A chunk of me online
Notes on WordPress, Symfony, Linux, home automation and free software. Written from the trenches.
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Not everyone has to build a startup
This morning I watched an entrepreneur look down on the life of the majority. It’s high time we reclaimed the “vulgar.”
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Prosegur Alarms: A Step Back in Home Assistant Integration
In the world of home automation, integration between devices and services is key to ensuring a seamless and convenient experience. That’s why I always appreciate it when a service provider or manufacturer facilitates access to their API, allowing the community (or the company itself) to develop integrations for platforms like Home Assistant. Unfortunately, this support is not always maintained, and…
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Home Assistant: My Laundry Room Automations
At home, we have our washing machine and tumble dryier in the laundry room in the attic. When the attic door is closed it’s really difficult for us realizing when the washing machine and/or the tumble dryer have finished the corresponding washing/drying cycles. Because of this, taking advantage of the home automation system based on Home Assistant, I’ve built a…
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Turning the door intercom into a smart intercom (and II)
Several months ago I proposed turning my door intercom into a smart intercom by using an Asterisk IP PBX installed on a Raspberry Pi, and with an I/O hat, according to what I explained in a previous post. I managed to progress up to the point I already could pick up and hang the intercom, and open the door remotely……
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My personal experience with COVID
By the end of March I started to feel wrong with what seemed a sinusitis with a lot of mocus and fever. My doctor prescribed antibiotics, and I spent a whole week taking them. I took April 1st and 2nd off from work because I still wasn’t feeling totally OK… On Monday April 4th I decided to go to the…
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Turning the door intercom into a smart intercom (I)
Keeping on with the hard task of turning my home into a smart home, I want to build a VoIP gateway for the door intercom. Using it, if the postman brings an Amazon parcel and rings the intercom I won’t have to rush down two floors of stairs (as my office is in the attic) to answer the intercom before…
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Validating JWT Access Tokens in PHP using AWS API Gateway and Lambda Authorizers
I’ve written an article for the Okta Developer blog about how to validate JWT Access Tokens using an AWS Lambda Authorizer written in PHP to secure access to an AWS API Gateway. It seems complicated, isn’t it? To write this article I had to make some R+D work, as it includes up-to-date pieces of information that cannot be found anywhere…
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SQL Injection in PHP: Practices to Avoid
I’ve written an article for the Okta blog about SQL Injection vulnerabilities in PHP and how to avoid them. You can check it here: https://developer.okta.com/blog/2020/06/15/sql-injection-in-php
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O Holy Night, Spanish version
Recently, according my English listening abilities have improved, I’ve discovered the depth of some English and American Christmas Carols. In Spanish, most of the existing Christmas Carols can be summarized as: party, fiesta, fish which are drinking in the river, trotting donkeys, and other consequences related to happiness caused by God becoming a man. Only a few Christmas songs invite…
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I want to automate my home lights, but nobody sells me what I need
I’d like to automate my home. I’d like having all my electrical circuits centralized and remotely managed, and being able to turn on and off lights from outside home, or in a scheduled way. Pressing a button when exiting home so all the house lights turn off immediately would be very cool, and the perfect solution to my kids’ carelessness…
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Can you license under the GPL a software requiring payments to work?
Some days ago, in the local Spanish WordPress Slack, I kept an interesting conversation about if a WordPress plugin, licensed under the GPLv2, may include a piece of code that disables the plugin, totally or partially, if a valid activation code is not entered in the plugin configuration backend. That is: if GPL-licensed software can be comercialized under the freemium model. My…