Today, I want to talk about something quite different: how I got back control of a Jablotron security system.

In the house we bought last year, there was a Jablotron security system. I am not particularly a fan of security system nor do we really need it. However, I am a fan of home automation. And I also dislike waste. Therefore, I wanted to use all this hardware and connect it ideally to Home Assistant. This is expensive hardware that is worth more than 4000 CHF. I was expecting a smooth journey, but I was wrong!

Normally, Jablotron systems connect to the MyJablotron cloud through LAN and also have GSM modules. These two connections were not possible since this system was not online anymore. Indeed the previous owners terminated the contract. The hardware was still working as an alarm system but entirely locally. However, it is possible to access the system through USB. And then there are ways to access it from Home Assistant, through an HACS application. Unfortunately, I did not have the master password, so I could not do anything with it. This makes sense since this is after all a security system.

So, I contacted the security firm that did the installation and requested them to give me the master password they had used. And they refused. Apparently, Jablotron only allows official installers to get the key. So, I proposed them to waive the guarantee and give me the code and they did not agree either. I also contacted several other companies and it was the same. They all could reset the system for me, but none of them were willing to give me the master password. This is unfortunately a case of "buying is not owning" which I hate.

So, I did the reset myself. I reset the full system myself with a jumper (and I obviously triggered the alarm in the process) and got inside, with the default installer code. And then the next blocker in this locked ecosystem appeared: the installer software is not available. Fortunately, I could find it online through a reseller (had to pay 75 EUR for it) and got the software and could finally control the full system. Since the system was fully reset, I had to enroll and configure all devices again myself. It was quite tedious but the process is simple. There is really no need for a professional to do that. I could restore devices, sections and users. I had to change some batteries, but overall, the system was working well. The only disappointing thing is that these devices do not like Eneloop batteries because they have a lower voltage output and lead to a battery alert.

With my system back in my control, I could finally connect it in HA. Since Jablotron is connected through USB to HA, I used the Jablotron 100 HACS integration. It worked quite well and is easy to configure. It takes a while to get readings from all the devices, but this makes sense given the low-power devices. These devices are not made for constant but for alerting. Some of these sensors also have temperature sensors that complete my own sensors quite well. I also used the Alarmo plugin to get cleaner dashboards and integrate external devices in the future.

I understand the need for security. But locking down a system so much that even his owner cannot access is simple anti-consumerism. These companies (Jablotron is not the only one) are doing that to ensure they are the ones that can manage it (and charge for it). This is sad, but it unfortunately getting more and more common in the Tech world. In the end, I was able to resolve the issue, but many Jablotron customers would not go through with such manual DIY work.

I hope this can be useful to someone and I wish it was not necessary to spend so much time to take real ownership of a system I already owned.

Recently, I have bene doing some upgrades and refresh to my homelab rack. Some of these updates are just getting started, but several of these are completed already.

Snce we moved to the new house, we have 10G internet. So, I upgraded the networking on the rack to be 10G network. This means, two 10G switches and two 10G NIC (Intel) on the firewall server. I also installed one 10G NIC on my desktop computer to get 10G internet. I plan to upgrade the other two servers to 10G ethernet in the next few months. Obviously, I do not really need 10G internet on my computer, but it was fun to achieve that.

I have also installed a new UPS in the rack. I went with Powerwalker this time because it much more affordable than APC. The reviews on that UPS looked good, so I am trying it. So far, it has been really good. It can keep my homelab running for about 45 minutes. This was necessary multiple times during the installation of our solar panels.

After many years of service, the hardware in some of the servers needed upgrading. I had some issues on the hardware of the firewall and the main server did not have enough RAM to handle all the services. I was running Openproject and InfluxDB (among others) on the same machine and this did not work well with 4Go of RAM. So, I refreshed the entire hardware and also changed the case. The cases from Norco and Ri-vier were quite nice but also very short so not great for airflow and for extensibility. I switched to Lanberg cases for the servers that were upgraded.

