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.

Building A Temperature Based Fan Controller

Cooling is important. I know this, because in the file vault I built myself there is hardly any airflow with 8 hard drives in close proximity to each other. This causes the hard drives to approach their safe temperature limit. In an enclosed space, they exceed it and shut down. This isn't good, as it wears the hard drives more than regular usage. So we need to add a fan to them. I want to build my own temperature based fan controller because I'll need one for another project I'm working on. The payoff on that one will be pretty cool, too. So stick around.

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.

Turning A Broken Chromecast Into An Audio Chromecast

The Chromecast reinvented the way we share media with those around us. It baffles me that it took so long for a company to make a device that turns dumb TVs into smart TVs. It's also amazing the power they pack in their tiny form factor. The small Chromecast 1 was way ahead of its time. It's a miracle that it can do what it does and do it so well. But because they're so compact, they can fail very easily. For example, I recently got my hands on one that produces very strange video artifacts. Like, very very strange.

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.