Can You Video Edit Using The Cloud As Your Disk?

I've recently started using Davinci Resolve for my editing software. Something I found interesting about it was that it saved all of its project data in a Postgres Database instead of project files. This gives you the option of saving things to a remote work server so you can work on it from several computers. Video projects can generate a lot of raw footage and data, and keeping files and such locally can be a logistical nightmare. But the cloud is basically infinite. So can we edit video using the cloud as our storage? Probably not, but it's worth a shot!

Stream Raymarine's Multifunction Displays Anywhere

Raymarine's electronics are not very secure. This is no secret, but there really isn't a drive to reverse engineer or hack them. But the way they're selling their high end solutions for a large amount of money is ridiculous. What even is "SeaTalk"? It's a serial connection. They could have done the same thing with ethernet or just a few wires. It's all a market cornering money grab. So I decided to try and imitate what (I think) is one of their more expensive features: viewing the MFD on a TV screen.

Reverse Engineering HP PCIe Mezzanine Cards - Part 1

This is a big project that's way above my electrical pay-grade. Am I going to do it? Yes. Will it work by the end? Maybe. I've heard conflicting rumors about how tolerant PCIe is supposed to be. One quote I've heard is that you can run PCIe over a wet string. But that might not be the case for server hardware like the HP Blades. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. For now, we need to figure out what we're doing and how we're going to do it.

Remote Audio Transmitter with an ESP8266

The motivation for this project was to have a wireless way to listen to my building's intercom remotely, be it from another room or from another state. Having the ability to do this doesn't necessarily add security to my residence like cameras would (maybe keep an eye out for a post on that), but it's interesting nonetheless. So what we can do is capture the audio over WiFi with an ESP8266 and capture it on a server. All with the power of Docker, of course!

Cloud Gaming - Part 1: The Proof of Concept and The Plan

Cloud gaming. Everybody's doing it. NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Sony... you get the picture. Big tech companies are doing it. Am I willing to say it's the future of gaming? Not quite, but it is an interesting service that clearly has a market. I wanted to see what it took to build a service like this in the cloud as well as the bandwidth it required to play things at a higher resolution, framerate, and quality than my computer.

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.

Fixing a Bootlooping Nexus 5X

The Nexus 5X was a really great phone offered by Google back in 2015. My mother got one that year while I got a Nexus 6P. Both were pretty solid phones for a while. But, after a while, my phone's battery got so ridiculously sketchy that it wouldn't stay on for more than 15 minutes. There was a lawsuit about that, I think. There was also a lawsuit about the Nexus 5X bootlooping or simply not turning on. That's what my mother's phone was doing: not turning on. I recently tried to fix it using a combination of several methods I found on line. Did it work? Kind of.

Building a Communications Standard from the Ground Up

Before you read this, just know that this is by no means a good way to do any of this. Hell, it's probably wrong. But it's how I'm doing it for a school project. There are probably many ways and standards in existence that do what I already want to do and do it better, but that's no fun, not a waste of time, and doesn't make for a very good blog post.

Simulating MapReduce in Mathematica

MapReduce is one of the most important algorithm types in big data. Perhaps its biggest draw is the fact that it can be massively distributed across commodity hardware to crunch massive amounts of data. This puts super computing in the hands of those without specialized parallel hardware. In a very basic example for a Hadoop class I did, I implemented a basic MapReduce simulator in Mathematica in order to illustrate how MapReduce works. I also got some extra credit for it, as well.

MacOS Screensavers Aren't That Hard

I recently had the chance to play around with a Macbook Pro and XCode 10. I'm not used to using these computers, but I do really like them. I've never been a big fan of the iPhone, but I've always loved Apple's beautiful, if underpowered computers. I wanted to try to make something relatively easy, so I figured I'd start with a screen saver. It wasn't as easy as I thought, but it certainly wasn't hard, either.

Journey Into The Home Automation Sinkhole

Home automation. There have been many products, ecosystems, and clouds pushed over the years that claim they are The Best™ at automating your home. Recently with the wave of IoT devices, companies big and small, foreign and domestic, real and fake have been clamoring to get into the home automation space. This leads to fragmented homes with multiple devices running across multiple apps on your phone. If you decide to lock yourself into an ecosystem, it's expensive to get out. Hell, it's expensive to stay in some ecosystems (*cough* nest *cough*). But, the real question here (at least for me)... could we build a better smart home out of 'dumb' electronics or make electronics that are smart and extensible. Of course we can. Companies don't because they wouldn't make money that way.

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.

Make A Slackbot From a Google Spreadsheet

In this episode of "probably useless", I'll quickly write about how to make a SlackBot that runs in the cloud using data from a Google Sheet. The example I'll be using was made by me and my friends to handle commuting to and from school, but I've generalized it to many carpooling situations. Because I don't have a lot of time to work on projects right now, I'll be explaining briefly how this works and how you can apply it to your own Slack (or otherwise) bot and maybe pick up some neat tricks for code like this along the way.

Toggle Switch to Pulse Conversion Circuit

For my next computer build - my filevault and media server - I wanted to take a less microcontrollery way to turn the computer on and off. My parents' build required a microcontroller because I didn't have the parts for this when I built it, so I had to make do. But, as I said before, I don't like cutting sandwiches with chainsaws. It seems wasteful to me to use a whole microcontroller to do one simple task and sleep the rest of the time. So I designed a specialized circuit to do it. I'm by no means a electrical engineer, so this may be a poor design. But stay with me to the end, because this simple thing works (and it's a very short post because it's so simple).

A File System Using Google Docs As The Disk

In today's episode of "Why the hell would you even want to do this?", I'd like to show off a software-only file system I wrote in Google Apps Script that uses a Google Doc as its disk. That's right. This is one of those "because I was bored and because I can" type projects. It has no real purpose and probably isn't a good file system implementation. But what can I say? I'm not a file system engineer and making a file system to be written to a Google Doc is stupid.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 4

In this exciting episode of "Making a Smart Speaker", we'll work on the AI that will do our bidding. We're already using some massive neural networks and pretrained models just do do voice recognition, but here is where we get to be creative about our AI. What do we want it to do? How freeform should we allow input? And, most importantly... how the hell are we going to do hotword detection?

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.

Writing a Discord Bot For Literally Anything

I love Discord. It is not only great for gaming chat, but it's awesome for chat in general, supporting arbitrary numbers of people, channels, and voice channels. It's really remarkable how much Discord can do. Discord, being the awesome application it is, exposes an API for you to develop bots with. These bots can do literally anything a regular user can, so we can make some great things with it. So, why don't we make all the things with it? Let's make a modular bot that has hot swappable components and can span multiple hosts monitoring multiple things. Sounds hard right? It's probably not, but as I'm writing this I haven't touched any code whatsoever.

Running CoffeeScript and Mustache on Google Apps Script

For a very long time, I thought Google Apps Script was quite useless. Then, one day, I found it useful. It's a nice little tool that's actually more flexible than you might think. I wanted to dive into seeing if I could make CoffeeScript and a templating engine like Moustache just to see if it was possible. I realize CoffeeScript is moving out of fashion, but it's still a nice little tool for making easy to read JavaScript. So, without further ado, let's do it!