Blog
Technical articles and how-tos
15 Jun 2026
Solar Energy Management with Home Assistant: Pool Heating
We have a solar power system with a battery, and a pool heated by a heat pump. The obvious goal: use excess solar energy to heat the pool for free. The naive solution — turn the heat pump on when there is surplus, turn it off when there isn't —...
10 Jan 2025
TeddyCloud on a Public Server IP with LetsEncrypt
TonieBoxes are a great kind of toy for fathers of young children. It allows them to play music or audio books on their own, just by placing funny little figures on it. It's cute, cuddly, extremely intuitive, and not that technically complex....
18 Jul 2022
Sync Zotero Library to Nextcloud
For my research, I'm using Zotero for bibliography management. It's free, it's great, and it fits perfectly for my needs. In this blog post, I show how to configure Zotero to synchronize your Zotero Library to Nextcloud. For some of the research...
15 Dec 2021
Controlling a TOLO Steam Bath with Home Assistant
This one started, as many of my side projects do, with a piece of hardware sitting in front of me and the nagging question: why can't I control this from Home Assistant? A while ago I built a steam bath together with a member of my family. The...
14 Jun 2021
GPG Agent for SSH Authentication (Update)
In my last post regarding the usage of GPG Agent for SSH Authentication (read here) I presented my first solution to replace the default OpenSSH Agent with GPG's SSH Agent support. With the update to Ubuntu 21.04 I had to reconfigure this, since...
29 Jun 2020
Kubernetes Cluster on Hetzner Bare Metal Servers
If you want to run your own Kubernetes Cluster, you have plenty of possibilities: You can set up a single node cluster using minikube locally or on a remote machine. You can also set up a multi node cluster on VPS or using managed cloud providers...
2 Mar 2020
Maintenance of Long-Living Smart Contracts
Last week at the 7th Collaborative Workshop on Evolution and Maintenance of Long-Living Systems, together with Sven Peldszus, I presented a paper regarding the Maintenance of Long-Living Smart Contracts. Lohr, M., & Peldszus, S. (2020)....
29 Dec 2019
Gitlab on a Diskstation
Sometimes, regardless of the possibilities offered by "the cloud", you want to host important services yourself. For me as a software and DevOp engineer, this applies to my source code. For this reason, I host my GitLab instance myself. Since the...
18 Jul 2019
2nd IEE International Conference on Blockchain - Paper on Data Genuineness
Yesterday I attended the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Besides many interesting and exciting lectures, I also presented my first paper there: https://mlohr.com/publications/ I would also like to...
8 Feb 2019
Check for Docker image updates
For certain docker-driven services, I would like to check regularly for new versions. One way to do this is to query Docker Hub via Cronjob. Here I provide a little bash script to check for Docker image updates on Docker Hub. #!/bin/bash #...