Recent content on kn100
I’ve had a fair bit of fun with Proxmox for a couple of years, but recently I got a bit bored and decided to give NixOS a go. What I was looking for was a simpler way to manage my stack of services, as well as a more declarative way of doing so. How we got here # I tried various iterations of setups using Proxmox. My first iteration involved running many small LXC containers each hosting a…
I have a standing desk, but I’ve always wanted a way to automate it, so that I could set up a schedule for “standing” vs “sitting". The controller box itself contains absolutely no smarts, and has no obvious external control mechanism, so I wasn’t really sure how I’d achieve this. This post documents my experience building a system that allows me to do this. It is not intended entirely…
Sometimes I find myself spending lots of time on personal hobby projects that appear to have very little real world purpose to others. Those I share the project with ask me why I bothered. Either that or they nervously smile and change the topic. As to the question of why, I understand the impulse to ask it. I too have heard about projects that lead me to ask the same question. In the past, I’ve…
This post is the second part in a series I am working on. See the first part here: Home Lab Upgrades: Why This Mutant Motherboard/CPU Combo Could Be the Perfect Solution ) The biggest most exciting use case for me with my new home server was a virtualised gaming environment. I’ve always wanted a living room gaming PC, but didn’t want to have a PC just for that purpose. I’ve had a…
I’ve always liked strange hardware. Odd prototype mobile phones, weirdo computer parts that only exist because of Bitcoin mining etc. You name it, I enjoy looking at it and imagining the possibilities. Recently, thanks to CraftComputing on Youtube, I became aware of a strange sort of motherboard/CPU combo that features an Engineering Sample CPU that purports to be an Intel 11800h. The retail…
I was bored, and was curious to know what the charging behaviour of my Pixel 6 Pro looked like. I decided to use a Ugreen Nexode 100w USB-C charging brick with a Macbook charging cable as the power supply, and left my phone in its case. I note this because I will in the future perform this same test with the phone artificially cooled to see how much of a difference temperature makes to charging…
As a 16-year-old, I made the decision to leave the UK due to my dislike of the politics and direction of Great Britain under the Conservative party, particularly under the leadership of Theresa May as Home Secretary. This decision was further solidified by the Brexit referendum and the actions of subsequent leaders such as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Over the past decade, my views have only…
According to 419eater.com, scambaiting is “enter[ing] into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves”. These scammers aim to take advantage of the elderly, people with disabilities, and others. I…
RSS, or RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary and most recently Really Simple Syndication, is a standard that allows readers to aggregate multiple blogs into one ‘reader’ interface, which displays these blogs posts in a standardised way. It’s an old standard, developed in 1999 at Netscape for use on their my.netscape.com portal. It allowed users to import RSS feeds from other…
Just a quick note to say kn100.me was fully rebuilt. I’ve done my best to keep all links the same, but it’s possible I’ve missed something. If you notice something broken or missing, let me know. Thanks!
The battery problem # Unfortunately old, long term unused Cybiko Classics suffer from exploded batteries. Worse, the residue will eat away at the original battery contacts, and will even begin to damage the motherboard if left in for long enough. Get the batteries that are in there out as soon as possible, and clean the battery contacts as well as the Cybikos own contacts as best you can. You may…
Tl;Dr : In this blog post, I discuss the problem I have with having an external DAC (cable clutter), and the hacky solution I came up with (putting a USB DAC inside the chassis of my computer and hijacking the HD-Audio solution built into most PC cases). The problem # I recently became dissatisfied with my motherboard audio solution, so I investigated DACs and found the Fiio K3 . The difference…
Firstly, you might want to check out the dashboard . I recently started a diet. One thing I decided this time around was to be heavily data driven in my weight loss, and therefore I decided to get some ‘smart’ weighing scales. I got the Eufy P1 scales which seemed to be reasonably well reviewed, and it turns out that Eufy is another name for Anker, another Chinese brand I’ve had…
I recently wrote a blog post concerning my discovery that my NAS had decided to expose itself all over the internet . If you haven’t seen that, it’s probably worth reading first. That post took off in a way I wasn’t quite expecting, and of course I didn’t quite dot my Is and cross my T’s as well as I should have, leading to a fair bit of misunderstanding in the HN…
Addendum: The most controversial detail in this blog post so far has been my claim that disabling uPnP is a significant hit to convenience. I wanted to be fully transparent and say that I do not have data to back this claim up, and this is more of a feeling than it is an analytical decision. This criticism somewhat misses the point however, since the vast majority of consumer routes I’ve…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on cloud services. This is purely ideological, I have no real reason to distrust the cloud, nor am I going to attempt to convince you to. I just made a decision a while ago that all my mission critical/sensitive stuff needed to be moved off of centralised cloud storage. The stories of people losing their Google accounts…
So, it turns out that a lot of smart gear from many manufacturers, including ones you’ve almost certainly heard of, comes from a company called Tuya. They seem to make all sorts of fun IOT gear, which all connects to the Tuya cloud. What Tuya seem to do is sell whitelabeled ‘versions’ of their products to various brands who then sell them as if they’d manufactured them…
Note : While the general themes in this post are still accurate, this blog post has predictably fallen out of date. I will eventually write a follow up for Pipewire, but for now, here be dragons. Yee hath been warned! Bluetooth Audio is generally considered convenient, but not ‘audiophile’. Any self respecting audiophile is probably connecting their fancy headphones to some Digital to…
My trusty old USB 3 hub has failed. It was only around a year old, but it was cheap and it worked. It wasn’t powered, but most of the time it didn’t need to be. One day I began having very strange issues with USB on my computer. Devices randomly disconnecting, devices never connecting until the computer was rebooted and so on. I eventually narrowed it down to the hub. I tossed it out…
You may have seen my article on the air quality meter I built a while ago. Diyode, a print magazine in Australia kindly published an article discussing the process I took to create the thing! It’s a really cool feeling to be featured somewhere like this. The article is a great read, check it out over on Diyode: Sense of Smell .
