I’m trying to get data out of BigQuery into Splunk and got the error:

Error in ‘dbxquery’ command: No value present

while searching in the Data Lab view.

Turns out, even though I’d configured auth in the connection, you have to add a null identity, so I just created a “token” type identity set the value to “x” and associated it with the connection and it seems to work so far!

This guide configures an OpenTelemetry Collector running in Kubernetes to ingest /var/log/auth.log from a Linux node and forward it to Splunk through the HTTP Event Collector (HEC).

The resulting Splunk events use:

index=monitoring
sourcetype=linux:auth
source=/var/log/auth.log
host=host1.example.com

Since I had to work it out myself and it wasn’t immediately clear, here’s the two main steps for hiding/disabling recaps in Slack (as of today, since I’m sure it’ll change in ten minutes).

Stop generating recaps

From the recap UI, click “Edit Channels”

Then “Stop receiving recaps”

And.. finally confirm stopping.

Remove it from the picker

To hide it from the bar on the left, go to preferences -> home -> untick recaps.

I’ve been playing around with building an audiobook app, mostly through using Codex to write it, but getting in and playing with Swift code periodically as well. I wanted to clip some words out of the awesome Dungeon Crawler Carl series to make a funny “new achievement” message, and couldn’t find an easy way to find where in the ~12 hour audiobook right words happened…

… so, as you might have guessed from the title of the post, I implemented automated transcription in Bleat (more details one day soon), which took no time at all either from the code side or the actual transcription side. My iPhone 16 Pro will happily transcribe a twenty minute chapter in 51 seconds, which is more than reasonable for a battery powered device sitting in my hand!

Annoyed by some of the default rules? Wish ruff just fixed everything magically for you when it can?

Add this to your settings.json and it’ll automagically run the fixes on save.

{
  "[python]": {
    "editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
      "source.fixAll.ruff": "explicit",
      "source.organizeImports.ruff": "explicit"
    }
  }
}

If you want to limit the fixes it applies you can set this in pyproject.toml:

[tool.ruff.lint]
# Only auto-fix these rule families/codes
fixable = ["F401", "I"]

# Alternatively:
# fixable = ["ALL"]
# unfixable = ["F401"]

It’s weird issue fixing week, one of my HomePod mini’s started playing up a while back and it basically was acting like the touch sensor was always “touched”. Before that it was randomly starting music every few minutes and stopping it, which was… a little cursed.

I think it might have gotten a weird voltage spike from the house power because the AC-DC power supply on one of my Sonoff smart switches on the same power board died around the same time. It worked with UART power, but just not from the wall power.

I finally fixed a weird issue i’ve had on the ESPHome builder in Home Assistant for YEARS… I couldn’t download firmware from the web UI. The logs would just show a HTTP 400 error with “Missing argument configuration”.

Turns out it was some odd Cloudflare cache interaction where it was dropping query string values - caching was set to “ignore query string” - but this wasn’t breaking anything else in the platform. Just this one specific thing.

This is what I use for the single-relay ESP32 board I have in my garage as the garage door controller.

This is the board:

Files

The Fusion360 model file based on this case model but I added the button.

ESPHome Garage Door Button Config

Basically you can tap the physical button or the “Garage Door Trigger” entity in Home Assistant and it’ll trigger the relay for 300ms which is enough for my garage door to think I pressed the button.

Yeah, it happened. Here’s the things I’m changing as I find them.

Safari Tabs

Go into settings -> apps -> Safari, set it to “bottom” so that you can get back to the tab view with one click rather than having to go into a menu etc.

I was trawling through the logs in my Home Assistant instance recently and this was coming up a lot:

2026-01-21 23:52:38.204 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.addons.options] Option 'require_ssl' does not exist in the schema for Node-RED (a0d7b954_nodered)

Took me a little bit to find it, but going to Settings -> Addons -> Node Red -> Configuration tab.. then clicking the … and opening the YAML config, I found an extra line in the config and removed it, fixing the issue. It would have been something from an old version that wasn’t removed automagically.