Better Firmware For A First Gen Polar3D Printer

I was given a Polar3D printer. You know, the old one with a serial number lower than 1000. Polar was offering an upgrade to a new printer for the price of the old printer and $400 extra dollars. That's definitely not worth it to me. I figured I could abandon the Polar Cloud altogether because they don't seem to support the old printer anymore (not shocking) and I can't slice things differently with the onboard software. So let's install and configure OctoPrint on here so I can actually use it in future projects!

Virtualizing my Original Homelab

Remember that high school home lab that I had set up many years ago? Well, most if it is coming down. After graduation I'm moving to my own place and for some odd and inexplicable reason my parents don't want those horribly outdated computers in their basement. Well, I certainly don't have room for them in the place I'm moving. So why don't we take what we can and virtualize it? That way we can still have the computers without the bulk.

Setting Up My Plex Server In Docker

I've been gearing up to maintaining my own Plex server. Back in the good ol' days, I ran a Plex server off of my very first computer in my homelab and it was... adequate. It didn't have a bunch of media but it served its purpose. But, eventually, I stopped upgrading it and it became obsolete very quickly. Then, in college, my friends and I started to build a Plex machine using an old laptop and an external 16TB hard drive. Then we outgrew that, so we moved to a larger storage system. Now, we're all graduating. We all want copies of the Plex but we also want to continue to grow it. So, how did we do it?

How I Transcoded 11TB of Media Under A Week

The answer to the question "how did I transcode 11TB of media in under a week" will not shock you. In fact, there's really only one answer: I threw a disgusting amount of compute power at the problem. Now, I know what you're thinking. Throw enough computer at something and it will break, but the design used to solve a problem is just as important as the power you have behind it. If you don't use the power correctly, then you don't truly have power.

Running a Blade Server Without an Enclosure

I remember when the commercials for IBM Blades aired on TV. I thought the concept was pretty interesting, although at the time I didn't fully understand what was going on. After working with a few HP blades for a while, I get why they're so important. You can put a lot of compute power in a very small amount of space. But in order for many of them to be useful they have to be linked to a midplane in the blade enclosure. Or do they?

Headless Raspberry Pi Stream Youtube Streamer

There are many reasons you'd want to stream to Youtube from a Raspberry Pi. With the camera attachment, you can watch over anything with great clarity. My friend wanted to set up a camera to watch over his hedgehog - mostly for fun - and chose this system to do so. In many of the solutions I've seen to now, it simply offers a command line interface from which you can start streaming. What I intend to do is far more simple to use.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 6

Calvin has been on my desk for far too long now. I really want to just, you know, finish this project. Obviously, the software will be continuously evolving, but the hardware will be packed away in this nice package and will not be in wires and parts on my desk as it has been for many months. But I think that Calvin's design - as well as his codebase, isn't what I want it to be. Maybe I should start from scratch? Let's design a whole system architecture that allows us to make a whole smart home based on Calvin.

Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer - Episode 3: Broken IP Camera

This one has been sitting on my shelf for a while now. I've talked about these kinds of cameras before, and now we have the opportunity to see what they're made of - both inside and out - to see what makes them tick, and to see how safe, performant, and reliable they are. We'll look at the firmware to see what's going on inside of it, strip it of all of its camera bits, and make it a generic computer that's somewhat reliable.

Some FFMPEG Commands I Find Useful

This post is more for me than for you. I've been working with FFMPEG and AVCONV quite a bit recently, and I've had to reuse these commands quite a bit over that time. I'm putting them here so I don't lose them, and I also hope that someone finds them useful at some point in the future.  So, without further ado, here are some FFMPEG things I do a lot.

My High School Home Lab Is A Mess

I went home this weekend and I got a chance to work with my really janky homelab set up. Since I don't really have a whole lot to write about this month, I figured I'd take a anecdotal trip down memory lane for a blog post and document this this atrocity somewhere and begin to talk about how horrible this set up was.

How To Put A Custom ROM on a Verizon Samsung Fascinate (SCH-I500)

Old Android phones are really neat. They still have a decent amount of computing power and a multitude of neat hardware (sensors, cameras, WiFi connectivity and Bluetooth all in one). But with so much bloatware and carrier restriction, these devices are almost useless. A great way to get around this is to put an entirely new Android ROM onto the device. This blog outlines my adventures in trying to root the Verizon edition Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S SCH-I500) so you can do it too. Heads up, I probably made it harder than it needs to be.

