The Blog of Philip and Dakota Schneider
My first job out of school was with Digital Equipment Corporation, in Palo Alto, California. I worked there from 1987 to 1992, during the heyday (last hurrah?) of UNIX workstations and the X Window System. Being workaholic young engineers, I and some of my colleagues spent probably too much time fiddling around with interactive X11 Continue reading mtetris: Tetris-like Game in X11/Motif
There are many uses for a dedicated GPU besides gaming. Potentially the most appealing, for homelab enthusiasts, is providing hardware accelerated transcoding of video files. Recent consumer graphics cards include dedicated hardware modules for both decoding and encoding the most common video compression formats. This allows the heavy lifting of video transcoding to be offloaded Continue reading…
With the last couple of major revision to VMWare s enterprise virtualization platform, ESXi, it has become relatively easy to robustly pass through consumer NVIDIA GPUs for use in virtualized gaming and other consumer/enthusiast configurations. However, although information on how to correctly configure this may be widely available, it s usually poorly explained. After successfully configuring…
After two years of trouble-free service running FreeNAS and Ubiquiti s UniFi Controller under an Ubuntu Server 18.04 VM, it was finally time for some upgrades. Although I was able to expand my storage capacity by growing a vDev of old, small drives, I wanted to take this opportunity to future-proof and expand my capabilities. Goals: Continue reading The Hyperconverged Homelab—Upgrades
Quickly approaching 85% utilization of my pool, I found myself in need of more storage capacity. Since the first revision of this project s hardware was scrounged together on a small budget and utilized some already-owned drives, one of my vDevs ended up being a RAIDZ1 vDev of only 3x2TB. Adding more vDevs to my pool Continue reading The Hyperconverged Homelab—Growing RAIDZ vDevs
Although my original use-case included virtualizing a router/firewall, it was only beneficial for a couple months while I was still living in accommodation with a shared network. I ran OpenWRT for simplicity of configuration and had two separate vSwitches configured in ESXi, one for each NIC. This allowed me to connect to the shared network Continue reading The Hyperocnverged Homelab—Configuration…
Now in its second relatively trouble-free year, it s finally time to get some upgrades on my hyperconverged homelab. First, however, a long-overdue introduction! This project started out as a compact, low-power, ultra-quiet NAS build. However, I quickly decided that I wanted to virtualize and give myself more power and flexibility. At the very least, being Continue reading The Hyperconverged…
Since as early as 2013, the misleadingly-named, San Francisco-based Free Stream Media Corp. has touted smart TV software capable of detecting what you re watching. Initially marketed as a social tool to drive viewer engagement, the software has morphed into an Orwellian advertising spy machine. Called Samba TV since its debut at CES in 2013, the Continue reading Smart TVs Enable Creepy Ads That…
In May, the New York Times reported on a private company that purchased bulk user location data from US cellular carriers and then re-sold individual location data to law enforcement in a blatant violation of customer privacy and legal due process: The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within Continue reading US Cell Phone Carriers Sell Your Location, Without…
Recently-kickstarted Tapplock touts a Bluetooth-enabled smart lock that uses a fingerprint sensor. The company came under fire from tech-savvy commentators when popular YouTuber JerryRigEverything completely disassembled and defeated in a matter of minutes using a screwdriver and adhesive pad. This attack appears to be related to a quality control problem with the specific unit he used; Continue…