Chris Bergerons Tech Blog

Why AI agents need verified identity

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Troubleshooting Consul systemd on Raspberry Pi

I run a Hashistack on my homelab and I’ve had a startup issue with Consul on one of my Raspberry Pis. The systemd unit file is correct and I was able to start the service manually with systemctl start consul without issue. However, consul just would not start successfully on boot. I finally had some time to work on the issue tonight and the fix was actually quite simple. Troubleshooting consul is…

Dynamic SSH ports with Hashicorp Vault TOTP

In this post I’m demonstrating how you could use Hashicorp’s Vault TOTP generator and an authenticator to connect to a dynamic ssh port. This is mostly a proof of concept and not a production grade solution, so use at your own risk. What’s TOTP? It’s a Time-based One Time Password. TBOTP is probably too ugly of an acronym to have gained widespread use. I don’t know, I didn’t coin it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Own Yourself - You Are Your Brand

The crux of this article centers around personal branding in the field of tech. Whether it’s work, play or social, having an online persona has become the new normal. Online personas have grown from bleeding-edge gamers, content creators, vloggers and bloggers - to traditional soccer moms with recipe groups. The internet continues to connect everyone and as online trust and validation become more…

Monitoring Uptime Status with Github Actions

I was searching github for some uptime monitoring apps when I stumbled across a github actions based uptime and status page. It’s aptly named upptime and while it wasn’t what I was looking for, I found it to be novel and worth setting up:

Time Tracking with a Disney Infinity USB NFC Reader

While browsing my local thrift store, I stumbled upon a little gadget that I decided to repurpose: It was only $6 USD, so I thought it would be a fun project. I searched for ‘Disney Infinity Linux’ to see if any work had been done toward decoding it or making it work. I found various sources that suggested that Playstation or Wii versions work fine, but the X-Box version was challenging.…

Controlling iRobot Roomba from the Command Line

If you’re a heavy command line (cli) user in Macos, Linux or WSL, you may it convenient to easily start or stop your robot from it’s cleaning cycle. In this post I’ll you fellow keyboard jockeys how to control and even view your robot as is cleans.

Hands On with the Gigabyte Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 Card

I’ve been exploring Thunderbolt quite a bit lately. As a follow up to my post about using Thunderbolt in a NAS , I recently bought a Gigabyte Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 add on card. I’ve captured a few thoughts, observations and pics here. Gigabyte GC-Maple Ridge

Fast RAID-0 DAS Using Two Thunderbolt 3 Enclosures

In this post I’m demonstrating how to create a high-speed macos volume using quantity 2 Thunderbolt ports and NVMe enclosures. This solution uses RAID-0 (striping) so the failure threshold is more than twice that of a normal standalone disk. This example is for demonstration purposes and could be useful for video editing scratch space, rendering, large photo sessions or similar uses. Obviously,…

Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

In this post I discuss how you can upgrade a NAS Server by adding Thunderbolt 3 for lightning fast connectivity at 20 or 40Gbps. This particular implementation is specific to an Apple Mac Mini M1 and a Linux NAS server on an older Supermicro X10SRL-F motherboard, but the principles should be the same on similar architectures and operating systems.

Person is not a known valid target type for the publisher property.

It’s not just you. If you’ve received this error the odds are pretty good this component of your schema is correct and your validator

AiGenArt, AI Generated Art - Saturn

Saturn. This is an interesting piece. The keywords I used for this creation were ‘saturn’ and ‘smoke’. It began with a mostly blank frame / canvas. The machine learning and training model set out to discover Saturn and generate accordingly. As the piece evolved (video below), I started to notice what appear to be rigid, unnatural lines take shape. It turns out that the machine found Saturn to be…

Generating Art with VQGAN+CLIP AI

I’ve been playing around with OpenGAN, TensorFlow, torch and a few other goodies lately. Adding CLIP to the mix gives me the ability to use common phrases to guide the AI to creating works. It’s fascinating to see what is generated based on the training models used. Some are surprisingly good and others, well, I’ll let you be the judge. Here are a few of the pieces along with the phrases that…

Pushover Desktop? Yes, on Apple Silicon.

At home I run a lot of gadgets. A mix of computer servers, IoT devices and various Raspberry Pi projects that I’ve built. I always want to be aware of what’s happening with the home, so I’ve been using a notification app called Pushover. It’s a nice notification utility that can send messages to your phone or tablet, in addition to your desktop browser . The keyword here is browser .

New CB Brand Logo

I created a new logo and icon of my initials for my personal brand tonight: <img

New website - launch.chrisbergeron.com

I wanted a quick, lightweight way to view rocket launches from Florida’s Space Coast - Kennedy Space Center but everything I found online was bloated. So, I create a simple website and Progressive Web App (PWA) so I could just check it on my phone.

Creating a Magic Mirror with a Raspberry Pi

Making a Raspberry Pi Garage Door Opener

A few years back I built a neat project I found online. It was originally designed by Andrew Shillday. You can find the code here . I decided that a Raspberry Pi Zero was sufficient, so I had to modify the pins used, but otherwise it was a fairly easy project.