Talking about servers, I also added a new server for Home Assistant. I got rid of Samsung Smarthings and Hue and replaced everything with Home Assistant. I can now control many things in the house and I have many more plans. I am really impressed by this software, it's nothing short of amazing.

I also changed my KVM switch. I had an hardware KVM switch with a hardware monitor console. But the keyboard was falling into pieces and the connectivity was ancient (VGA). So I switched to multiple JetKVM. I am very happy about them. They are much easier to setup than piKVM and and they are cheaper. I also ordered a 3D printed rack mount on ebay.

The next thing I want to refresh is the NAS. The hardware is also in need of a refresh because it still has really old hardware (10+ years old at this point). However, I also want to switch the RAID to ZFS (mostly to learn) instead of LVM + mdadm. But this means either getting rid of a lot of data or replacing all disks. And disks are currently insanely expensive.

As for software, all servers are still running Gentoo. I am still quite happy about it, even though I would sometimes prefer faster upgrades.

Here is a picture of the rack in its current state:

What about you? Do you have a homelab?

Again, it has been too long since I posted on this blog. I am still very busy between family, work and my other blog.

I wanted to post a short update on my transition back to linux. For the last 5 or 6 years of so, I have been running Windows on my desktop computers. My servers are still all on Gentoo. But it took me too much time to handle issues on the Linux desktop and time was exactly what I did not have. So, I opted out for Windows. I was also playing multiple games and it was much easier for me to do it on Windows.

I was still doing development and this is something that I do on Linux. With Windows Subsystems for Linux (WSL), I felt I had found the best of both worlds. I did all my development on WSL.

This is not the first time I am transitioning. I used to have Linux on my computers, then Windows again for a while. In 2013, I transitioned back to Linux and then back to Windows for simplicity.

So, what changed? I got fed up with some projects and changes by Microsoft:

1. The idea of Windows Recall is so bad for me that it should never have made it to be a project. If you are not aware, Windows Recall is a feature that takes a screenshot of your desktop every few seconds. The stated goal is to help us remember what we do on our computer and help us troubleshoot. I cannot believe they would implementation such a stupid thing on a computer. This is a disaster for privacy even if implemented properly (and the first implementation was far from proper). I would never run a computer where Windows Recall is enabled. This was never enabled for me because my PC was apparently not Copilot+ rated.

2. Microsoft keeps pushing for AI features into Windows. Over the years, Windows 11 has become steadily worse in my opinion. And now Microsoft is trying to push AI into the OS directly, but nobody wants that. Microsoft should push features the user wants, not force AI on everybody just because this fuels their share price.

3. Recently, it was disclosed that Microsoft is storing Bitlocker recovery keys on their servers. Bitlocker is Microsoft solution for full-disk encryption. But if the keys are stored on their cloud, this kinds of ruins the value of full-disk encryption.

There are other small reasons, but this boils down to the fact that I lost trust in Microsoft.

SO, I moved back to Linux. I pondered going back to Gentoo again, but I simply do not have enough time to tinker with it on a desktop computer where any upgrade takes forever. So, after some research, I decided to go with CachyOS, a distribution based on Arch Linux. I already have experience with Arch Linux. The focus on performance of CachyOS is talking to me. And the reviews I have read have convinced me.

So far, I have converted my laptop and desktop to CachyOS and everything has been very smooth. I am also discovering btrfs which I had never used before, switched to a new bootloader (Limine) and a new desktop environment (KDE Plasma). So, there is a lot to be learned.

Overall, I have found alternatives to every software I was using on WIndows, but one. The only thing I could not do is replace Aida64 which was configuring the LCD display on my ASUS ROG AIO. But this is a small price to pay. Once I upgrade this computer, I will use an AIO that can be configured on Linux.