The Finished Product - quite rustic! This article was recently featured in Hackaday and Diyode ! I’m bored. I’m sure you are too. I’m personally very thankful that I can still work through this strange period - but there are still hours in the day to fill. I wanted a personal project, so I thought about remote working and the health impacts. Most offices here have air handling…
I recently installed Pop!_OS on my new desktop machine and have been loving it, but have been suffering with this really strange issue where the entire UI would stutter roughly every second for a few milliseconds. This got really, really annoying so I had a little dig around and found out the cause was actually a strange interaction between Ubuntu AppIndicator (a bundled extension for Gnome Shell…
Having speed makes others happy in the short term. Having velocity makes you happy in the long term. # One of the biggest lessons I learned was to prioritise ‘velocity’ over ‘speed’. This probably sounds meaningless to you, but allow me to explain. At some point around a year ago, during my one to ones with my manager, we were discussing the fact that I was heavily…
Knowing when and how to make breaking changes is tough. It is even tougher in the Go ecosystem. After being burned by making a breaking change and annoying people, I’m going to investigate how best to mitigate this annoyance. Disclaimer : This is mostly opinion, and only my opinion. This post is not associated with my employer in any way. You can contact me on Mastodon @kn100@fosstodon.org…
As a kid, I used to love playing Minecraft. I was technically precocious from a fairly young age, and naturally gravitated to attempting to host my own Minecraft server for me and my band of geeky pals to play on. The problem was, I had no idea what port forwarding was, nor how to log into a router. The solution I found was about as novel as it was dumb. I tried a few different things initially. I…
A long time ago I worked for an ISP as Tier 1 technical support. This is just one of many stories I have from my time here. These were originally published elsewhere on the internet, but are being reworked and republished here. Sometimes, the degree of insanity in a conversation can reach such a fever pitch that it is hard to recover. Sometimes, people can say things that leave you so…
I recently worked on a task which involved checking every single value in a Redis instance, and modifying ones which matched a certain format. This script needed to run in a fairly timely fashion, as it would need to be run frequently. Making requests sequentially didn’t cut it, so I learned about pipelining. This simple optimization meant that a script which I originally calculated to take…
It all started when I noticed these particular stickers absolutely everywhere all over London. I’d also seen them in other European cities! I was never curious enough to actually search for them, to figure out their meaning, so I just noticed, acknowledged my curiosity and moved on. I later did discover their meaning, but the way I discovered this was something I never expected. The 'why…
I personally don’t pay a massive amount of attention to cryptocurrency. This isn’t because I dislike them, more because they’re just not that interesting to me at the moment. I’ll occasionally hear about Bitcoin rallying or some Etherium app getting hacked, but other than that I avoid it. Recently, I’ve had a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally be interested…
Like many people, I find it difficult to wake up in the morning. I want to automate some of the things I do in the morning in order to continue to hack away at my laziness. To this effect, I want my television to switch on and over to BBC news in the morning. Unfortunately, Hisense do not provide a way to control the television remotely as far as I can tell, and nmapping it doesn’t give me…
A while ago, I and a friend of mine got rather annoyed at a ridiculous propaganda attempt called “Not So Safe”, claiming that Electronic Cigarettes were extremely dangerous, so we countered it by parodying the complete lies with a website in the same shape, which contained well cited research. We called it Not So Educated. They’ve long since taken the site down, I suspect in…
I’ve personally been maintaining a policy that generally dumber tech is better. I don’t own any smart speakers, I don’t own any smart lightbulbs because I’m terrified of the prospect of having a web server in a light-socket, and I definitely don’t own any smart cameras or the such for similar reasons. I’m not opposed to such things existing, I just think…
Few remember the Cybiko. In the year 2000, a Russian company unveiled a very strange looking device, adorned with a comically small keyboard and a retro antenna. They called it a handheld computer, and marketed it towards teens with some of the most insane advertising I’d personally ever seen. The device was an interesting one, and to describe just how far ahead of its time it really was, it…
This project provides you with two main scripts. The first is a player controller which was designed with the Oculus Rift DK2 in mind, but should work perfectly with more modern hardware. This player controller will attempt to keep the player locked to the surface of whatever three dimensional shape they are walking on, similar to Super Mario Galaxy. ##Video demos For some video demos of it in…