Observations on buying on an NFT on the Ethereum Blockchain

NFTs have recently piqued my curiosity. If you don’t know what an NFT is, it’s a Non-Fungible Token. Clear as mud right? There are many articles on the subject these days, so I’ll defer you to them if you want more background.

Installing Nginx, PHP and Mysql on Apple M1, MacOS 11 Big Sur

This guide will walk you through installing and configuring nginx, PHP and Mysql optimized for MacOS Big Sur on Apple Silicon - M1 Arm processors. Note: Most of this content originated from this post . Here, I’ve pared it down and fixed the relevant content. Credit goes to the original author: Kevin Dees.

Debris - Art with Blockchain Provenance by Bəɹʤəɹɑn

I was working on my latest project - Debris Art when NFT Blockchain Digital Ownership hit the news. I instantly realized the potential impact and decided to mint some of my works in the space.

Fixing Bitcoin Armory on macOS Catalina 10.15

The recent surge in crypto prices brought my old Bitcoin stash back to mind. I decided to load up an old digital wallet to check it for consistency, but when I tried to load it, the software, Bitcoin Armory, wouldn’t run. I’m running macOS Catalina 10.15.7, so I figured something changed during my miscellaneous software updates or upgrade from Mojave to Catalina.

Locast Plex - Local TV on Plex with Raspberry Pi4

Watch local broadcast TV on Plex without an antenna. What is it? Locast is a free service that receives over the air (OTA) broadcast television signals and encodes and legally distributes them digitally across the internet. Using the program locast2plex you can receive this digital content and send it to a Plex Media Server. Plex will allow you to record, time-shift and save this content. It works…

Fixing Hexo Not Generating Files

If you’re having trouble with Hexo not generating files, check for broken symbolic links in the source directory tree: 1 find ./ - type l - exec test ! -e {} \; - print

Strategy for Migrating to Infrastructure as Code

There are several existing resources that document strategies for migrating infrastructure to code. This post is about my experiences based on the reality, the challenges and best practices. The Setting You’re in charge of the infrastructure that the entire organization relies upon. Your product is a 24/7 web application, service or destination. The internet property is secure and five nines of…

MMM-NextRocketLaunch MagicMirror Module

This is a Magic Mirror Module that displays the Next Rocket Launch from Earth. The data comes from the excellent Launch Library 2 API provided by thespacedevs . This is the Launch Library 2 Documentation .

Disassembling a DirecTV RC Remote

While visiting with family, I came across an old DirecTV remote that wasn’t working entirely. Some buttons wouldn’t register even after replacing the batteries, so I figured a quick cleaning was in order. I snapped a few pictures of the disassembly so they might be useful to others (you).

Mcombo 7040 Lift Chair Manual

I recently purchased an Mcombo 7040 Lift Chair for my elderly grandfather. Prior to purchasing the chair my Grandfather had some questions so I figured I would have a look at the manual for answers. Surprised that I couldn’t find one, I thought I’d share it here along with my thoughts about the chair.

Bash Scripts for Cloudinary

Cloudinary is an amazing image hosting service that offers both a highly functional free tier in addition to a paid enterprise grade image hosting and transformation service. In this tutorial I demonstrate a few simple bash shell scripts to interface with Cloudinary.

Creating Grafana Annotations with Webhooks

Grafana is a great tool for visualizing data. In this tutorial I’ll be putting annotations, or comments on points of interest overlayed on top of graph panels.

DIY DAS and NAS for Media 2020

Updated for 2021 !!! Update: I’ve recently added a Thunderbolt 3 PCIe card for easy 40 Gbps connectivity. Why another NAS/DAS article? There are a lot resources online for building your own DIY DAS. A lot of them contain good information but none of them were comprehensive for the DAS I wanted to build so I compiled the information that was useful for my specific 2019 build here. The prices linked…

Cheapest Days Calendar

Are you looking for a calendar that lets you know what days of the week are cheapest to shop? If so, look no further. I created a calendar for anyone looking to save a few dollars on common purchases. The data for this calendar comes from this Reader’s Digest post . Please check it out if you want to know the reasoning behind the timing. If you know of other days that I should add - comment below!

Deluge Grafana Dashboard

Tonight I was introduced to a Deluge exporter for Prometheus so I figured I’d whip up a quick dashboard for visualizing the metrics. Deluge Dashboard is a very simple way to display Deluge torrent metrics. It uses the deluge exporter to populate a Prometheus data source. The panels in this dashboard can be copied into more comprehensive dashboards for a single pane of glass view of your network…

Plex What&#39;s Playing Plugin for BitBar

This is a Bitbar plugin that I wrote that shows you what’s currently playing on your Plex Media server.

