A Geek Goes Flying

I setup Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi I had left over from the IIgs / Slirp days, that's since been tasked with being a VPN server (but has gobs of excess capacity). Problem: At least one Apple TV app ( WE tv ), worked for everything but actually watching a show; it would sit on a black screen with a spinning grey wheel , forever. Since it's an ad supported app, I figured (correctly, as it turns out) that Pi-hole was interfering. Excluding a device from Pi-hole's DNS-based ad blocking was a bit less straightforward than I'd anticipated, so I figured I'd write it up here. In the Pi-hole admin, expand Group Management in the left pane, and select Groups:  In this case, I created a group named AppleTV, and left it Enabled:   Then, under Group Management | Clients, for each device you want to exclude from Pi-hole, dig through the "Known clients" list to find each one and add it: Then, under the "List of configured clients," under "Group assignment,

Trying to mount a Uniden radar detector to the rear view mirror on an old YJ Jeep Wrangler. I got this kit initially:  AccessoryBasics Rearview Mirror Stem Radar Detector Mount . It’s mostly cheap garbage. The bolts extend an inch above the mirror (which is annoying but not fatal), and worse, the bottom adjustable piece won’t tighten enough to actually hold the detector in position, so it starts drooping immediately and only gets worse over the next few minutes. But the piece that inserts into the radar detector is fine (and metal). It also has the same “fingers” as a GoPro camera mount, so there are options. I hooked it up to a  SMALLRIG Super Clamp Mount I had handy ($15.99), via a Smatree Aluminum Tripod Mount Adapter  ($9.99); it clamps perfectly and holds the detector steady. With the cold shoe ball head piece in place it hangs about an inch below the mirror, so I’m going to try it without that piece. So far so good, though. This might be a good alternative?  Taisioner Super Clam

I have a ~1 year old, lightly used, Western Digital WD_Black external hard drive. It currently has two 2TB FAT32 partitions (I needed to get some footage off an embedded security camera system), only one of which was accessible. Windows couldn't fix it, various Mac systems (Lion, High Sierra, Big Sur) couldn't, either. Neither could Linux, natively. But TestDisk , running on my MacBook (Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS), is currently recovering files off of the damaged partition, very successfully so far:  Credit where due, I found this amazing, awesome app through this answer on askubuntu.

So I got a new keyboard. I wasn’t really in the market, but I’d been sort of spec’ing in my head what I would build next, and then Drop had a significant sale price on the Entr keyboard, which I could order with Halo True switches (a Redditor’s review ), and it came with a second set of keycaps (from multiple options)... This checked all the “must have” boxes for my use case (no RGB or wireless, but this application doesn’t “require” either). So. Yeah. Here we are. I got the “silver” keyboard with the “ Vintage ” Artifact Bloom Series Keycap Set (Cherry MX profile). (The replacement keycaps aren’t backlit like the stock keys, but they’re much more stable ( one reviewer noted how “wobbly” the stock keycaps are ; that problem all but disappears with these keycaps). Of course, I created a custom Karabiner complex modifications setup . I was hoping to remap F1, F2, etc. to the F1, F2 keys, but for some reason that’s not working. Not critical, I’ll dig into that when I have more time. For

Hacked out this relatively simple Perl script ; took the backup of photos and videos from my old iPhone X from 104GB across 41,188 files, to 82G and 25,279 files. One of these days I have to build my “dedupe’d” filesystem. But today is not that day. This script is a little braindead but it worked for this purpose, where I had multiple files that looked like this: bfea8af574bedb735a089ce423eba8af: 3 files Removing: ./IMG_8963 1.JPG Removing: ./IMG_9868 1.JPG Keeping: ./IMG_9868.JPG 144d98e4b6b79e8ed3ed8baa70cca014: 2 files Keeping: ./IMG_6323 1.JPG Removing: ./IMG_6323 5.JPG

Now that the IIgs has an Uthernet II card, I no longer needed to have the DIN8-DB9 (“Apple IIgs, IIc+, LC III”) null modem cable / Blinken Lights GM-FTDI2-LED USB Serial Adapter / Raspberry Pi /  Slirp  setup I’d been using to connect it to the network. So, time to repurpose it as an OpenVPN server. (We’ve been running one at the office successfully for about 5 years now.) It was already setup with Raspberry Pi OS (aka   Raspbian GNU/Linux 9   (stretch)), so I kept in in place and assigned fixed IP addresses for the Ethernet and WiFi network interfaces in my DHCP server. I had to cycle both to pick up the new addresses (and I ran the command in screen so it would survive the forced disconnect, since I was doing this remotely via ssh ): # ip link set eth0 down &&  ip link set eth0 up I then updated the installed software to the latest version (10, buster); this will take a while (for my install, it was over 800 packages and almost 600MB): # vi /etc/apt/sources.list  # chang