A while back I fixed some issues that Google reckoned were hurting indexing, and sure enough I’m now back up over 1,000 pages indexed. Hurrah! This really only matters if I want to search for something, but apparently others have found some shit useful enough to click on it anyway.
Last week, they emailed me again to say there’s another new issue, so off to check it out. Google decided that a page under /pages/ was the same as a different page, and overrode my user-selected canonical URL for it. That’s weird… I shouldn’t have anything at that URL.
You see for things that aren’t really blog entries (things that I may come back and update, and aren’t really date-specific) I throw them under content/pages, but the slug of it typically renders elsewhere. A good example is the sysadmin section. Some of these won’t render unless there’s an _index.md in them though, for reasons which have long-since escaped me.
So how to fix it? First, let’s add /pages/ to robots.txt to stop search engines crawling it. Easy. Next, let’s make it so Hugo won’t render them, but will still generate the empty directories:
# Generate a page.md which won't render
cat >> /tmp/page.md
---
build:
render: never
---
^D
# Put that empty page.md everywhere there's an _index.md
find content/pages/ -name '_index.md' | while read i; do cp /tmp/page.md "$i"; done
Commit these changes, rebuild, and public/pages no longer exists, but all the other URLs appear to work. Hurrah!
However, for some reason Netlify are still showing them on the live site, and I’m not sure why.
Update: 2024-04-12: Looks like Netlify still have the /pages/ despite it not existing locally for me on a build. When I look at the build results, they’re showing ~14 more pages than my local environment builds, so looks like I have more investigative work to do yet?
First thing I tried, updating HUGO_VERSION, which was previously 0.59.1, to my current local version 0.124.1. That’s… pretty far behind. Let’s see if that fixes it?
I don’t appear to have written down when we got it, but I’m fairly sure Grog talked me into taking his broken Saeco Intelia Evo when I picked up the UPS from him, which would put it just under three years ago. I’m not sure how long after that it was that I got it working… there’s a resistor ladder on the board which is used to calculate the current draw of the grinder, and it uses that for calculating the dose of coffee beans - one of those resistors had popped, I soldered another on top of it and we were using it since.
We’ve had a couple spots of trouble with it, it had a fairly minor leak somewhere with the hot water, and I didn’t feel like messing with potentially scalding water so I just pretended I didn’t see it. That ended up making the microswitch that tells if the side door is open stop working, so I just bridged it so that it thought it was always closed (fuck yeah, safety!). We then noticed a few months back that there was a bit of steam building up under the bean hopper, so Sabriena started looking at replacements… but true to form, we never pulled the trigger.
Today, Sabriena noticed that it was complaining there was no water in it, when it should have ordinarily flushed itself out and shut off. Popped it apart, and after a bit of poking around I figured out that the water level sensor’s corroded. Pulled it out, cleaned it up with some flux and reflowing the dodgy looking joints, and I got it working long enough to do one power-on line rinse and that’s it. It’s dead, Jim.
So I took it apart and took the opportunity to photograph the super-dodgy repair job I originally did - I wish I could tell you I went back and fixed this. I wish I could, but I can’t. I left it like that. I figured it would break again and I would have ordered the SMT resistor for it, but I didn’t, and it didn’t break in that way, it just kept chugging along.
Anyway, Greg appears to have bought the thing in December, 2015, and it looks like he replaced it in November, 2019. It sat, broken in his shed for two years before I picked it up, and we’ve had it for nearly 3, so I think it’s done a fairly good innings?
As mentioned at the end of the previous installment of office rennovations, I bought a Tuya-powered RGB light strip from Kmart. On the face, it seems okay: it boots up pretty fast (albeit defaults to “on” in a power failure, always), it’s bright but dims down pretty good without flickering noticeably and has a pretty good gamut of colors available with no bullshit like “16 color-safe HTML triplets only” like the dogshit RGB Christmas lights we bought.
So I set about hooking it up to tuya-local in our Home Assistant installation, and nothing. Check the logs… it’s crashing, throwing a traceback! I initially thought this was broken from my last time fucking about with it, but when I checked, no, this device is just really different and doesn’t seem supported by tuya-local yet.
So I popped it open for a look (it’s very easy to open) and it’s definitely not an ESP device. After taking a macro photo of it so I could fucking read it, I found it’s powered by a Beken BK7231N microcontroller, and some research suggests that most of the new Tuya stuff is coming out based on this chipset. Fuck.