And this time, I also tried playing games. I rarely have time for gaming, but when I do, I like to have it ready. And I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the two games I am playing (Path of Exile and Satisfactory) are both working perfectly fine on Steam on Linux.

What about you? What OS do you use?

It has been too long again since I wrote here. But with family, my other blog and work, I did not get a chance to write here for a while.

Today is going to be a short update. I recently updated my main projects to use C++26. There is not much I can use at this point, but I have upgraded my compilers to GCC-15 and Clang-20 so that I can access most things. I will probably do some minor updates of the code in the coming weeks/months to see what I can add. What I am really waiting for is the concepts and the meta-programming, which are not yet in the base compilers. These two features are really going to make a huge difference on how we write C++ code.

In the last two months, I have started learning some Rust. Since I believe the best way to learn a language is by writing code, I quickly got into coding. I have ported a (small) part of my ETL and DLL libraries to Rust. I came to the point where I can train a simple Dense Neural Network on MNIST and it works. Of course, I also tried to make it as fast as possible. Currently, it is relatively close to at about 30% slower than ETL on a CPU and without MKL.

Overall, Rust is an interesting language. Its borrow checker and strong compiler contracts are definitely making the code safer. On the other hand, it also makes the code very strict. And some things that are very easy to write in C++ become very difficult to write in Rust.

Here are some of the issues I found with Rust:

1. The generics are very limited. Compared to the level of meta-programming we can do in C++ with templates, the comparison does not even start. Everything must be tied to Traits (a bit like concepts in this case) and we can't specialize code based on the type.

2. The SIMD library is also quite limited. I am currently using the portable-simd library from nightly Rust and it gets the job done. But we are again limited to the common interface between integers and floating points since we cannot specialize and unfortunately, some of the things are not defined for both. For instance, I could not get FMA in my code and I cannot easily tune the size of the vectors to the types.

3. Because of the borrow-checker, we are also not allowed to do some expressions where we mix mutable and immutable references, like x = b * x + d (x is once mutable and once immutable), so we either need to do two operations (slow) or do some inplace wrappers instead of relying on expressions (ugly

4. Currently, there is a lot of overhead to the parallelism I used (through rayon). Compared to simply using a simple thread pool, this is quickly much more complicated and apparently much more overhead. I am using much higher thresholds for parallelizing operations in my Rust library than I am in C++.

I should still mention that this was probably not the best project to start in Rust since C++ excels at templates while Rust does not. But it was fun. And it was not that difficult for me to quickly get into Rust. But it will take a longer time to become an expert.

While I enjoy writing Rust, I do enjoy writing C++ much more, so I really hope I can keep on writing C++ for a long time.

What about you? Anybody tried Rust?

In the last few months, I have been working on refreshing my Expression Templates Library (ETL) project with modern C++. I am happy to report that I have now finished the refresh. It took me longer than I expected and I also had less time than I expected. But I am very happy about the result.

The main change in etl is the use of concepts. Expression Templates are making heavy use of SFINAE. And I was able to replace every single usage of SFINAE with concepts. I was also able to replace many assertions with concepts instead.

In most cases, I am using concepts instead of the typename declaration. For instance

template <typename A, typename M, cpp_enable_iff(is_4d<A>)>
static void apply(A&& in, M&& m, size_t c1, size_t c2, size_t c3) {

becomes

template <etl_4d A, typename M>
static void apply(A&& in, M&& m, size_t c1, size_t c2, size_t c3) {

This makes the declaration much simpler to read. In some cases, I had to use requires. For instance, here is the old definition of sub_view:

template <typename T, bool Aligned>
struct sub_view<T, Aligned, std::enable_if_t<!fast_sub_view_able<T>>> final {

and here is the new one:

template <typename T, bool Aligned>
requires(!fast_sub_view_able<T>)
struct sub_view<T, Aligned> final {

This also explains the requirements much better than using SFINAE. In most cases, concepts should be faster to compile than the old enable-if stuff. However, I have not yet had time to measure that.

