Your guitar is out of tuna!

The USB hub is powered, and the Pi needed a driver swap for better stability. So far works great.

Here we gooooo, the king of all junk setups.

Yeah, I’ve collected some used disks over the years.

The housing has been drafted in FreeCAD and then sliced out of scrap plywood.

And yes, the temperature is okay.

What’s currently running on mine:

• 10 commodity SSDs through a powered USB hub forming a poor man’s NAS with snapraid + mergerfs
• Podsync for converting my favorite YouTube channels to podcast feeds
• Syncthing for generic file synchronization
• K3s for whatever projects coming to my mind
• Retroarch for occasional gaming needs
• MPD with a floppy disk interface as my music station
• CUPS for printserver

Not exactly a terminal bell, but in my own phone I have replaced all system sounds with those coming from Doom 3 and Quake 2. Best UI sounds ever.

Plasma rifle cocking for display unlock is music to my ears.

The only brand new one is the Motorola ROKR E2 in the middle.

It’s not quite often to see damaged units on sale, as most of them are headed to a dumpster/recycle shop.

Just today I salvaged a portable cassette player in a decent cosmetic condition, I’ve yet to check the inner mechanics, but I’m pretty sure I’ll bring it to life one day.

Ooooh that roomba brush is Muscat’s favourite toy! He’d play the damn out of it.

Bring Your Own Box

Homebox supports the https://<hostname>/a/<inventory_id> shorthand and does a 302 jump for you. Otherwise yes, I would have implemented the API search in a microservice.

Muscat is a totally different beast. Before any treats he would effin’ murder for pets.

It’s Nelko P21, around $20.

You’re absolutely right here, this is my personal bias as I come from that part of the world (ex-USSR), where Palm’s market share was almost negligible. I’ll make sure to actually fix this in my presentation.

For now I use the vendor provided app, given it supports a share intent, so I can simply toss a PNG from Vivaldi at it and make it print the label. It does the job, and more importantly, it bypasses all possible obnoxious advertisement.

Surprisingly, it works! I just checked it on my microservice, indeed now QRs are smaller. This is a lifesaver tip, thanks a bunch!

I keep track of lots of vintage devices in my basement, these lay on a CD shelf with narrow walls, and I want to keep track of their maintenance status, i.e. when did I charge the battery last time.

This little printer is pretty handy for labeling tasks, with one noticeable problem: the resolution is quite low, so I cannot afford printing full length domain name on such a tiny label. What I ended up with is writing my own microservice that puts fake http://i.nv/ domain in front of inventory ID. That domain is provided by DNSMASQ that I run on my server, and there’s also NGINX listening for that domain and doing 302 onto an actual Homebox page.

Homebox sends URL parameters to the specified endpoint, and given that information it is possible to construct any label of any shape or form, it only needs to be a PNG image.

Grab Homebox here and start tracking your inventory!

It’s almost always 7. I’m a chonky boi, and I like the number 7.

Well, it just happened.

I see it’s an Ericsson-branded Psion, the first to carry the Symbian logo!

Pretty dope, need to try that myself some day. But first I’d like to setup URAN-1 SDR to spawn a DIY 2G cell tower 👀

I simply wonder at this point what sinister kind of delirium awaits us when the AI hype is over.

It’s not the AI itself driving me crazy, LLMs are actually pretty good at some tasks (I do translate my own blog posts from time to time, and it’s much better at preserving nuances). It’s the tech industry hopping onto another bandwagon in attempt to squeeze all possible money from what had brought success to someone else. It’s circlejerk, a VC cargo cult where they cluelessly ape one another hoping that doing the same thing will get them rewarded.

Remember early 2010’s? Facebook took off, and then Google started sprinkling every damn thing they make with Google+ that no one actually needed since there was already Facebook. Took them 5 years to realize it was an utter failure and several years more to phase this nonsense out.

Remember late 2010s? Suddenly Snapchat takes off, and now Facebook is in chasing position. So they ape it with Instagram stories, and guess what? Now even your banking app displays stories. A feature so out of place that no one ever asked for, yet here we are.

Remember early 2020s? Suddenly Tiktok takes off, and guess what? Correct, Meta apes it immediately, and everybody else follows. I can go on for hours, but to sum it up: VCs will keep throwing money at whatever brought somebody insane revenue once, hoping for fat ROI. It’s never guaranteed though.