Easily disable Pihole from your iPhone (or iPad)

If you run a pihole the odds are good that you’ve needed to disable it from time to time. I wanted an easy way to disable my pihole(s) temporarily, so I wrote a simple shell script to do it for me. I’m almost always on my Macbook, so this approach worked for a while. I needed to disable it a few times while I was out of the room, so I figured I’d find an easier way to do it from my phone.

Grafana Dashboards

Grafana is a really great tool for visualizing data. In my homelab, I have obviously have a lot of data so what better than to use than the right tool for the job. Below, you can find some screenshots of my dashboards. I use a raspberry pi that just runs a full screen browser for viewing the dashboard slideshow in addition to a few other glance boards (DAKBoard, Monitorr, et al). Here’s the…

Plex Grafana Dashboard

I made a Grafana Dashboard for my Plex system at home. I feed various system telemetry into an influx database as the data source and Plex-Data-Collector for inserting the data from plex. Additionally, I wrote a python script for injecting logs from NZBGet into mysql . I then use Grafana to display the graphs. I really love Grafana and I’ve created several dashboards :

Service monitoring with Monitorr

As part of my dashboard project (link coming soon) I was looking for a lightweight self hosted monitoring solution for my home network services. I found Monitorr and decided it was a perfect fit for my needs. It’s simple and it doesn’t have any frills, which is exactly what I wanted.

pfSense graphs in Grafana

Using Grafana with pfSense Update: 2018/09/13 pfSense has a plugin for telegraf which can be installed from the gui. I recommend this method rather than what I figured out below. I’m leaving these notes for manual installation reference. 2017/12/09 I put this guide together using information from various other blogs. This is current as of December 2017 and using pfSense 2.4.2. For this tutorial,…

NZBGet MySQL Extension Script

I wrote a simple plugin for NZBGet that inserts download history into a MySQL database. Having my download list in a database makes operations on the data easier than groking text logs. I wanted to display my most recent downloads on a Grafana Dashboard: To use simply copy the Mysql-Log.py script into your NZBGet/scripts directory. In NZBGet, select settings and set the hostname of your MySQL…

Using curl with the Pihole API

I couldn’t find any quick references about accessing the Pihole API so I created this page. Pihole is a great app for blocking internet advertising that was originally designed to be run on a raspberry pi. It blocks known advertisers’ domains at the DNS level by effectively null routing requests destined to serve ads. It can be run on VMs, Raspberry Pis and bare metal servers. Here are the steps…

NZBGet ElasticSearch Plugin

I wrote a simple plugin for NZBGet that inserts download history into an ElasticSearch cluster (or node). It uses API calls rather than parsing filesystem logs. I wanted a quick way to just insert the data so I created this script. Simply copy the ESLog.py script into your NZBGet/scripts directory. In NZBGet, select settings and set the hostname of your ElasticSearch instance. You can download the…

Speeding up Ansible Playbook runs

Ansible is a great tool for configuration management but because of the way it’s designed a common complaint is that it’s not as fast as other tools like Salt, Chef or Puppet. This is because Ansible doesn’t have an agent that listens (although it can) on a host and uses a different type of deployment methodology that is based on SSH. This post isn’t about the pros and cons of each tool, but…

Pfsense WAN with Cellular LTE/4G

Using pfsense for WAN Redundancy with Cellular LTE/4G I work from home a lot and I need reliable internet connectivity to workplace. As a result, I decided to implement a failover WAN connection into my firewall. I use pfSense as my firewall which combines power and flexibility with ease of configuration. The Hardware: NetGear LB2120 LTE Modem While researching options, I decided on the Netgear…

Dynamic DNS via Digital Ocean API

This is a quick tutorial about setting up a simple shell script that runs periodically to update a DNS record on the internet with the IP address of your network. If you’ve ever wanted to have myhome.mydomain.com always updated with your home IP address, this is one way you can do it. There are paid and free services that offer this functionality, but I choose to use this method because it gives…

Quieting a Dell R710

I have a Dell R710 rev. II that I use in my home office lab homelab running ESXi 6.5. The R710 sits in my office where we work from home. Normally the hum of the R710 fans isn’t terribly bothersome - the 5 fans it houses run at around 3,800 RPM each. The noise is definitely noticeable so I did a little bit of digging into ways I could quiet it down. After looking into replacing the fans with…

A simple Ansible playbook for updating multiple Pihole DNS

I wrote a very simple little playbook for updating my local DNS records for my piholes. For me it’s easier than manually sshing onto each node and editing a file and restarting the service. Here’s the playbook:

A Dashboard for Pihole Stats

Pihole + Grafana + InfluxDB Dashboard I wanted to add the metrics from my ad-blocker, the great Pihole to my executive dashboard. To create the dashboard I used Grafana to display the graphs and InfluxDB a the time-series backend database. I use a simple python script to get the metrics from pihole and record them in influxdb. Grafana makes it easy to render them into a user friendly dashboard.…

Here&#39;s how they voted

This is a list of how US Representatives voted on Net Neutrality in 2018: Credit to reddit user truefalseequivalence Senate Vote for Net Neutrality