I’ve been using a Tada68 mechanical keyboard as my daily driver for the past 6 years. The keyboard is powered by an Atmel Atmega32U4 microcontroller, and is fully programmable with firmware such as QMK.

It’s now winter here in the UK, and like many people, I’ve noticed an increase in condensation on windows and some external walls in some areas of my home. So I decided to purchase a number of Sonoff temperature and humidity sensors to help me get a sense of the humidity levels throughout my home.

I recently had my old VDSL home internet connection upgraded to shiny new fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). As part of the upgrade my ISP sent me a new Eero 6 Wi-fi router to replace my old Huawei DG8041W. On paper the Eero 6 is a nice device, with Wi-fi6, a 1.2GHz quad core CPU and 512MB of RAM - quite impressive specs for a home router. The Eero is a wireless mesh device, providing the possibility of adding extra Eero nodes to provide blanket wi-fi coverage for your home.

For some time now I’ve been thinking of starting a blog about some of the things I’ve been working on and learning. It is good practice to record things we’ve done and learned and share them with others, and I wanted to give this a go myself. However, there always seemed to be something more important to do so I hadn’t got round to starting one. But recently I found some time to look into this.

Like many people these days I have various bits of infrastructure and software that I run to support internet services for my own personal domains, mostly email, DNS and web. I have a physical server colocated in a datacentre that hosted much of these services, but the colo costs have become quite expensive and running my own hardware is a bit of a liability. So I have been slowly moving all my stuff to AWS, which is the cloud hosting provider I am most familiar with.

Domain fronting is a technique that allows circumventing HTTP domain restrictions by leveraging the fact that some large web content providers do not check that the domain specified in the Host: header of the HTTP request matches the server_name in the TLS handshake.