Live Streaming Headless Processes To YouTube

The use cases are endless but useless all the same. In a hell-bent effort to waste Google's resources, I'm going to design a Docker image that allows you to stream a graphical process in the background. Sound interesting? Great, because this is a very short and straightforward blog post and I'm running out of things to write before the fold.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 5

Calvin is coming together. The software is moving along slowly, but I think it's time to assemble Calvin so there's only a single cable coming from him. The power cable. Everything else is optional, the way smart speakers should be. We'll add neato features like lights and working in its own microphone. Let's get to it!

Designing and Building a File Vault Part Two: My Turn

So I built my parent's file vault/media center a few months ago and it was a big hit. UPS was pretty rough with shipping it, but a little super glue and hope brought it back and it worked beautifully. I don't think my parents were totally up front and honest with me at first when they said they loved it, but now there's no question in my mind. My father has never been into binge watching shows, but now I'm pretty sure he'll get into some of the shows I've been recommending for years. He's already rewatched the Newsroom from both inside and outside the house thanks to Plex, and I've already trained him on how to add his own music. My mother loves it because all of the family photos are now much more secure (thanks to RAID) and we've watched a few movies on the TV thanks to Kodi. However, the system wasn't without its bugs, and we'll try to address them with the one I'll be making for myself, and I'll try to apply the software fixes remotely. Let's get into it!

Designing and Building a File Vault

Actually, make that two file vaults. I'm making a large file vault for myself and a smaller one for my parents. The specs of the machines will be similar, but the biggest difference is the amount of storage each will have. The best part: they'll both go into an almost identical case to the almost complete Game Console (I should really figure out what I need to do to finish that...). The only difference is that these are a little shorter. But I'll still use the power buttons and lights, I'll still remove the display boards (assuming they're still separate from the main logic boards) and I'll do everything very similarly. That's why this probably will be one long post instead of broken up into several posts like it was initially.

A Futile Attempt At Bending a DVR To My Will

One of my favorite places in the world is Gateway Electronics in St. Louis. They're an electronic part and surplus store that never fails to delight with their collection of old electronics. The last time I went, however, I found something newish. It was a DirecTV HR23-700 HD DVR box. I looked at the back and it had several really interesting ports: HDMI, eSATA, and two ethernet ports just to name a few. At $10, it was too good to pass up, so I bought it to see what I could do with it. I don't have any immediate plans for this right now mainly because I don't know what's inside. But we're about to find out.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 3

The Orange Pi Zero came in the mail yesterday, so I guess we're ready to move on to the next part in the design of the smart speaker: audio input and output. We won't cover any of the intelligence behind the AI right now because all I want to do is get audio out of the Orange Pi and into the speaker at a reasonable volume, and maybe get voice recognition to work. By the end of this, we should have something that can play music files and maybe transcribe what I say. We'll see.

What Can You Do With A Free Server In The Cloud?

I apologize for the clickbait title, but it's verbatim the exact question I asked myself when I learned about Google's Always Free tier for their cloud computing. This was a step up from what Amazon offered, because Amazon's free tier for computing only lasts 12 months. Naturally, I was really excited to have a free VM in the cloud that never had to be turned off. In this post, we can test the limits of these servers and see what you can do with them. Hopefully this can apply to developers and non-developers alike.

Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer - Episode 2

This is a cop out because moving to where I'll be living over the summer took more time than I thought it would. So in this episode of "Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer", we'll be making a old router into a computer. I know, I know, it's basically already a computer... but we're going to try and benchmark its performance and see what it's really capable of and we're going to try to do more with this than we did with the drone board because this has far more documentation than that drone board did. I guess you could say it was... undocumented code. B)

A Practical Guide to pthread And Pretty Fractals

Threads. Many programs need them, and they're important on multiprocessor systems (which, recently, is basically every system). Sometimes, they can be confusing, so I've taken the most most important bits and I've distilled them down into the basics of how to do threads in a basic C program using POSIX Threads (pthreads, for short). Let's get started!