A well-ventilated roof stays cooler on a hot summer day 1 resulting in more comfortable living spaces and cheaper cost of air conditioning. Roof vents with a solar-powered fan have been touted as more effective than passive or wind-powered vents like Whirlybirds. Although these can be bought from Australian suppliers, there seems to be little awareness that the sometimes the same product can be bought directly from the Chinese manufacturer.

When using smart lights it sucks to have someone turn the light off at the physical light switch. In the Philips Hue system, a convenient way around this - without messing with the electrical wiring - is to mount the Philips Hue dimmer over the top of the light switch. Many third-party covers and adaptors1 exist for this and here I list some of the off-the-shelf and DIY 3D-printable options for single (1 gang2) wall switches.

I’m looking for an electrician to fix some problems with the house so I thought I’d post a job on one of the find-a-tradie websites. Their IOS app didn’t work so I figured I’d do it from my PC and attach a few photos to my job. Normally I’d use Airdrop to bring the photos over but it seems that in this case it’ll be easiest to use good old-fashioned copper.

I like storing my documents in the cloud so that I can easily access them anywhere. It’s not so easy with Google Drive on Ubuntu, however, which has no native Linux client - a long requested feature that seems unlikely to arrive anytime soon 1. Luckily there are many third-party clients to choose from; so many that it’s hard to choose one. Ask Ubuntu wisdom is to using GNOME Online Accounts which is pre-installed in Ubuntu as part of the GNOME desktop environment 2.

After leaving the green pastures of Windows land I have been residing in the walled garden of MacOS land for over 5 years. I find myself curious about Linux and, now I work with servers more, I wish be more proficient with using it. Surely the best way learn Linux would be use it as my main personal OS. In MacOS it just works as long as you want to do what Apple wants you to do, which for me is most of the time.