-- I'll probably regret this when I finally lose my data
Figure 1. TrueNAS VM configuration panel
I've been meaning to transfer my Raspberry Pi based services into a virtual machine on my main server running TrueNAS for a while now, but I've always delayed as I didn't know where to store the VM's disk. I have 7 disks in my main server: 2x 128 GB SSDs as the boot array, 4x 4 TB HDDs as the main array, and another single 4 TB HDD for less important data.
Basically, I don't care where I store the VM, but I want my HDDs to spin down during the night and low load periods. Since a VM will definitely keep the drives up, the mechanical drives are out, leaving me only with the boot pool. It has enough storage for what I need, but, and here comes the problem, TrueNAS does not allow me to keep custom datasets on the boot pool.
But, under the hood, TrueNAS is just FreeBSD. So as I had some time over the holidays, I set out to find a solution to do it nonetheless.
WARNING! This guide is definitely not how TrueNAS is intended to be used. It's dirty and terrible. If you brick your installation (even if you followed this guide perfectly), or even worse, lose your VMs and data, don't tell me I didn't warn you. Only do this if you can live with losing everything and having to reconfigure your entire system.
-- Based on an AVR and a Raspberry Pi 0W running MPD
Figure 1. DIY Web Radio
Last year, a friend gave me a dead DAB+ radio, whose only function that still worked was the heater-function -- Oh, it wasn't supposed to do that? OK... Then it was 100% dead. --
Either way, I've been meaning to get myself an Internet radio for a while now, but all on the market were missing some feature I wanted, plus building one myself didn't sound too hard.
This post describes the radio that I built in the end, based around only the original case and speaker from the DAB+ radio.
-- Now that's my definition of building a computer!
Figure 1. The finished LW-35
Do you still remember the old electronic typewriters from the nineties? Many of the later machines were already pretty much full-fledged computers, just with a word processor as the operating system. One of these typewriters is the Brother LW-35 released in Europe. I still had one of these lying around; Great keyboard, a fun daisy wheel printer, and a 14 line display for distraction free writing. It even had a floppy drive for data exchange. So in summary, a pretty cool device.
But there were a few problems with it. First of all, the floppy drive stopped working reliably. And secondly, on the days the floppy drive decided to work, it was still a floppy drive. Not exactly the most convenient way to store and transfer data these days, although I'm sure some of you will disagree. Also, the typewriter used its own file format, which needed to be converted on the device itself before it could be read in a DOS or UNIX environment. This may be OK if you're writing a longer document, and only write it on that machine. But as someone who constantly changes the machine they type on, it's not practical.
Yet, even with these problems, I just didn't have the heart to throw it out.
So what can we do about it? Upgrade it!
In this post, I will show you how I converted my old LW-35 typewriter into a modern computer while keeping all the good features of the old machine.
Figure 1. Thank you for 2018! 2018 is coming to an end, and so it's time to tend to things that didn't get done over the year.
For me, I've been wanting to talk about many of my old projects for quite a while now, but never got around to it.
So this December (or tbh, many were shot during November), I pulled together and made videos for 25 of my projects. They date from very recent (November 2018) back to my school days (2007), so there's quite some variation to the style and type of project. I hope that you will enjoy (at least some of) them.
-- Let's pretend FlightGear is a model airplane simulator
Figure 1. FlightGear controlled using the FlySky FS-i6
In this post, I will explain how to use the FlySky FS-i6 RC remote control as a game controller / joystick on Linux.
This post covers how to connect the FS-iA6B receiver to a computer and how to compile the driver and support software.
-- Debugging an application which only works in the debug build
Figure 1. The error message I was confronted with
Recently, I had an interesting bug in one of my C applications where the application would work in the debug build but not in the release build (-O3 etc.). It turned out to be a really stupid mistake of mine where I went 'How could that ever work?!' after finding it out. However, this opened my eyes to how strong gcc's optimization feature really is.
In this article, I will explain the mistake I made, how I went about solving it and what I learned about gcc in the process.
