Today is Saturday and, as such, a welcome opportunity to put one's feet up … I wish!

A few months ago we had the heating company in to perform a “hydraulic adjustment”. This is apparently a sophisticated procedure where the heating guy comes in and measures the size of all the rooms in the flat (actually in the end I did most of the measurements myself using my laser measuring device, which was a lot faster than the heating guy's dinky little folding ruler) as well as the size of the radiators. He takes that away and comes back a few days later to make intricate adjustments to the radiator valves that will equalise the flow of hot water to all the radiators in the house such that they all run as efficiently as possible.

So far, so good – except that, as it turns out, during the colder days over Christmas we found that it was quite impossible to heat our living room to a temperature of more than 17°C. We do like our blankets and hot-water bottles, and the rest of the flat, including our offices, is fortunately fine, but we would still prefer the living room to be … livable. I eventually managed to fix this by venting a huge amount of excess air from the living-room radiators; this must have been botched when the heating guys emptied and re-filled all of the pipes and radiators in the house so they could replace the valves. (I would have done that earlier, except that I had to go to the DIY store to pick up a radiator venting tool – I was quite sure that I had one somewhere but couldn't find it. At €1.50 for two this is not a huge investment, and the other one will probably turn up very promptly now that a replacement has been procured. Also, for the record, the two new ones are now in the big black toolbox with the red handles.)

Now that our living room is nice and cosy again, I spent the afternoon at my mum's where there were more domestic chores to perform. Apparently the electric rolling shutter in her kitchen lost its programming – while it could still be raised and lowered by pressing buttons, it should really do that on its own at given times, so I spent ten minutes poking rubber buttons on the controller to reprogram it. I'm probably going to have to do that again three months from now when spring comes, the sun rises earlier and sets later, and the time changes to DST; I'm not a huge fan of home automation via the Internet, but this is an instance where a quick visit to a web site would beat half an hour in the car, one way, plus figuring out (again and again) how to set up the times using a barely-readable LCD and five rubber buttons. I didn't stay around to see whether the shutter closed on its own, but OTOH I haven't had a complaint yet so it may actually have worked.

The other constant source of little annoyances is Mum's online banking – she's generally doing reasonably well on the Linux PC I got her to replace Dad's aging iMac when that broke down, and we trained her to use the little QR code scanner for the one-time PINs her bank requires for authentication. That thing, however, apparently lost its synchronisation and had to be reset from the bank branch office, after which we had to re-initialise it at our end. Normally I can fix computer stuff from home using a remote connection, but as long as there is no robot arm for the QR code scanner it is easier to sort this out on the spot. Plus, I get treated to delicious tea, cookies, and what must be the last Christmas stollen of the season, so what's not to like? And it's good to check up on the old lady every so often.

In the Strathspey server department, I'm happy to say that I figured out how to use nft for the anti-bot blocker – this used to be done with iptables, but since these days iptables is just a compatibility layer on top of nft, it's nicer to stay within that system (I think). It's also satisfying to use systemd to set all of this up automatically when the server boots, which fortunately happens very rarely. – The anti-bot blocker is part of the server's networking setup and is designed to keep out nosy “web crawlers” which are pointlessly trying to download all of the SCD database in order to train large language models for generative AI, and slowing everything down for legitimate users in the process; we keep a list of IP addresses that are known to be used by these bots and simply throw away any incoming traffic from those addresses, instead of replying to it. Also, now all my (important) VMs are in Zabbix so I can conveniently check on how they're doing on CPU usage, memory, and disk space (among many other things). Bliss.