idatum

I'm happy to not see the term "daily driver" (yet again) used so far -- usually seen in discussions near the term "desktop".

OpenBSD is my behind-the-scenes, CLI focused, rock solid, lab project driver. It delivers when used correctly.

I've been using XEphem 4.1 on Win11 using WSLg and it works well. But I noticed a Windows installation is available of Stellarium -- I'll give it a try.

I think this is when we know something is in the past: A nice tribute.

I used gnuradio to decode a remote control to a device that allowed me to then automate. I now use a Great Scott Gadgets YARD Stick One to transmit along with rfcat and python. A generic RTL-SDR device with gnuradio worked on the decoding part.

I found some good online resources to understand how to do the decoding (e.g. learning the different protocols used). You can dive into more theory (FFT etc.) of course. It was a winter break project. Pretty fun. But be warned SDR generally can be a deep rabbit hole.

One note: gnuradio is a shockingly bloated suite of software, so pick a machine you don't mind getting tons of new packages.

Brace yourself for "Watson" branding and IBM marketing hype.

Agree.

"The average store size in the U.S. is the smallest it’s been in at least 17 years, reflecting profound changes in the way Americans now shop."

I'm also struggling to understand why this is "profound". Things change, business adapts. life goes on.

I just realized I have the transform of the dump1090-fa data to MQTT message already written up: https://github.com/idatum/adsb2mqtt What's missing is the client that enhances flight info and uses TTS to play the generated wave. I also wanted to play around with Home Assistant's TTS. I'll get motivated to write this up more fully, blog style.

I'll finally get motivated and share :)

I wrote a simple program that connects to (default) port 30003 on dump1090-fa (Flightaware version). It parses the ADS-B output and uses Flightaware's AeroAPI (there is a free tier based on requests) to augment with airline, aircraft, and city departure information. I then publish to my MQTT (Mosquitto) broker for planes within 2.1 nautical miles (i.e. I can visually make them out).

An MQTT client on an RPi3 (Linux) subscribes to those messages and uses a TTS service (Azure) to generate a wave file. I then use USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) to play it to me while I sit on my patio and watch local planes fly by.

I live near a couple major airports, so most of the planes are easy to spot (~5000 MSL). It's a simple pleasure.

I used OpenCV and Yolo on an RPi4 for object detection. Worked great. Fun project and I learned a lot from the OpenCV community.

I think the ability to learn computer vision from scratch (and free) like I did is one of the best aspects of open source generally.

But yeah, an Arduino would be tough.

For my RockPro64, I ran both OpenBSD 7.3 (haven't tried 7.4 yet) and both NetBSD 9.3 and 10_beta, and I found the NetBSD install process for both versions easier. In the end, I'm now on NetBSD 10 RC1 (just upgraded) and I'm happy. All of the important things work on NetBSD for this Aarch64 device.

I used Waze and loved the idea before I became so cynical -- around 2013-ish -- about the "surveillance economy" that I started deleting apps from the likes of GOOG and FB. This included Waze post-GOOG.

Maybe there could have been a revenue stream for Waze pre-GOOG from something other than ads and tracking? We'll never know.

Great to see many ARM64 (aka AArch64) improvements. This includes Apple M1/M2 and SoCs like Pine64 and RPI.

I wanted to use npf but I couldn't figure out how to implement NAT64. The syntax looked nice though.

Went from a Pixel 5a to a Pixel 7 (it's pre-8 bargain season!).

After a week, I do like the Pixel 7. Great camera, snappy interface, solid build.

The battery life so far is disappointing though.

I kindly ask: Provide numbers, how this survey was conducted, some math. Please.

Biggest potential I see with this update is IPv6 support.

I was happy to learn the 3G radio in my 2016 VW Golf no longer works. Obsolescence can be a savior.

In your experience, what is a good schedule for scrubs?

I do one about every month or so. I should probably add a crontab for that.

I need 3 stores to feel I'm keeping safe years of digital family photos. 1) I have a live (local) FreeBSD ZFS server running for backups and snapshots; 2 pairs of mirrored physical drives 2) I have a USB device that takes 2 mirrored drives to recv ZFS snapshots from #1; I store that vdev backup in a safe place 3) I backup entire datasets to cloud storage from off-prem using rclone.

It's #3 where I need to do some more research/work. I need to spend some time sending snapshots/diffs to cloud blob storage and make sure I can restore. Yes, I know there is rsync.net.

Any experiences to share?

The individual insight though sitting and thinking is what can be shared with others, each also doing the same, and can really move the conversation forward.

I couldn't find any info on the privacy policy of this privacy tool. If I request an image of myself removed from public search, does Google use that image as reinforcement to internally help identify me in their ad algorithms?

Think back when FB asked for your phone # for "security", then turned that into another data point on you to exploit.

Yes, dc calculator, mentioned in this article. Here's the Wikipedia link also given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dc_%28computer_program%29

Here's the NetBSD man page: https://man.netbsd.org/dc.1

I forgot about dc! A NetBSD instance I have still has it. Love going back in time to these original utilities.

As long as you don't consider Play services bloatware, yes Pixel is quite clean. I'm still happy with a Pixel 5a. Camera is good enough even with that older model.

I like Android though because compared to others I know with iPhones, there seems to be more ways to customize Android. Termux is one obvious example -- with a BT keyboard, feels like a pocket Linux device. I also use a different launcher as well as different browser and search engine.

jail.conf:

ssh { exec.start = "/bin/sh /etc/rc"; exec.stop = "/bin/sh /etc/rc.shutdown"; exec.clean; mount.devfs; path = "/var/jail/ssh"; host.hostname = "ssh"; vnet; vnet.interface += "em0"; }

It's IPv6 only, so this is key in rc.conf: rtsold_enable="YES"

OpenBSD PF based router does the rest. IPv6 simplifies things here.

PF on FreeBSD isn't the most ideal, sure, but I can limit local access on inet6.

For SSH tunnel, it's straight forward.

I have a VNET jail for remote access to my home lab. This takes an extra NIC I wasn't using anyway. It has been solid running on FreeBSD 13.2.

This jail allows me to lock things down to minimal access to other services I need remotely, such as an SSH tunnel to Home Assistant.

I run my FreeBSD server mainly for ZFS. Adding a jail for remote access adds to the usefulness that hardware.

Absolutely agree a VLAN is the better solution to block an entire network, and I do use one in my case (protecting my other VLANs). But I still need to explicitly block Amcrest cam because I also have an RPI on that VLAN doing image processing, which uploads to an external site; hence I can't block the entire VLAN.

I recommend explicitly blocking internet access for Amcrest devices. I configured my camera with a static IP and blocked it in my PF rules with logging, and my camera model was making 1000s (16k in 24 hours) of DNS requests for config.amcrestcloud.com. I don't use any of their cloud services.

I'm done with new cars. I have a 2016 VW Golf GTI, manual transmission, 3G telemetry already dead, minimal infotainment crap but good backup cam. Not for sale!