Avatar photoShane Baldacchino

Installing & Integrating Clipsal Wiser Smoke Alarms In To Home Assistant & Amazon Alexa

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Recently I installed a 40kw battery and as a result of doing this and complying with Australian Standards, I needed to install an additional smoke alarm. Given the need to add a new alarm and my drive for consistency throughout my house I was on the hunt for smoke alarms that can integrate in to … Read more

Part 2 – Building A Multi-Subscription Azure Savings & Score Card Report – Visualisation and Email

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Have you read Part 1 of this multi part post on creating a Multi-Subscription Azure Savings & Score Card Report? If not you can bring yourself up to speed here But to recap. Cost, it’s something that a lot of organisations struggle with when operating in the cloud. I have authored many posts on mechanisms … Read more

Part 1 – Building A Multi-Subscription Azure Savings & Score Card Report – Data Collection & Insights

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Cost, it’s something that a lot of organisations struggle with when operating in the cloud. I have authored many posts on mechanisms you can take to reduce your costs, and they broadly apply across all the hyperscalers, but as they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The sunlight I am referring to is cost visibility. … Read more

Downgrading From Azure Ultra Disks & Premium SSD V2 to Premium SSD/Standard SSD/Standard HDD

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Storage can be one of those big rocks in terms of cost in the cloud, regardless of which public cloud you choose. By using platforms such as Azure Monitor you can validate actual I/O usage versus procured performance. So why this post? I am currently working with an organisation driving efficiency in to their tech … Read more

Ditch the Remote: Aesthetically clean control for Ventair SkyFan DC with Clipsal, Sonoff, MQTT, Tasmota Home Assistant & TUYA

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Do you like the trend of remotes for appliances? I don’t. They often look our of place, require you to drill tiny holes in walls for mounts and even still, they can go missing. Let alone, they need batteries and you never can find them when you need them. But modern devices do more than … Read more

Importing External GSuite, GMail and Office 365 Calendars into a single GSuite Calendar using Google Apps Script

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Do you need to manage multiple calendars? I do. In my day to day I need to keep track of my work calendar (GSuite), my personal calendar (GSuite) and a customers Office 365 Calendar. There are two distinct problems that led me to crafting this solution. Problem No 1 : Managing 3 calendars is just … Read more

Monitoring Compressor Tank Pressure and Counting Refill Cycles Using a Pressure Transducer, an Arduino, Home Assistant and MQTT

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I am the kind of person who operates on data. I also like tools and want to maintain them well. For many of my small engines I use hour meters to provide me the data to indicate when to perform maintenance . I was looking for a project of late and thought, what could I … Read more

Setup Amazon Workspaces Pools Using FSLogix and Okta

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Amazon Workspaces Pools recently launched on June 27th 2024, it augments the Amazons Workspaces line up by providing non-persistent desktops in the cloud. In terms of a price to value ratio, this offering greatly reduces the cost to serve when comparing against Amazon Workspaces Personal, Amazon Workspaces Core and other VDI solutions (Citrix, Azure Virtual … Read more

Lessons Learnt Building An AI-Powered People Counter

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Recently I started working for a relatively new AWS partner (V2 Digital) leading a team of builders. I author this post 4 months after AWS Sydney Summit 2024. Our goal for summit was simple. How do we differentiate ourselves from all of the other AWS partners out there? We didn’t want to blend in to … Read more