I also made many small cleanups to the code, but they are probably not worth discussing.

As mentioned in my last article, I am now using neovim instead of vim. I just wanted to comment shortly on this change.

I have been using vim as my IDE for many years now (more than 10 years at least). But at the beginning of the year, I switched to neovim instead.

neovim is a fork of vim, so it is quite similar, but it has some very important differences. It started in 2015, after a multithreading patch was rejected from vim.

Here are some of the advantages:

• Very powerful Builtin Langauge Server Protocol (LSP)

• Faster startup

• Builtin LUA support (the configuration can be written entirely in LUA)

• Asynchronous tasks (was later added to vim)

A lot of things are compatible between both editors. When I started with neovim, I simply copied over my vim configuration and started using neovim with only very minor changes.

But what really convinced me to keep using neovim was the LSP. This feature and the great plugins that make use of it greatly simplify how to deeply integrate C++ into neovim. I am now taking advantage of the clang tooling to analyze C++ code on the fly. And I get great autocompletion as well.

All of this is doable with vim as well, but the last time I tried with vim, it was a nightmware to configure. With the help of (quite a few) plugins, I could setup automcompletion in a great way. This allows me to jump to declarations and definitions very easily.

I am far from being a neovim expert, but I am very happy with this tool. It definitely makes my life easier for configuring complex features, compared to vim.

If you are interested, you can find my neovim configuration in my dotfiles repository<https://github.com/wichtounet/dotfiles>. It's very fresh because it was previously saved on another place and was recently copied there. I plan to improve it and little by little rewrite it in LUA. There are still some experimental stuff and it could be improved significantly. But I am really happy with the features configured.

What about you? What do you think of neovim?

I am happy to announce the release of budgetwarrior 1.1.0.

The last release of budgetwarrior was more than 5 years ago. So, once I finished my C++20/C++23 refresh of the code, I decided it was a good time to generate a new release. There has been many improvements in this new version:

• Many new graphs on the web interface

• Add support for tracking stock values

• Significant speed improvements if you have a lot of data in the tool

• Assets can be set as inactive to be hidden

• Introduction of the FI Net Worth

• Better support of asset classes

• Many small bug fixes

If you want to use the latest version, you can now use the docker image that I am publishing frequently. This docker image is what I use, so it should be fairly up-to-date. * budgetwarrior on docker hub <https://hub.docker.com/r/wichtounet/budgetwarrior>

Otherwise, you can of course compile it from the sources (another docker image is available as a build image). For this, you will need a very recent GCC (13+) or Clang (16+) compiler.

Most of the new features have been implemented a while ago, for my personal usage. The main recent changes are improvements in the code, related to using C++20 and C++23. I plan for all my projects to be compiled with C++23 by default. The reason is mostly so I can really learn about these features, since I cannot use them all at work. On that note, I was a bit disappointed by the support in clang, especially in libc++. I had to work around a few limitations in order to support clang.

The main C++20 feature that I am using in budgetwarrior is ranges. I have been able to improve many pieces of code from using loops and multiple ifs, to using a range. I have implemented many transforms and filters for budgetwarrior. And I am quite happy about the result. For instance:

bool budget::account_exists(const std::string& name){
        for(auto& account : all_accounts()){
                if(account.name == name){
                        return true;
                }
        }

        return false;
}

became:

bool budget::account_exists(const std::string& name){
        return !ranges::empty(all_accounts() | filter_by_name(name));
}

or here is another example of using ranges:

if (accounts.data() | not_id(id) | active_today | filter_by_name(account.name)) {
    throw budget_exception("There is already an account with the name " + account.name);
}

This is likely the biggest change, but I have made other improvements based on recent versions of C++:

• Use of std::format

• Use of the spaceship operator

• Use of template lambdas

• Use of std::string_view

• Use of std::filesystem

• Use of std::map::contains (and other such functions)

Overall, it was a lot of fun and I could significantly improve the code by using these new features (and more).

