Sunday, Mar 29, 2020
I recently moved, and my new abode has an Ubiquiti Amplifi LAN. The rationale is this mesh-based WiFi network eliminates the need to install Ethernet between Wireless Access Points (APs). It works surprisingly well. In this post I document how I extended this network so I could place my networked devices all on the same Ethernet segment, without needing to wire it to the Amplifi base station.
The idea is the network should look like this:
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Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020
Previously I detailed how I set up blog.winny.tech using GitHub for source code hosting and Caddy’s git plugin for deployment. This works well and I used a similar setup with my homepage. The downside is I host the static web content and I am tied to using Caddy.1 I imagine simpler is better, so I opted to host my static sites — https://winny.tech/ & https://blog.winny.tech/ — with GitLab pages.
What’s wrong with Caddy?
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Wednesday, Dec 25, 2019
Most of my workstations & laptops require a passphrase typed in to open the encrypted root filesystem. So my steps to booting are as follows:
Power on machine Wait for FDE passphrase prompt Type in FDE passphrase Wait for boot to complete and automatic XFCE session to start Since I need to know when the computer is ready to accept the passphrase, it is important the framebuffer is usable during the early part of the boot.
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Saturday, Nov 23, 2019
This most recent weekend (November 16th) I attended the Milwaukee Code Camp and was pleased with the content. There was plenty of food, coffee, and give-aways.
The Talks I attended five talks:
starting an open source project (link) 1,
how to manage work life balance as a software developer (link),
getting started with Docker and Kubernetes2 (link),
introduction to Terraform for cloud infrastructure management (link),
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Monday, Nov 18, 2019
About a fortnight ago (Nov 9th) I went to the MSOE x Google Cloud hackathon.1 There was pizza, soda, and Google Cloud gear. Each group was given a Google AIY Computer Vision kit to assemble, and build a proof of concept around.
The kit contained a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the Raspberry Pi Camera Add-on, a breakout board to provide simplified pin-outs for a button with an integrated light, an additional LED that mounted next to the camera to indicate if the camera was active, and a piezo buzzer.
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Wednesday, Nov 6, 2019
I attended the GDG Milwaukee 2019 DevFest last Saturday. This was my second hackathon. Around 6-9 teams participated. We coded for six hours, and I learned a lot about team dynamics. We formed a team of eight participants. We encountered a couple significant challenges.
The stack matters Initially we decided to use Python and the Django framework. This turned out to be a grave error, because picking up Django quickly while staying productive is challenging.
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Friday, Nov 1, 2019
I ran into a hang today with only ivy enabled and nothing else configured or installed. The behavior was such that after I typed a hostname with a TLD (such as not.existant.com1), then typed C-x d to visit a directory or C-x C-f to find a file, Emacs would hang. My mouse would turn into a pin-wheel. My only recourse was to send the ‘quit’ command via C-g to cancel the operation.
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