For a home automation project I needed to upload files to Google Drive v3. I use Node-RED together with Home assistant for adding “intelligence” to my home automation. My HP printer has a feature to scan documents to email. I wanted to use this feature to scan documents and automatically upload them as PDF to Google Drive. Within Node-RED the http request node is the obvious choice to accomplish this, but I found it challenging to get it uploading multipart-encoded payloads.

In this post I will show you how to use the Node-RED http request node to upload a file to Google Drive using the v3 API, using a multipart-encoded payload.

I’m collecting Dutch P2000 messages sent out by Dutch emergency services to “page” them. These public FLEX-protocol based messages are broadcasted all over the Netherlands and you can receive them via a cheap DVB-T-receiver. Sometimes, when I hear a siren in my neighbourhood (or wherever in the Netherlands I am), I’m curious as to what is happening. Accessing my smartphone, connecting via VPN en accessing my Elasticsearch cluster via Kibana does mostly satisfy my curiosity, but it’s not a convenient and fast process. Then why not use one of the many P2000 websites that are out there already? I simply don’t like them enough. Also, I love to play around with frontend-stacks (so many choices!), being mostly a backend/infrastructure kind of guy. So, that got me on the look for a cheap (or preferably free-tier) container-based hosting solution that can serve P2000 messages to other curious people like me.

On January 15 2022 a shockwave was sent around the whole world caused by the ‘2022 Hunga Tonga eruption and tsunami’. As an inhabitant of The Netherlands and it’s relative location on earth to Tonga (which is the opposite side of the world) I didn’t expect I would be able to read these effect from my Aquara ZigBee Humidity, Temperature and Pressure sensors, but yet I did:

To set your alpine-based container to output the date in your favorite local timezone, pass it the TZ=Europe/Amsterdam environment variable and also install the tzdata package using apk. A date command will then give you your local time instead of (the default) UTC time.

This is about my WiFi network set-up with Ubiquiti Access Points (AP’s) in a home situation, but without having (or wanting) physical hardware for running the Unifi Network Controller software on premise (required for set-up and management purposes). The software is therefore running as a container on a Virtual Machine in the Microsoft Azure cloud and AP’s are adopted by it via the ‘Layer 3 Adoption for Remote Unifi Controllers’ method. Because running the Unifi Network Controller web UI with a proper (valid and auto-renewing) LetsEncrypt web certificate and working websocket connections wasn’t trivial after all, that’s what I’m sharing in this article.