I am also taking advantage of clang-tidy now. I have added a clang-tidy configuration to my projects so that I can quickly check everything. I have also integrated clang-tidy in neovim (yes, I switched from vim to neovim, more on that later maybe) and this shows in real time where I could improve the code.

Finally, another change is that I am now taking advantage of Github Workflows. Every time I push to the repo, everything is compiled with the two compilers I support. This allows me to keep compatibility between both. In the future, I plan to add a few more tools to the workflows for code analysis. This is also an opportunity for me to learn about these workflows, which I never used before.

I am quite glad to be working on these projects again eve though I do not have much time. It was really fun to use all these new features in budgetwarrior. Next, I plan to refresh the code of ETL. And since I want to refresh my GPU skills as well, I will also work on etl_gpu_blas.

I can't believe it's been about 5 years since the last update on this blog. For those, who are wondering what is happening, here is a short update.

About 6 years ago, I have finished my Ph.D. and about 5 years, I started to work as a software engineer, at Verisign. I am now a Senior Software Engineer, still at Verisign. After I started working professionally, I did not spend much time on my personal projects anymore. Before, my personal projects were part of my Ph.D., so it made sense to posts some updates on this blog and I had time to also post other articles.

But probably another bigger factor is that I started another blog in 2017, The Poor Swiss <https://thepoorswiss.com>. This is not a technical blog but a blog on personal finance, related to Switzerland. I have written more than 400 articles on this blog and I am still writing about one article a week these days. This takes a lot of time and made me scale down even more on my personal projects. The only project that continued getting some improvements was budgetwarrior since I am using it almost every day.

It's obviously worth mentioning that I got married about 5 years ago and that we now have a son, almost two years old. This obviously takes a lot of time!

So, why am I posting this short update today? I recently started missing working on personal projects. And I realized I had gotten out of touch with recent C++. It is a bit disappointing but my C++ level is becoming worse since I have started working professionally on C++. So, I learned in details about C++20 and C++23 and decided to apply some of it to my personal projects.

I have made significant cleanups to budgetwarrior, using C++23 by default now and switching to GCC 15 and Clang 16 as the default compilers. I plan to continue working on budgetwarrior_web, the web interface for budgetwarrior next. This project will also be converted to C++23. After that, I will probably continue with ETL and DLL. And hopefully, I plan to dedicate some time to adding more features to ETL and DLL as well. Thor OS is currently not on my list because I don't have the kind of energy and time this project requires.

I also hope I will be posting some more updates on this blog, but I will not adhere to any posting schedule. At least, I will not let five years go by before the next update!

I'm happy to announce the release of budgetwarrior 1.0.1. This new version contains a series of improvement over the 1.0 version and some new features.

I haven't been very active this last month. I have been working a bit on budgetwarrior for features I needed for my budget. I've also been contacted with questions on my thor operating system and since that point I've doing some work on thor as well.

This new version of budgetwarrior has quite a few new features even though it's a minor version.

Note: The data from all the views is totally randomized and does not make sense ;)

Retirement Calculator

The biggest novelty in this version is the addition of a retirement calculator. This is still very basic, but it may give information on how close (or far) you are from early retirement. Here is what the view gives you:

Using your annual withdrawal rate and expected Rate Of Return, it can compute how many years you will need to reach your goals Financial Independence (FI). It will also gives you your FI ratio and a few more information about your savings rate, income, expenses and so on. It's nothing very fancy but it can be very useful.

New features

I've also added a few graphs based on the budget information. The first is the visualization of the expenses over time:

This can be pretty useful to see how are your expenses going. Even if your income is going, expenses should not necessarily go up (you should save more!).

Another new view can show your asset allocation over time and the current asset allocation of your entire net worth or specifically for your portfolio.

