Over a decade ago I took the LiveATC feed for KJFK ground and SomaFM's venerable Groove Salad and mixed them together into a nice background music stream that I'd listen to while working. Recently I setup an Icecast stream of my Uniden BearCat BC125AT scanner so I could listen to it from anywhere in the house but it is very jarring when abject silence is broken by a burst of traffic on the radio so I went spelunking in the digital horde and out fell a shell script. A quick modification and this is what came out the other side.
If you follow my thoughts microblog you may have noticed that I finally had to replace my router. The new to me motherboard is a SUPERMICRO X11SDV. I was finishing setup on it and discovered that I do not have the IPMI password. Turns out that getting it may be tricky, especially if you have one of the motherboards that didn't ship with their BMC Unique Password Security Feature, but got it via a firmware update. This means you may not have the default password on a label on your board.
When I originally installed the UniFi Video system at the house I was pretty happy with it. While rudimentary it was remarkable in that it was a prosumer grade system that was able to run entirely on premises. I installed the controller application on the same VM that runs the UniFi controller for the networking system and was reasonably happy.
Today marks five years since I re-launched this site, built on the software that I wrote to generate the site from a collection of markdown files. The development started 4 days prior with this rather innocuous commit.
Previously I got passff working on Windows 10 using a bit of a convoluted process that involved manually editing a bunch of the shims and replacing the pass binary with gopass. This has worked OK but I recently downgraded Firefox to the ESR release (the new UI in 90+ is an absolute abomination and I'm going to avoid it for as long as I can) and that wiped out my profile and deleted all the installed extensions. I figured it was time to do the update dance anyway and while doing that I decided to look into other solutions to see if there were less fragile options.
If you follow my microblog that I named Thoughts, you may have noticed that I added rich link previews. I found myself taking screenshots of links that I'd post and that is just a silly duplication of work which means it's time to write some software.
Here we are at the fourth installment in the ongoing series where I list a bunch of of bizarre and eclectic of YouTube channels that I enjoy. The theme for this edition seems to be the algorithm sought to surprise me. I found many of these channels just clicking on random videos.
I had previously bemoaned the inability to figure out why my automounts were being so stupid in Catalina and after periodically searching and giving up I finally found a bread crumb that showed me the way.
I have a pair of galleries on the website that are generated by my simple-gallery Python program. I created it back in 2010 and in 2016 I added lazy loading of thumbnails using jQuery.lazyload. This seemed reasonable to me at the time. These days I prefer to not use any external JavaScript libraries unless I have to and then I try to only use ones that are reasonably self-contained (because let us not forget that the JS ecosystem has a history of being a Zork-like maze of twisty passages all alike.) So while making some other much needed updates (a lot of Python 2 to Python 3 refactoring) I set about taking some JavaScript I wrote for a different project and bashing it into something more generic.
I don't understand the desire to shove everything into a web browser.
Other than the fact that it is how tech startups extract money from
venture capitalists, spy on your user base, and lock out interoperability
I don't see why a web browser is a better place to implement most things
and yet, here we are. I have resisted participating in the new real time
chat services because they don't really offer much over IRC, however I
finally gave in and joined a group of friends on Discord.
When I originally built Thoughts, I only supported images as attachments. I used the accept parameter of the file input tag in the posting interface to prevent myself from trying to attach anything other than images, leaving the pipeline simply unimplemented. This made it easy to add.
One of the more popular things that I have written in recent times is a small Python tool that gets statistics from an Arris SB8200 DOCSIS cable modem and sends them to InfluxDB. I then visualize this data in Grafana to keep an eye on the physical status of my cable Internet connection. This setup has happily chugged along since sometime in 2019, but sadly its time to put it all to bed.
I'm a feckless curmudgeon, so of course I believe that software that provides security infrastructure -- especially physical security infrastructure shouldn't be trying to chase the upgrade dragon like a heroin addict, but I digress. My UniFi Video installation stopped working last night and I was a bit distressed. Yes I know it isn't supported anymore and Ubiquiti would REALLY LIKE ME TO UPGRADE TO PROTECT NOW PLEASE. But never the less. Turns out, dear lazyweb that a Java update screwed me.
Edited: June 09, 2021 @09:45
I've always been fairly adamant that unless the built-in application for core mobile device functionality (things like contacts, calendar, phone dialer, SMS messenger, e-mail, camera, photos, music playback) is unfit for purpose that I would use it. A lot of it comes from a long history of third party applications just never being quite as well integrated as first party and my reliance on these functions. I have very few apps on my phone and other than SMS messaging the most often used is the Podcast app. Sadly iOS 14.5 seems to have opted to replace the podcast app with something no one bothered to use or test.
I like data. I've been spending some time cleaning up my monitoring and
visualization infrastructure, making sure everything is in Grafana and
available at a glance and I noticed that the one thing that I'm not doing
any collection on is my gaming PC. Now I don't spend as much time as I used
to playing video games but I still want information on how the system is
performing. Most of the tools to measure the performance of a Windows based
gaming system tend to cater towards traditional video gamers, providing
overlays or alerts on screen with the information. That is interesting to
me so I went looking for a way to send that information into my
monitoring platform.