Technology

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. Published while listening to: Malang With our temporary relocation, I currently manage two ‘home-labs’ - one which I remotely manage with a WireGuard tunnel and the other just a local-access only setup. The remote home-lab is essentially a Nextcloud server running on a DietPi OS spun on an RPi4. I pulled down the HAProxy config on the fronting server since that was no longer required. ...

Here’s a quick and simple way to make and print your own passport photos[PP]. I’ve used GIMP - which is a fabulous photo editing tool. They have a nifty installer irrespective of which OS you use and have stood the test of time. There are a slew of different ways to arrive at the final product. This method has worked well for me over the past and based on your specific needs, you might have to alter a few settings. ...

I’ve been sitting on the ledge for a while now and Whatsapp’s latest ultimatum is just what I needed to see myself out the doors. I value my freedom and privacy - way more than the perceived convenience and I’ve deleted my Whatsapp account for good. Ever since FB bought Whatsapp in 2014, they’ve been working on building a feature-set that would keep users tethered to the network - read receipts, web clients, weeding out third party clients, voice calls, removing the 1$ annual fee, file sharing, encryption, desktop clients, video calls, customer service platform for enterprises, status, enhanced video call features - you get it. The most recent move is a strategic attempt to enhance their monetizing pipeline by building the framework to better mine metadata across its various platforms - Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook and CrowdTangle. In growing economies, Payments has been one realm they have had their eyes on for a while now and this latest move will turbo-boost that intent and help them compete with PayTM, Google and Amazon Payment systems. I’m surprised they took 6 years to get here though. ...

This is fascinating! A few GPS devices apparently had a mild(?) path offset issue few days ago: The issue has to do with the ephemeris data file, also called the EPO file (Extended Prediction Orbit) or Connected Predictive Ephemeris (CPE). Or simply the satellite pre-cache file. That’s the file that’s delivered to your device on a frequent basis (usually every few days). This file is what makes your watch near-instantly find GPS satellites when you go outside. It’s basically a cheat-sheet of where the satellites are for the next few days, or up to a week or so. ...

Over the last few days, I’ve been meandering through Bert’s webpage and a few other sites - Such a treasure trove of information on the C-19 vaccine and biology/technology in general. No seriously, dive into these links for some great layman(ish) explanation of DNA, RNA, Vaccines and what not! Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine No, Really, mRNA Vaccines Are Not Going To Affect Your DNA The story of mRNA: From a loose idea to a tool that may help curb Covid I Made a Covid-19 Vaccine in my Kitchen and it Worked Note: These links point to my Wallabag instance. I’d much prefer linking to the original article. However, I find this as a good way to save information which I can access later even if the original source vanishes. ...

Earlier last week one of my external hard-disks went kaput. Though it’s fair to assume the recent travel could have led to this, my guess is that it was just a case of an ill-fated drive. While I did lose all the data on that drive, I thankfully had duplicate copies of the over 200GB data on other drives or machines. This is the first time that I’m losing a hard-drive and I’m so glad I was prudent enough to have multiple copies. All thanks to the folks over at Backblaze who frequently publish hard-drive failure statistics on their stock! ...

I’ve had my eyes on the Intel NUC for a while now. My current laptop has been on a downward spiral and a few days back, when I came across a fabulous deal on eBay for an unboxed but unused NUC, I took the dive and ordered it. With 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD, 8TH Gen Core i7 Pro processor and Windows 10 Pro pre-installed - This is the most powerful machine I’ve owned. Agreed speed and performance is all relative. I’m just amazed that all of this fits in a tiny 4"x 4"x 1" box! ...

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. My ‘Homelab’ setup has not changed much since my last update in January. I did add in a switch and installed a wireguard vpn on the RPI 3B+ that fronts as a reverse proxy for the Nextcloud media devices. I also got a Seagate 2TB drive and built two partitions into it. One acts as a backup for my Nextcloud files and the other is a ‘cold backup’ of my Hetzner cloud instance. ...

So far I had all the micro-servers in the home network connected either to a LAN port or to an Orbi Satellite. This week I implemented a simple 8 port un-managed TP-Link switch into my ‘homelab’. Costed just about 18 bucks with a price-match from amazon and it has tremendously improved upload/download speeds! Also it’s pretty cool to visually see that the RPi3B+ boards are being throttled at 10/100Mbps while the RPi4 is rummaging at 1000Mbps. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention: Weather’s been pretty erratic this week. We also had a mild dusting yesterday out of the blue! Might consider heading out for a hike later today. I nudged Meena to write more. We’ve had some interesting discussions on Yoga and other things over the past week and I do think she has a ton to share! She’s also planning to train for a 50miler which I am super excited about! Oh and beyond all that marketing ploy, Happy Mothers’ day. ...