This is also really useful if you want to have a global view of your asset allocation into bonds, stocks and such.

There are also two other new minor features. You can now search expenses by name. This is really useful once you start having many expenses. Another new view is the Full aggregate view. Before, you could aggregate your expenses by month or year, now they can be aggregate since the beginning of the budget. With this, you can see how much you spend on coffee since you started keeping track of your budget. For me, it's a lot! Both these features are available both in command line and in the web interface.

layman -a wichtounet
emerge -a budgetwarrior

git clone --recursive git://github.com/wichtounet/budgetwarrior.git
cd budgetwarrior
git checkout 1.0.1
make
sudo make install

About a year ago, I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. This week, I decided to get rid of Vivaldi and replaced with Google Chrome. In this post, I'm going to outline the reasons why I got rid of it.

Before, I switched to Vivaldi because Firefox was dropping support for XUL/XPCOM extensions and I was using Pentadactyl. In fact, Pentadactyl was the only reason I was using Firefox. It was slow and bloated and a bit unstable, but the extension was making it worth. Since they are dropping support for such extensions, I did not want to use Firefox anymore. So I switched to Vivaldi with Vimium. It's not as great as Firefox plus Pentadactyl. But it's a more customizable version of Google Chrome on which it's based.

But, in that year or so of using Vivaldi, I have had many issues. Some of them were not too bad and there was some workarounds. But they continued to pile up and they did not fix any of them so now, I decided it's too much.

Since the beginning, it always has been slow. It's not really bad, but still noticeable compared to Chrome. Especially opening Vivaldi is pretty bad. This is something I can live with, but they should really do something to make it faster.

The thing that I had the most issues with is multimedia. For instance Youtube (but all the other platforms have the same issues).

The first problem with media is to get a video in fullscreen. Most of the time, when I press the fullscreen button on Youtube, it grays out the screen and I have to press ESC. If I do that around five to ten times, it finally goes fullscreen. It may be because of my multi-monitor setup but Google Chrome has no issues whatsoever with that. It's pretty painful to do, but again I could live for since I don't use full screen a lot.

A second problem I had with media is they were running too fast. I'm not kidding, really too fast, not too slow. The media was running about twice too fast, you could see the seconds going fast on Youtube. I never seen this issue in any other tool, but it was happening at every start of Vivaldi. The fix was to restart Vivaldi every time this happened and the video played normally.

Another problem I had from the beginning is to make all HTML5 videos work. You have to download the binary plugins from Chrome to let Vivaldi play all HTML5 videos. It's not a big deal, but the problem is that they are overwritten after each update of Vivaldi. So you have to do it all the time.

A new media issue I had on the last update of Vivaldi is with Flash. At the beginning it was working even if it was outdated. I just had to confirm to run it with a warning. But, since the last update, I only had the warning that it was outdated. But I could not confirm to use it, the option was not here anymore. And it was still happening after I updated Flash... The only option to run Flash was to use a private navigation window...

And finally, I had another big issue with the last version of Vivaldi as well. The browser keeps crashing on my work computer. It can stay up a few minutes and then crash. The complete interface is not updated. I can still press the tabs and I can see the title of the window change, but the interface does not update. Again, it may come from my special window manager (I use awesome), but it's the only application not working...

With all these issues and especially the last two new problems, I decided it was time to cut the losses. So I reinstalled Google Chrome, transferred my plugins and everything worked like a charm. I still use Vimium to use vim bindings so my usage of the browser does not change. Of course, I don't have the customization that I had with Vivaldi. I would really really like to get rid of the address bar in the browser. I would also like to significantly reduce the size of the tab bar. But I prefer to live without these improvements than with so many bugs. I think Vivaldi is a good idea, but with a terrible implementation.

I also considered qutebrowser as an alternative. But for now it's still missing many features that I don't want to get rid of. So I will stay with Google Chrome for the time being.

What about you ? Do you have any experience with Vivaldi ?