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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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Books Read: 2020

I’m trying to be a bit more on the ball with the reading list this year. It’s not even February 2020, and this post is in draft mode. It’s a start…

After the the Charles Dickinson short story called ‘The Chimes’, which I attempted to read for several weeks, I moved onto something short. A small palette cleanser. I read a short PDF/ebook put out by The Minimalists called Minimalist Rulebook: 16 Rules for Living with Less. It’s a great short read with some practical tips and tools to help get things on track.

Toward the end of last year I watched the pilot episode of Anne with an E.… 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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Bash Script – Restarting OpenVPN Connections

I use Sanoid, and Syncoid, to take snapshots of my Centos based ZFS storage system and copy them to replicas. Generally speaking, I use re-purposed Thecus N5550 storage units for the remote hardware. I have a long history with Thecus hardware, and while I’m not a fan of their software, I am a big fan of removing it and installing Linux. I usually take out the 2GB of memory it comes with, and swap it for a pair of 4GB modules. The only down side, especially for systems I install in remote locations, is that I don’t have any out of band management.… 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!

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MacOS Catalina and Beyond – Updating $PATH in ZSH (2020)

I’ve just moved from Fedora on my primary work laptop, to MacOS. It’s a change I’m pretty happy about, not because I had any trouble with Fedora, but the quality of my hardware has been upgraded in a big way. This transition has been pretty smooth overall, but I have needed to solve a few small details to make sure I’m not losing any features.

One of those has been adding the tool MTR back to my machine. This was pretty straight forward, as it’s a part of Brew, a sort of package manager for MacOS. The only issue was that once MTR was installed, it’s location wasn’t in my $PATH for the default terminal emulator used in MacOS Catalina, called Z Shell, or zsh.… Click here to read more!

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Backup Hosted Email – OfflineIMAP with Fastmail

A few years ago I finally let go and started using a hosted email provider. Running a secure email platform is something I’ve done or years, both professionally and personally, but I was tired of power outages at home taking my email offline and it’s far less expensive to move to hosted email than convert my home into a redundant datacenter.

After some research, I landed on Fastmail. Pricing is very reasonable and they allow me to use all of the domains I have in my one account. To date, and it’s been a couple of years now, I’ve never lost access to my email due to their back-end going down.… Click here to read more!

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Books Read: 2019

As I did last year, below is a listing of all the books I read in the previous year, and my thoughts on them. For the first time, all of the books I read last year were in digital form.

I began the year finishing Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. I read this as part of a collection of his Christmas stories.

In keeping with my love of murder mysteries, I read Introducing Agatha Raisin: The Quiche of Death/The Vicious Vet, the first of the Agatha Raisin books by M. C. Beaton. We’ve watched the TV series and they seemed like some light reading after the holidays.… Click here to read more!

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Switching from Nikon to Olympus: Part 3 – Trading Up.

As I’ve been writing about over these past posts, I’ve decided to make the move from Nikon to Olympus. I spent about a week with some rental equipment, and while I didn’t love all of the gear I rented, I did love the micro four third system.

I spent some time evaluating my Nikon gear, to figure out how much money I would get for it’s sale. I used KEH for this process, since it’s a lot easier and a lot less work than trying to get it all listed for sale myself on eBay.

As I began this process I was initially considering selling off just my Nikon digital gear, and holding onto some of my well loved film cameras and lenses.… Click here to read more!

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Switching from Nikon to Olympus: Part 2 – Before I make the jump, I’ll test out the system

With a decision made to seriously consider Olympus, as I wrote about previously, it was time to rent some gear and give it a whirl. I looked over my calendar for a period of time that would give me a chance to use the system in a variety of situations and settled on a 6 day period around Christmas. This allowed me to shoot some event photography, some family gatherings, as well as some shooting while hiking.

I placed my order with a local rental company, BorrowLenses. Their website is really slow to return search results, but they had a deal going so I ordered an Olympus OM-D E-M5, and a lens kit that would replace the lenses I used with my Nikon gear.… Click here to read more!