A friend asked me for a recommendation on where to start with Alastair Reynolds’ books. With the caveat that I haven’t (yet!) read his Merlin or Poseidon’s Children series, I have three suggestions. Pick the one that most resonates with you: Revelation Space series: classic hard … | Continue reading
For context and background information, see my original post on keeping an SMB share mounted and alerting when it does down. Since my first post on this topic, I’ve iterated on the SMB mount maintenance script; in particular, it now gracefully handles the case where macOS decides … | Continue reading
One item on my todo list for ages was to put in place some sort of monitoring for silent data corruption on my NAS. This turned out to be surprisingly easy to do, thanks to two programs: cshatag and my own runner! Before we dive in, some background information: My NAS (aka “home … | Continue reading
Last weekend, a strong geomagnetic storm resulted in an aurora being somewhat visible where I live in southeastern Michigan. This is unusual! I didn’t have that much time to prepare for it, but I wanted to share my photos (the Flickr album is embedded above) and note what worked … | Continue reading
A quick post for today. When trying to force my NAS’s mdraid array to run a check, in a root terminal, I got this error: # echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action -bash: /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action: cannot overwrite existing file This is because I have the bash shell on all … | Continue reading
Recently1 I have forked, updated, and started distributing two Alfred workflows: alred-bear.alfredworkflow and docker-hub.alfredworkflow. alfred-bear I forked alfred-bear from bjrnt/alfred-bear to fix a few issues: it wasn’t built for Apple Silicon it wasn’t codesigned or distrib … | Continue reading
Some recent bird photos April 01, 2024 • Tagged: photography birding | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. If you aren’t using a read-only filesystem on your Raspberry Pi, you should reduce the amount of stuff that gets written to its SD card. This will help increase the card’s lifespan and keep your Pi running smoothly. Caution: Advice to … | Continue reading
Part of the Project Logs series. I’m fully invested in the Ego line of power tools for everything from my lawnmower to hedge trimmer. I also have a need for a portable, long-lasting, rechargeable, power-outage-resistant, 12 volt power supply.[1] Ego sells several inverters/conver … | Continue reading
Many applications that run on Raspberry Pis and similar single-board computers — for example, environmental data loggers that report to a central database server — don’t really need to store any state locally on the Pi’s SD card. This means you can run the Pi with a read-only roo … | Continue reading
On one server I manage, the default net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max value (65536, IIRC) was not sufficient and I wanted to increase it substantially. The first thing I did was add a new file in /etc/sysctl.d: # /etc/sysctl.d/91-cdz-nf_conntrack.conf net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max … | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. One Pi I run here at home sits in an outbuilding with less-than-ideal WiFi signal strength. It runs PiAware 1 and BirdNET-Pi, and I specifically haven’t run Ethernet to it to partially mitigate lightning-strike risks, given that it has … | Continue reading
On my primary Mac Studio desktop, I like to keep 2 Samba shares from my home server/NAS mounted all the time. These mounts can be interrupted by network glitches, power outages, and the like, so I needed a solution that could remount them when necessary and would alert me if they … | Continue reading
The Yearlong Koyaanisqatsi Mastodon bot just shared another few frames I thought would make great desktop wallpaper. This time they’re frames of clouds at (I think) sunrise. The same process and quality caveats apply as with the desert wallpaper from a few days ago. Enjoy. D … | Continue reading
Another recent 3D printing project was customizing these socket organizers for 4 socket sets that live in a tool bag with my 3/8” impact wrench: Since these live in a tool bag instead of in a drawer, I wanted to be sure the sockets would fit snugly in the organizer but/and be ea … | Continue reading
My table saw — a portable Hitachi C10RA2 I bought from a friend — features two aluminum extrusions along the table top. These extrusions stick out a bit on each side of the saw, and they have sharp corners, and they hurt when you bump into them: I chose to take a decidedly extra … | Continue reading
Mastodon yesterday experienced a small wave of spam. One thing we’re doing in response at a2mi.social, as recommended by this summary of the incident, is improving how we block disposable email providers. I wrote the following Bash script, inspired by this one. Run periodically v … | Continue reading
The Bambu X1C is a great 3D printer, but it struggles to maintain a WiFi connection in many common environments (an Eero mesh network, for example). You can find numerous complaints and discussions with a quick Web search; I’m not going to link them here. I ran into this with my … | Continue reading
The Yearlong Koyaanisqatsi Mastodon bot recently shared a series of frames that I felt could stand alone as still photos — something I find somewhat rare in a lot of movies, though Koyaanisqatsi and co. are a notable exception. I thought they’d work nicely as desktop wallpapers. … | Continue reading
Another recent house-related problem, and a solution. My house has an old 7 kW natural gas generator. During a power outage, it makes sure the house still has heat and running water, and it also powers some lights and outlets in the bedroom, office, and kitchen. The “office” part … | Continue reading
There are now two objects in my house that look odd but work 1000% better than when I bought them. I quite like my alarm clock overall, but the buttons you use to control the light, volume, snooze, and alarm are tiny and it’s nearly impossible to tell which is which. They are lab … | Continue reading
I received a kind email this week from someone who used my Chrome extension, OpenList, asking if I was aware it had been de-listed from the Chrome Web Store. I am indeed aware; I de-listed it, and I’m happy to explain why: I have personally not used this extension in the better p … | Continue reading
A brief project log for today. I was taking in some sun last weekend when I decided the chair I was sitting in needed a matching footrest. I briefly looked at Amazon, but I wanted instant gratification, and everything that looked halfway decent and was made of actual wood seemed … | Continue reading
I run Pi-Hole as the DNS server for my home network. It provides ad and nuisance blocking for a subset of the systems in the house. Having a single DNS server for your network is very stressful; it’s a single point of failure, so even routine maintenance feels touch-and-go. I fin … | Continue reading
I recently wanted to set up a VM on my home Ubuntu 22.04 LTS server, with the following goals: the VM uses KVM virtualization, for performance the guest VM is assigned an IP via DHCP by my home network router the guest VM is accessible by everything on the home network, inclu … | Continue reading
I recently had to move Docker’s data directory on my home NAS (from the root filesystem to the storage array). I found some incomplete and inconsistent information on the Web about how to do this, so for future reference here’s the process I used to do it successfully on an Ubunt … | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. I use Raspberry Pis around my home as everything from low-power FM transmitters to UPS energy monitors. Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several cl … | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. Raspberry Pi OS, on a fresh installation, will allocate some amount of swap space on the SD card by default. Using your Pi’s SD card for swap space will, in time, kill the SD card. On any Pi, I recommend disabling swap on the SD card. … | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. When something does go wrong, having collected logs somewhere other than your Raspberry Pi’s SD card is very helpful. Depending on how your Pi is set up: Logs may only be kept for the current boot or may be stored only in RAM, so aft … | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. Here’s a (rare) quick entry in this series, with few if any caveats. If your Raspberry Pi is not using a read-only filesystem, I recommend setting the Pi to run a filesystem check on its root filesystem at every boot. This will (hopefu … | Continue reading
Sometimes, through no fault of your own, something deep down will cause your Raspberry Pi to crash. Hard. Luckily, we can do a few things to mitigate this. The information in this post is, to the best of my knowledge, current as of November 2023. It should work on Raspberry Pi OS … | Continue reading
Part of the Raspberry Pi Reliability series. The first issue you’re likely to hit with a long-running Pi, particularly with a Raspberry Pi Zero, is the Pi dropping off your WiFi network for no apparent reason after days or just hours of operation. The information in this post is, … | Continue reading