Recently I installed a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian, and attached a touchscreen to it. The device is supposed to work as a display for our openHAB home automation system. All nice and shiny, except the Pi occasionally disconnects from the Wi-Fi - apparently in order to safe power. Once the network device is needed, the Wi-Fi is reconnected. That is the default setting.
That is quite annoying, because the HABpanel will lose it's connection to the openHAB server, and no longer show widget updates. Some widgets like "time" will just continue to work, but other widgets like status of the washing machine, or the current outside temperature just show the last state, and never update.
Continue reading "Raspberry Pi: disable Wi-Fi powersave, and stay connected all the time"
It was time to pick a new mobile phone for myself. Not being very happy with the Samsung I have from my employer, I compiled a list of decent Android phones, and looked into each of them. In the end, I settled with the Huawei P10.
All in all, it was a good choice, and I'm happy with the device. It's fast, has enough memory, USB-C, receives updates, has a headphone jack and a slot for either an additional SIM or an SD card.
Continue reading "Huawei P10"
At home I have two different WiFi networks, both known to all my mobile devices. One is our internal network, password protected. The other one is an open Freifunk network. It's nice to walk around in the village and automatically connect to other Freifunk WiFi routers, instead of using expensive mobile data.
But when at home I really want my devices connected to our internal network. Makes it easy to copy files between devices, or access services only available in our internal network. Plus the native WiFi connection is much faster than the Freifunk connection, which is limited by the speed of the VPN.
However Android connects to the last used WiFi network, and when the last one was another Freifunk router, it will connect to this network at home as well. By default, Android does not allow to prioritize networks. That's where "WiFi Prioritizer" comes to the rescue!
Continue reading "How to prioritize WiFi connections on Android"