Making your own ‘smart’ garage door controller
February 9, 2021I have two garage doors, both of which can have motors and can be opened automatically from my car, using a remote or a press off a button. Very convienient. However, sometimes I want to check if the garage doors are closed and be able to close / open them remotely, even if I am not anywhere near them. Now, you can buy new garage door motors or buy something that makes them smart, but what’s the fun in that? It is just another app on your mobile phone, another company storing your data in the cloud and another security…
Updated: Annual Radio Countdown Top 2000 in Power BI
/ December 23, 2020Here we are again – trying to continue the tradition of updating my Power BI analysis of the Dutch Radio 2’s Top 2000. This year however, the report was fully redesigned by my friend Marc Lelijveld after…
Never forget to water the plants again: building a DIY automatic plant watering / irrigation system for <$5
/ November 12, 2020One thing we never seem to get right is when to water plants. We either overfeed them or forget them. In either case, they die quickly. As part of my many home automation endeavors I wanted to…
Power BI Pro Tip: show 0 instead of (Blank)
/ May 12, 2020Default behavior of Power BI is to show (Blank) even when summing a numerical column that happens to be all empty. Want to show 0 instead? COALESCE helps.
Azure SQL firewall settings for Power BI refresh
/ April 28, 2020I do not claim that what is included in this post is the perfect way of doing things. However, some things related to Azure SQL firewall settings for Power BI data refresh caught me by surprise recently…
Fixing ‘subscription is not registered with NRP’ error in Azure
/ April 24, 2020Today I hit the following error while trying to write a PowerShell script to automate some Azure Networking related tasks (more on that soon!): 'Subscription [subscriptionID] is not registered with NRP'. In this short post I will…
Working with aggregations in Power BI Desktop
/ April 23, 2020Aggregations bring me back to the good old SSAS days.You can imagine that I was curious but skeptical when I tried aggregations in Power BI Desktop.
Updated: Annual radio countdown Top 2000 in Power BI
/ December 30, 2019A bit later this year, but even after my move to the US I decided to keep up the tradition of updating my Power BI analysis of the Top 2000 analysis for this year. Read all about…
Stepping back into the ring.
/ July 24, 2019I am happy to share with you all that I am stepping back into the ring. After a ‘brief’ period (“It has been 6 months, how can you call that brief?”) I am back. And better than…
Passing command line settings to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages using dtexec on Linux
/ March 1, 2019This is my first blog post since I moved to Redmond. A lot of time has passed, sorry for that! I kept busy filling out forms, forms and some more forms. After that came more forms. I…
Updated: Annual radio countdown Top 2000 in Power BI
/ January 3, 2019This is starting to become a tradition, sort of. My Power BI analysis of the Top 2000 has been updated to include 2018’s edition! Read all about it in the original post from 2016. Full screen Enjoy…