and Home Assistant eventually stop being a pile of gadgets and start being infrastructure. Here’s how I built observability, a live topology graph, and an AI-assisted ops layer for mine — without letting anything have unsupervised write access to the network.
Building a GPS-Disciplined NTP Server on a Raspberry Pi
How a Raspberry Pi 5, a cheap u-blox GPS module, and chrony turned into a home stratum-1 time server — the wiring mistakes, the serial-port gotcha nobody documents, and the PPS upgrade that took accuracy from ±50ms to ±350ns.
Installing the NVIDIA T600 Driver with PRIME Render Offload on Debian 12 (Dell Precision 3571)
A step-by-step guide to getting a PRIME render offload setup working on a Dell Precision 3571 — Intel iGPU driving the desktop, NVIDIA T600 on demand — plus the specific mistakes that commonly break it.
How This Site Is Built and Deployed
The stack behind andylittle.net: Hugo, PaperMod, and a GitHub Actions pipeline that deploys straight to my existing web host.
Hello, World
The first post on the new andylittle.net.