Author: Bazar
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When “Very Good” Is Not Enough
At some point I stumbled across Adolf Hitler’s paintings online. Not in a history book. Just… there. Watercolours. Buildings. Streets. Quiet scenes. The uncomfortable question followed immediately:All wrongdoings aside — purely as a painter — was he any good? The honest answer surprised me. Yes. He was good. Technically competent. Solid perspective. Careful execution. His…
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A Cup of Coffee That Shouldn’t Have Existed
Here I am, sipping my morning coffee while watching the new Veritasium video about antimatter. At school I always loved physics. I wasn’t a physicist or a mathematician, but something about it pulled me in. I even sat the physics exam for fun and got admitted to university for applied physics, although I never pulled…
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Three Months Later: A Journey from Clicks to Containers
Time really flies – wooosh – another three months gone. I’ve been struggling a bit to keep this blog consistent. Whenever I start a new project, I tend to go all in and stay laser-focused until it’s done. The downside is that everything else gets pushed aside, and sadly, this blog often ends up on…
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Defining Values: Version 1
I realised something fundamentally important today about values. I’ve often heard – from people, books, and articles – that we are all driven by our internal values. Our decisions, actions, motives, and even fears stem from within. These values aren’t all equal, either. They form a hierarchy, a kind of internal priority system. Every time…
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Uptime, UPS, and the Domino Effect
There’s an interesting concept behind any problem: you never really solve all your problems – they’re always there. What actually happens is this: by solving one, you inevitably create another, just in a higher dimension. Take being overweight for example. You decide to fix it by joining a gym. Solved? Not quite. Now you need…
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How to connect an ESP Board to HAOS: My Go-To Setup Guide
I always struggle a bit with the steps required to connect an ESP board to HAOS for the first time. Even though it’s super simple and straightforward, the sequence of steps does matter for a clean setup. So, just for my own reference – here’s what needs to be done. Open ESPHome Builder and add…
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Restarting Apache on Remote Servers via SSH from Home Assistant
Goal Allow Home Assistant to securely restart Apache on a remote server (e.g. AWS Lightsail instance) at the press of a button. This is ideal when a rarely unstable website goes down and a manual restart is sufficient, but you want the flexibility to trigger it from anywhere — even your phone. Step 1: Generate…
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Monitoring Website Status in Home Assistant
This post documents how I set up a simple and reliable system in Home Assistant OS (HAOS) to monitor the status of websites, display the result in the UI, and keep a timestamp of the last check. It uses native command_line and template sensors and is designed to be easy to maintain and extend. Goal…
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Web Monitoring on My Terms: Powered by Home Assistant
I used to monitor my websites with SolarWinds Pingdom. Recently, they migrated me to their new observability platform. It’s not bad – in fact, quite powerful – but way too complex for what I actually needed. I managed to reconfigure everything and set up SMS alerts through another provider (apparently, they no longer supports SMS…
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Raising the bar
I had a bit of an enlightenment today… While listening to The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett, he shared his approach to identifying underperforming employees and the importance of letting them go. He posed a thought-provoking question: Pick any random employee and imagine if the entire company inherited this person’s qualities – their…