You probably know what a QR code is, but if you don’t, you likely used them when you’ve eaten out at a restaurant. Do you know you can generated them at the command line? Did you also know you can can generate wifi login credentials in the form of QR codes at the command line?

Generating QR Codes for Arbitrary URLs

While there are a ton of internet sites which will generate QR codes for arbitrary URLs, some of these function as intermediaries, with generated QR codes actually visiting something other than your URL first. Sometimes they advertise this fact (“Track the success of your marketing campaign!”) but if you want a safe way that the QR code just points at your own URL, without any dependencies on other sites, you want to generate your QR code yourself. Fortunately it is easy.

Continue reading “Linux Command Line QR Codes” →

I work from home. I wanted to be able to let my wife know, “Joelle is busy right now.”

This article will be fairly technical, but won’t give step-by-step instructions for everyone. It’s more meant to serve as an inspiration to other computer professionals — to determine how they might do something similar.

I love working from home, being able to have an environment that is set up exactly for me. Everything in my office, from the desk and chair I use, to the room’s lighting was designed to make me comfortable.

But I wanted something outside my office door to indicate I was busy that my wife could see — some sort of display — that was easy for both of us to use.

After all, my wife isn’t a fan of making unscheduled appearances on video meetings, and there are times I want to work uninterrupted.

Specifying My Requirements

Because I’m a technical professional, I naturally started by writing down my requirements. Here’s what I came up with:

Continue reading “Making a Linux-Based “On-Air” Light for My Home Office w/ Camera & Google Calendar Integration” →

I had a problem at home. I wanted to be able to do maintenance on my recursive DNS server without impacting my home network too significantly. It is exactly the kind of problem that an enterprise network or an ISP might deal with: sometimes you need to do work on a server.

I’ll admit my home network is a bit more complex than most. I’m a network engineer and open source networking software developer, so I built it more like an enterprise or small service provider than a typical home network. I need a place to try new technologies and connect home-built network devices and software stacks for testing. I even have multiple sites, two of which are shown here — my house and some data center space I rent.

Network Design

Here’s a greatly simplified diagram of what this network looks like:

The home network has several network segments, my user (my wife), some additional routing infrastructure not shown, and some servers. One of those servers runs a recursive DNS server. I have two connections to the internet for redundancy, one via DOCSIS and the other via DSL.

Continue reading “Anycast DNS with Raku Net::BGP” →