Category: Computers

Fun with Sensors

I started woodworking some more in the garage, since I plan on doing this for decades to come I should worry a bit about air quality. I found a cheap sensor on eBay that can read particles the size of 1.0 μm, 2.5μm, and 10μm and provide both the AQI for that as well as a particle count. I bought a similar all in one device on Amazon which is nice for a visual I can move around the shop and another bare device I wired into the Raspberry Pi. The result of using my table and miter saw are below. The base-line is because I run a box fan and air filter setup to try and keep the air somewhat clean.

Miter peak at AQI 50 @ 10μm and tablesaw peak of 139 AQI @ μm as graphed with grafana.

As shown the air quality is pretty bad when using these tools. Which means I will be wearing a N95 mask while using them to be on the safe side. But it looks like setting up the cuts I need to probably be less worried due to my box fan air cleaners. Next up is collecting more data around cleaning up (I use a leaf blower to kick up stray dust for my box fans to catch) and sanding. The result will hopefully be a nice coffee table. The progress of which after this weekend is about ready for finishing:

Coffee table progress.

Sensor is the Plantower PMS5003 (spec sheet) (amazon affiliate link) — This one includes a handy breakout board so you don’t need to solder from Adafruit and some code: Link here.

One with a screen I found on Amazon, there are cheaper ones available (Mine was about 50 bucks I think at the time): (amazon affilate link)

Alt+Drag for Windows

I found a program named AltDrag recently that I find really useful. Its a small program that lets you hold the ALT key and left click and drag windows around. Now you don’t have to find the top part of the window to drag and makes it easy to rearrange windows quickly. Check it out here: https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

Nexus 6P Screen Replacement done!

I just got my phone back from Huawei with a brand new screen. I called Jul 20th to support to get the ball rolling, sent it out shortly thereafter to Texas, and I just got it back today. So about 3 weeks to get a phone screen replaced and a cost of $163.46 for the repair and $18 for shipping UPS to them (181.46 total). Much cheaper than the going through Asurion  who wanted to give me a different device and the deductible was about the same. Overall, I’m happy with Huawei and their support, it was easy to call and talk immediately with people who handled my claim quickly and professionally. For comparison Asurion put me on hold for 30 or so minutes and I just gave up.

Adobe Account Snafu

I’ve been a Creative Cloud member for over a year without any problems whatsoever. I am in the process of retiring an old e-mail address and went to setup the new one on Adobe.com. In the process my account has disappeared! I specified a new account id and an alternate, now none of them work except the alternate, but my membership details have been deleted. Support didn’t resolve the issue, I’m not sure if they could have since I doubt they have much access to anything. So, as a result I just cancelled the subscription in Paypal to Adobe and will begin a trial in my alternate account until I need to pay again. I’m glad I didn’t store anything in their cloud servers as it would be gone by now. Who knows what really happened, its probably in a log file somewhere.

This is running in a container

Kuberenetes on Google Cloud specifically. Just thought I’d see how it looks and works. Now I’ve moved my production blog over from my self-hosted linode. Running WordPress in a container with a separate MySQL container is working well!

Some features I really like over my roll-it-yourself approach:

  1. Upgrades are now seamless, no more update notifications, the docker container is setup to allow auto-updating.
  2. Plugins don’t need to be installed manually, they just install.
  3. Same with themes!
  4. Themes are easily customizable, no more mucking with permissions.
  5. It seems faster, but that may be because its running on a separate server from MySQL.

Openstack Server

I’ve been playing with Openstack a bit at work and at home. I purchased an Lenovo TD340 a while ago and have been playing a bit with Devstack. Right now I have neutron networking and glusterfs installed on it. It took a bit of work to get it working so I thought I’d share my local.conf file showing how to add a plugin to devstack and how to configure networking, since the documentation for me was not complete. I’m on a 10.0.0.0/8 network at home, the openstack devstack server is 10.0.0.5, and my router is 10.0.0.1.


[[local|localrc]]
enable_plugin devstack-plugin-glusterfs https://github.com/stackforge/devstack-plugin-glusterfs

#Enable heat services
enable_service h-eng h-api h-api-cfn h-api-cw

# Minimal Contents
# ----------------
ADMIN_PASSWORD=securepassword
DATABASE_PASSWORD=stackdb
RABBIT_PASSWORD=stackqueue
SERVICE_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
HOST_IP=10.0.0.5

# Logging
# -------
LOGFILE=$DEST/logs/stack.sh.log
LOGDAYS=2

# Swift
# -----
SWIFT_HASH=66a3d6b56c1f479c8b4e70ab5c2000f5
SWIFT_REPLICAS=1
SWIFT_DATA_DIR=$DEST/data

# Neutron options
# ---------------

# Do not use Nova-Network
disable_service n-net

# Enable Neutron
ENABLED_SERVICES+=,q-svc,q-agt,q-dhcp,q-l3,q-meta,neutron,q-lbaas

Q_USE_SECGROUP=True
FLOATING_RANGE="10.0.5.0/8"
FIXED_RANGE="192.168.0.0/24"
Q_FLOATING_ALLOCATION_POOL=start=10.0.5.10,end=10.0.5.250
PUBLIC_NETWORK_GATEWAY="10.0.0.1"
Q_L3_ENABLED=True
PUBLIC_INTERFACE=enp7s0
Q_USE_PROVIDERNET_FOR_PUBLIC=True
OVS_PHYSICAL_BRIDGE=br-ex
PUBLIC_BRIDGE=br-ex
OVS_BRIDGE_MAPPINGS=public:br-ex
#NETWORK_GATEWAY=10.0.0.1
NETWORK_GATEWAY=192.168.0.1

# Glusterfs
# ---------
CINDER_ENABLED_BACKENDS=glusterfs
CONFIGURE_GLUSTERFS_GLANCE=True
CONFIGURE_GLUSTERFS_NOVA=True
CONFIGURE_GLUSTERFS_CINDER=True
CONFIGURE_GLUSTERFS_MANILA=True

Very Strange DNS Issue

I have a unique setup at my home with fios, I have the fios router connected to a netgear 600 with dd-wrt installed. The speed is perfectly fine but for whatever reason DNS is unbearably slow. I’ve configured the Google DNS servers to try and speed things up but those appear to be slow. Sometimes it can’t even resolve to Google.com. Right now I’m on a VPN to Denver and pages are resolving and loading wicked fast! I’m going to have to investigate this more but its a weird issue nonetheless.

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My Chunkhost server got all messy

For some reason I had an issue with my Chunkhost server that hosts www.technobadger.com, my empty forum. So I had to restart the system a couple of times to get it working again. I took the opportunity since its mostly a graveyard over there to upgrade the vBulletin on there to the latest patch and get ssl setup correctly. I still would like to find a nice theme to put on there which I think I will soon to hopefully attract some folks.

Just a speed test & some thoughts on internet access in the USA

Netflix internet streaming is finally good. I watched a movie two nights ago and it streamed to Super HD within in a couple of seconds. It stayed nice and swell for the entire thing too. Today I decided to see how much an internet upgrade would cost me. After trying to do it myself online with Verizon I hit an error where it wouldn’t let me do an internet-only plan without a bundle. So a couple of minutes in a chat later I get some idea of pricing for me as a current customer. I currently play $69.99/mo for 50/50 internet access. Today I upgraded to 75/75 internet:

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