Category: Computers

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New House Projects – Weather Watching V0.5

I’ve always been fascinated with the weather. I can still remember the daily routine of charting the weather in kindergarten with meticulous scientific rigor: Each morning one pupil, on a rotation, would peer out a window and then mark down if it was sunny, or cloudy, or possibly raining. Growing up in New Hampshire I used to follow the extreme weather on Mount Washington. And, as a lover of metrics and data, I love the idea of contributing my own, hyper-local, data to the larger pool available for weather predicting and archiving.

Life is funny though, and when I finally saved up and bought a nice weather station for home we decided we needed to move.… Click here to read more!

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New House Projects – Network 2.0

Ok – So, take one of this project didn’t go as planned. I don’t regret the choices I made, and while I’m very happy with how everything is working today. it’s not the setup I had hoped for. So, where did I end up?

Firstly – I ended up ordering a firewall from Protectli, the VP2420, which I ordered with Coreboot BIOS. Performance has been great, it was easy to setup, and the 2.5Gb ports work great. My only gripe is that the console port on the unit isn’t a true serial port. It’s a USB serial adapter, for which only drivers for Windows exists.… Click here to read more!

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New House Projects – Network Planning and Setup

EDIT - 11.1.2024 - I have changed many of the equipment choices listed below, which will be another blog post. The equipment from FS has been a total disaster, and the Qotom firewall, while effective, lacked the usability I really wanted in such an important device. The FS wireless equipment is likely to be e-waste, which is horrible, but the Qotom will live on, just in a different role

We’re in the process of moving from our apartment to a house to call our own. It will be somewhere I can drill holes, make improvements, and really nerd-out. The new spot has, if you can believe it, access to symmetric 2 Gigabit internet service for under $100/month.… Click here to read more!

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Dell Wyse 5070 – RAM and Coral AI

I too have been bitten by the bug and have a growing number of Dell Wyse 5070 thin clients appearing. I’ve been very happy with them, and since I struggled to find clear info on a couple of upgrades, I thought I’d add my text based ramblings to the Internets in case it’s a help for someone else.

I have a 5070 Extended, which has a PCIe 2.0 4x slot. The one I have included the AMD E9173 graphics card which works fine, but I don’t use it. I have it removed at the moment and, given time, will likely try out some other cards in there.… Click here to read more!

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My Default Apps at the End of 2023

Quick and dirty! Here’s all the stuff I can think of…

Mail Client: Apple Mail and Thunderbird
Mail Server: Fastmail
Notes: Apple Notes
To-Do: Nothing
iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
iPhone Photo Backup: Nextcloud
Photo Management: Apple Phones (on iPhone), On1 on MacOS
Calendar: Apple Calendar
Cloud File Storage: Nextcloud
RSS: TinyTinyRSS
Contacts: Apple Contacts
Browser: Firefox
Chat: iMessage
Bookmarks: Firefox
Homepage/News: Protopage
Music: Apple Music (The app, not the service)
Podcasts: Overcast
Password Management: KeePassXC

Other Default Apps and Devices:

Mastodon Client: Mono
eReader: Kindle Oasis
Digital Audio Workstation (DAW): AVID Pro Tools
Video Editing (NLE): Davinci Resolve
Linux Distribution: Debian (Bookworm)
Firewall: OpnSense (PC Engines APU4)
VPN Platform: Wireguard
Storage System: ZFS (on Debian)
Virtual Machines: KVM/qemu
Containers: Podman
Backup Service: Crashplan Pro
ZFS Data Replication: Syncoid (Sanoid)
Non-Web File Syncing: Syncthing
Home Automation: Home Assistant (Zigbee and WiFi for devices, with MQTT)
Weather Station: WeeWx
‘Serious’ Camera: OM Digital Solutions OM-1 (Micro Four Thirds)

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Simple Linux Kernel Picker

I run Fedora in my home-lab as the base OS for my server. It works well for me but I do occasionally run into an issue where Fedora will make a new kernel available before the ZFS project has support for it. When that happens I have to change from the most current kernel to something that I can have a dkms module built for.

I do this once or twice a year and I never remember the commands. So, here’s a script that will do it for me.

Run the script as a normal user and it will list your installed kernels.… Click here to read more!

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RSyslog, ZFS, and Storing logs based on the source in my HomeLab

There are many ways to store syslog data, and nearly all of them are better than what I am outlining here. If you’re looking to learn how to deal with syslog at scale, take a look at Graylog, or the Elk Stack or some other similar tool. There are many free and/or open source options to do this. Many of which I’ve setup and used for my employers.

For me though, I’m not looking to load big piles of data into some database and keep it stored for long periods, automatically indexed and cataloged. I don’t need that.

Instead, I’d like to gather logs from a handful of devices, store them as flat files based on the date, and then just throw them away after a month.… Click here to read more!

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Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Via Serial Console

I have a few PC Engines APU units that do not have a graphics adapter, and are designed to be setup via a serial interface.

The first step is to find the mini.iso that is made available on the mirrors. This ~75MB image is the core installer for Ubuntu and it will download the items needed to complete your install as it runs, instead of it being pre-loaded onto a larger ISO image. Ubuntu does not make it that easy to find anymore, but if you know where to look you can find what you need.

Head to the below link, and then navigate into the version of Ubuntu you’re looking to install.… Click here to read more!

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Installing WeeWx on Centos 8 – The Basics

I’ve long been a weather nerd, and some years ago I finally invested in a personal weather station with all the sensors you could want. Temperature and humidity? Of course! Wind speed and direction? Absolutely! I even have a rain gauge, though I wouldn’t want to brag. And, once all of these items were acquired, my wife and I decided to sell our house; We’ve been very happy in our apartment these past 4 years, but apartment living and accurate weather monitoring are not the easiest of friends.

But, I’m getting a head of myself. Lets get started at the beginning: This post is about taking a ‘Minimal’ install of Centos 8 and getting WeeWX 4.1.1 running on it.… Click here to read more!

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Behringer X-Live – Splitting 32 Channel WAV Files and Deleting Silence

*** Work on this continues over on GitHub: https://github.com/Topslakr/x32Live-CleanUp ***

At my church we use a Behringer X32 mixer to run Sunday services and we added an X-Live card, instead of the included USB Audio interface card, so we can record our services, multi-tracked, direct to an SD card. This has saved a lot of recording overhead, since we don’t need a PC, display, etc., but it’s also created some hassles.

The X-Live card works great, but it does lack some flexibility we’d like. For instance, you can record 8/16/32 channels off the board but you can’t really pick which ones.… Click here to read more!