A week of small fixes and new projects (5–11 November 2026)

I was away seeing family for a few days. In between that and getting back to things, I spent some time on the van’s dashboard and started a couple of projects I’d been meaning to get to.

A battery reading that stood still

The starter battery card on my Node-RED dashboard was showing a voltage that seemed stuck. The flow was only sending a new MQTT message when the alarm changed level, so the card kept showing the voltage from the last change. The two jobs need different rules. The card should show the latest reading, and my phone only needs a notification when the alarm level changes. I’ve worked out where to make the change and still need to try it on the van.\n

Learning Ansible on a server I already use

I’ve been looking for a practical way to learn infrastructure as code. The question I settled on was fairly straightforward. If my VPS disappeared tomorrow, how much of it could I rebuild from what I’ve written down?

I started with an Ansible playbook that checks what’s already running and leaves the server alone. That first audit ran successfully. The next part is turning what I’ve found into a setup I can try on a fresh machine.

A ZIP for Tape attachments

I also started a little tool for downloading the files on a Tape record. Paste a record link and it bundles the files from the record’s file fields into one ZIP. The first demo gave me five PDFs in one download after I fixed how the tool reads Tape’s attachment details. Signing in with Tape is still on the list.

I also got to try a restore in Tape Vault. That’s a longer story, so I’ve given it a post of its own.