Nick Pegg
I usually try to make a good effort at Wordle , but sometimes I get down to the last one or two chances and need some help. Instead of anything fancy-pants, I usually turn to a dictionary file and my friend, grep . So, first thing's first, you need a dictionary file, which is just a file with a bunch of words one-per-line. These are usually found in /usr/share/dict . I happen to have…
I do all of my PC gaming on a Windows VM which I run on a Linux host running KVM. With a new gaming monitor on the way, I got the idea of using a DisplayPort/USB switcher to switch my keyboard, mouse, and monitor between my laptop and Windows VM (via KVM's USB passthrough). That way I can connect the monitor directly to the Windows VM and use its 144 Hz refresh rate instead of being stuck at what…
Here's a quick blurb about something I recently ran into and found a fix for, and I'm hoping that the search indexing gods find this and help some other poor soul who has run into this sort of thing. I've been playing around with KVM virtual machines on my home server recently, and have started using the virt-sparsify and virt-resize CLI tools respectively to generate a compressed golden machine…
In my last post I talked about setting up a VPN tunnel to my home network using Wireguard, but did you know that Wireguard also makes for a good IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel?
If you have an interest in Linux networking, by now you've probably heard of Wireguard . In case you haven't, it's a newer cross-platform VPN whose main attraction is that it's way way easier to set up on Linux than other VPNs that have come before it. If you've ever had to set up an IPSec VPN using Racoon or Openswan or StrongSwan or any other weird animal-based tool, then you know how much of a…
Here's a Linux utility that I recently learned about: Anacron Simliar to cron , it runs tasks on a periodic basis, but it will ensure the task runs when the computer is on. My use case is that I want my backup repository integrity check to run once a week on my laptop, but when a cron @weekly task is going fire (midnight on Sunday) my laptop's going to be turned off. Anacron to the rescue! So what…
I've added a new page to chronicle my bike touring trips besides whatever blog posts I make about them. Go check it out!
When redesigning my website and re-writing my static site generator Posty , I wanted to refactor the URLs for my blog posts but not leave anyone hanging when they had an old URL bookmarked. Since my website could be hosted somewhere that I don't have control over the webserver config, I had to figure out how to do this with HTML.
My website here, as of the time of writing this, is still based on a design I made back in 2010, and is rendered using my static site generator that I haven't touched in nearly as long. The site's served its purpose pretty well, but it's kind of a mess; It's unreadable on mobile devices, the CSS causes some weird inconsistencies, and the static site generator is no where near my current standards.…
In April of this year, I attempted to bike the Katy Trail , but I forgot how unpredictable weather could be in Missouri that time of year and got rained out. While visiting with my parents waiting for my flight back to California, I decided to do a short bike tour in the San Francisco Bay Area where at the very least I wouldn't have to deal with rain.
Continuing on my adventure of running my own self-built router at home, I decided to get IPv6 running on my home network. As of writing this blog post, my ISP doesn't do native IPv6 yet so I decided to go with Hurricane Electric's IPv6 Tunnel Broker service, which provides you with an IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel.
In my last post I talked about getting my home router up and forwarding packets from nothing and getting my computers connected via Ethernet. The next step is to get 802.11 (WiFi) working.
This is the first of a series of blog posts on building my own home router from scratch using Debian. My hopes are that by sharing my experiences, it can help others in this endeavor.
I've been playing Minecraft for a while and after doing some travelling, I've ran into the issue where I'd like to syncronize my Minecraft saves across computers.
After getting my tax refund and being sick and tired of bottling my homebrew beer, I've built myself a kegerator! Details are over at my project page , or if you'd rather just gawk at some pictures, check out the Flickr set !
Yes, it's that time of year. Time to change my website design yet again ! I got tired of dealing with Wordpress and wrote my own static page generator in Python, dubbed Posty . I know, I'm kind of re-inventing the wheel here and there are some really nice solutions to this problem, but why not just make something for making's sake? Plus, I just feel cool using Markdown and YAML to update my…
I've been struggling getting my work phone number verified with Google Voice. The way that number verification works is that Google Voice calls you and asks you to enter the two-digit code that's displayed on the website. But for some reason when I get a call on my outside line and I press a number button, it doesn't send that DTMF tone. Instead it tries to place another call. My solution? I found…
Those of you who know me fairly well know that I'm a total HTPC geek. It's to the point where I outright refuse to subscribe to cable television or even hook up an antenna to my TV. This geekery combined with my affinity for Linux leads me to running XBMC on Linux on my little home theater machine. It's been a pretty smooth experience with the exception of getting my remote work with it. If you're…
It was the Friday before my Spring Break and quite possibly the worst thing in the world happened to me: I got rear-ended while at a stop. Well, okay, it's not the worst thing in the world but to a college student who loves his car, it was pretty bad. The lady who hit me did quite a number on my back end, and then pushed me into the car in front of me. Despite my airbags not going off, my car was…
I don't cook/bake fancy stuff all that often, but when I do I like to have some fun with it. I came up with a ham recipe that turned out well, so I figured I'd share it with everyone.
I figured I'd post the latest graph magic from my work at Nucor-Yamato Steel. This is a graph of the entire network, switches AND hosts!
I'm glad to announce that my recent pet project, Beertraq, is now in a (somewhat closed) beta stage! The basic idea is there and functioning, but the extra functionality isn't done and it's far from polished. Nonetheless, it's time to take her for a test drive!
I've always been utterly fascinated with graph theory, mostly with its applications to networks. As an added bonus, they can be represented with pretty pictures!
Well, I finally bit the bullet and got a Linode account. So far I'm pretty happy with it. I figured that with the costs of power and bandwidth, I was almost spending $20/month to run my old server on my own hardware. Incidentally, the lowest-grade Linode VM costs that much and is enough to suit my needs.
Want to share what you're doing with another person logged into the same system? All you need is a FIFO, cat, and script. On your session: mkfifo foo script -f foo On the viewer's session: cat foo The viewer can then see everything that you're doing as if they're looking over your shoulder!
I said that I'd post details on my Intelligent Drink Dispenser project "soon". That was over a month ago. Whoops. I blame my new internship for that. For those of you not in the know, the Intelligent Drink Dispenser was my senior design project at Missouri University of Science and Technology (which will forever in my heart be University of Missouri-Rolla). It's basically a smart drink dispenser…
The other major half of the Intelligent Drink Dispenser project was the software side of things. As with the hardware, there were some things we had to consider when beginning the design of things.
So, I've been pretty quiet about my Intelligent Drink Dispenser project so far, mostly because there was going to be a competition between myself and Clint Rutkas and I didn't want to give the enemy any details.
After spending all afternoon fighting with my new server and my DD-WRT router, I finally figured out how to get my server to PXE boot and fire up an Ubuntu install. All it really involved was setting up TFTP on another box (my desktop, to be specific), adding a line to DD-WRT's DNSMasq options, and configuring the damn server to boot from PXE, which was the hardest part. Luckily, for those of you…
Thanks to a generous donation from Richard Allen , I now have a new server.
So, I've decided to redo my website again. My old one was pretty bland and updating stuff was a relatively a pain. Plus, I seem to be doing more interesting things and having more interesting thoughts (hopefully) than I have in the past couple of years. Of course, I am a Computer Engineer (aka nerd), so don't expect to see anything like me pondering the wonders of the cosmos here. I'll probably…