Good news: there’s ESPHome-style LibreTiny and similar firmwares available for it, and flashing it looks pretty trivial! So warranties be damned, I soldered some wires up, dug out a MAX3232 and… nothing. Tried several different flashers, hooked up my oscilloscope, it just does not seem to respond. I can hook up my serial adaptor to UART2 and get some debug output:
[01-01 00:00:00 TUYA N][lr:0x5835b] < TuyaOS V:3.3.40 BS:40.00_PT:2.3_LAN:3.5_CAD:1.0.5_CD:1.0.0 >
< BUILD AT:2022_11_25_18_35_59 BY ci_manage FOR tuyaos-iot AT bk7231n >
IOT DEFS < WIFI_GW:1 DEBUG:1 KV_FILE:0 LITTLE_END:1 TLS_MODE:2 OPERATING_SYSTEM:9[01-01 00:00:00 TUYA N][lr:0x58365] oem_bk7231n_strip_ty:2.0.21
(shortened for brevity, it’s way more verbose than that)
I spent quite some time just trying to get anything out of the TX pin of the UART1, to no avail. Thought maybe I had them the wrong way around, so I swapped the pins around (from crossover to straight-through and back), still nothing.
Eventually I gave up, and someone on Discord suggested a provider named Athom, who appear to have the same thing with an open firmware already installed - just point it at your MQTT server and off it goes. So I’m thinking I’ll just give that a shot instead, and this might be the start of moving away from Tuya finally?
After making a trip back to HammerBarn to pick up a single solitary sheet of plywood, I have enough material to finish out the shelving, so on Friday that’s what I determined to do… it was getting done tonight, damn it, as I wanted the weekend to finish painting!
After a nervous start, again triple-checking my measurements, I made the final cuts, put some notches in it, assembled everything and nailed/screwed it all together. I managed to break my small drill-bit that I was using to pre-drill the nail holes, but I had everything done and broke it on what was basically the last one, so replacing it can wait.
Absolutely stuffed, I disassembled it one final time, placed it out on some timber stretched across two saw benches and used the roller to paint up the last of the paint on it… and ran out.
So back to HammerBarn on Saturday morning, around Noon, to pick up another 2L of the “Flooded Gum” leftover from Duncan’s bedroom, and I was able to finish it up. Another coat in the evening, and when it was touch-dry, I assembled everything for what I genuinely hope is the final time.
A few more sands and paint coats, and I’m pretty happy with how it looks. If I were more patient, I could probably get the finish smoother… but I’m absolutely knackered and just need a break from this. I can always pull everything off, put down another drop sheet, and start sanding it more in the future. For now, this is good enough.
I’ve not yet started loading it back up yet, wanting to wait for the acrylic paint to set up properly before I go filling it, but I’m excited! And the integrated workbench is already proving quite useful.
It really needs some lights though…
Unable to leave well enough alone after the last batch of renovations, I went ahead and bought the materials for some shelving on Friday and spent the weekend putting most of it together.
I made a bunch of measurements, drew up some plans, and then bought four sheets of 19mm plywood. I could have saved some money using chipboard or MDF, but I’ve not had the greatest luck with those and I wanted this to be strong. I could also have gone with dress timber, but that would have significantly inflated the cost and I don’t have the cabinet-making skills to not fuck it up, so this is a happy middle-ground.
As of tonight the bottom half is together and painted with primer, while I decide what colour to do it. The top half I actually miscounted (changing my mind part way through of how I would do it) and lack the material to finish properly. But it’s in, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s solid.
I originally wanted to do something like a tenon joint for the shelving, but after trying a couple of experiments on scrap I don’t really have the gear - or the skills to use the gear I have - for this, so I ended up just doing a partial slot on each board (about 20% on the horizontals and 80% on the verticals) and it slots together like a puzzle piece. I was slightly inaccurate (I think my tape measure is not very good, poor crafstman and all that) on some of them but it’s nothing that can’t be filled.
Most importantly, everything came out straight and level, and it should stay that way for many years to come.
I also bought some lighting for it… 5 meters of RGB tape and a Tuya-powered controller that I’m sure I won’t regret one bit. I’m nowhere near ready to light it, but it was there so I grabbed it. We’ll see how it goes.
