Revised smart doorbell adapter circuit

In a previous post, I described issues encountered when integrating the Unifi G4 Doorbell with a digital chimebox. I designed an adapter circuit, and it worked for a few months; however, eventually I started encountering problems and upon further investigation discovered that some of the assumptions I made about the behavior of the Unifi chime adapter module were incorrect. With this new information, I designed a new circuit which is actually simpler and should be more reliable.

Pulseaudio configuration for soundboard routing

Pulseaudio has been the default audio engine in Ubuntu for several years now, and fortunately it has a very flexible module system that lets you route and mix audio. Today, we’ll be looking at how we can set it up to mix mic and soundboard inputs into a virtual source.

Adapting a smart doorbell to an incompatible digital chime

Update (2021-12-11): It turns out some of the assumptions I initially made were incorrect, and the adapter circuit described within eventually stopped working. After further investigation, I have made a revised circuit. Refer to the new post For a few months, I’ve been using an Ubiquiti G4 Doorbell, but recently chose to upgrade my mechanical chimebox to a digital one. Though The Ubiquiti store lists the NuTone LA600WH as compatible, it turns out there are some caveats which I managed to overcome by conjuring up an adapter from parts I had lying around. This technique can likely be adapted to work with other doorbells or chimeboxes that don’t play nice with each other, and avoids spending money on a commercially-available adapter.

Dependency and build management for sourcemod with sourceknight

Though I haven’t been playing with it for long, I’ve found that compiling plugins for sourcemod is a huge hassle, mostly due to how dependencies are managed – that is, they really aren’t. For those who don’t know what sourcemod is, you probably have no interest in reading this article. But, if for whatever reason you want to read it anyway, sourcemod is a mod for Source engine game servers that provides support for custom scripts and plugins. The Source engine is fairly old, dating back to Half-Life 2, but many games based on it such as Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive still have a thriving community with active custom servers. Many of these community servers rely on sourcemod to provide various features as well as support for custom game modes. Unfortunately, the state of sourcemod plugin development is largely “download a bunch of files, put them somewhere, hopefully have them organized correctly, and pray.” I aimed to fix that through the creation of the tool I’m writing about today: sourceknight.

Tools to check for compromised Keepass passwords

It’s 2020, and by now everyone should know the basics of password hygiene: use strong passwords, don’t reuse them across sites, etc. A password manager such as Keepass is an essential tool for keeping track of all the passwords you inevitably end up with under this set of rules. Unfortunately, no matter how good your passwords are, there’s always a chance that they’ll get compromised. For example, a website might have a breach and someone can obtain your password regardless of how hard it would have been to guess. In cases like these, services like Have I Been Pwned can let you know this has happened. However, if your password is leaked in something like a large credential-stuffing dump, it might not be obvious which sites you may need to change your password on.