I've been playing around with PVoutput.org - it's a community site which lets you quickly and easily publish live details of your solar panels. I couldn't see a pre-built library for my model of Solar Power Inverter - the Fronius - so I thought I'd build one. Important: the PVoutput API doesn't run over HTTPS. All of your communications with it are in the clear. While there's a limit to the amount of damage a malicious party could do, be aware that your API key isn't secure. The API is…
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I don't understand how our Government works. I understand that tough decisions often need to be made - but sometimes those decisions are so utterly without reason that you have to wonder if politicians spend most of their days "painting their noses". The UK used to have a public sector postal service - the Royal Mail. Postmen need to know to where they were delivering mail. Postal Codes were created to help divide up the country into easily sortable destinations. And so, over time, a…
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My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by violent racists who strictly segregated the non-white population. This was Apartheid. There's not much…
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Earlier this year I was playing around with DogeCoin. Try as hard as I might, I just couldn't get their API working. I delved into the settings, to see what was up. Take a look at this setting, is it obvious to you which state is active? I clicked around on it, and the state changed. Had this enabled it or disabled it? By carefully hovering my mouse over the options, I could see what I thought was the active state. Although, of course, I could have been wrong. I don't know of any…
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Private Eye is the only "Dead Tree" publication I buy. I think its satire misses the mark more often than not - but its investigative journalism and general muck-raking are second to none. The Eye has reluctantly been drawn into the digital age. It has a piss-poor website run by the sort of "tired and emotional" gnomes who struggle with concepts like sanitising user input. EXCLUSIVE Push this button to see the Eye's new owner... Meet Our New Owner!Private Eye is delighted to announce …
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Right, that's enough keyword stuffing! I've been trying to mount an OwnCloud instance via WebDAV. I kept receiving the error Mounting failed. SSL handshake failed: SSL error: sslv3 alert handshake failure Or SSL handshake failed: SSL alert received: Handshake failed The route of this problem seems to be that the version of libneon (the WebDAVS connector library) shipped with Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't play nicely with the SSL certificates issued by CloudFlare. Here's the solution I…
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