Using own OpenWRT router with Vodafone/Cityfibre

For something very different this time, a quick recipe for a very specific situation. One of the very few fiber-to-the-home solutions in the UK is through Cityfibre, sold as Vodafone “Gigafast” packages where I live. As with other ISPs they give you their own internet router. If you would like to use your own, here’s how. TLDR; Obtain PPPoE credentials specific to your account from Vodafone, then use them to configure your router, you need to tag all your packets with VLAN 911. [Read More]

Don't throw away. Fix.

Try fixing your things. It’s already broken - no need to sweat. You might learn something. Level 2 - push for things to be easily fixable. It’s good for you. It’s good for the planet.

CNC router arrives

After 2 months of waiting - my CNC router arrives. 8 weeks lead time they said - 7 weeks and 4 days it was ! Who are they ? TanieCNC people [CheapCNC in Polish :]. Although it may look like they don’t know how to make websites AND their name does not instill a lot of confidence - but hey, they certainly know how to weld and make precise machinery ! [Read More]

Tools - PCB holder

I thought it would be cool to share with you the tools I find surprisingly useful. Behold the first in the series: the PCB holder ! I cannot overstate how much is that of a difference from the ’third hand’-type of holders. The grip is very firm but won’t scratch the surface nor short anything because the jaws are made from a soft plastic. And the whole thing ROTATES ! [Read More]

Backing up and restoring whole block devices

SD cards are not really a reliable storage, especially when used constantly e.g. while sitting in always powered-on Raspberry Pi. Because of that I’ve recently needed to perform lots of backup/restore operations ;) I wrote this script for backing up: #!/bin/bash if [[ -z $1 ]]; then echo "usage: $0 device_to_clone" exit fi device=$1 timestamp=`date +%Y%m%d` dest_file="/tmp/$timestamp.dd.xz" echo "about to clone $device to $dest_file" echo "ctrl-c or [enter]" read sudo umount $device? [Read More]

Standing desk

It was some time since the last photo-story so, please accept these pictures of my standing desk. On the actual desk, there is a laptop stand serving a role of a keyboard and mouse rest. Laptop itself is flipped on its back, motherboard attached to the back of what once was a lid. The whole thing is flying on standard monitor desk mount, using custom vesa-to-acrylic mounting system ;) Img 1238 [Read More]

Mount your filament spool on the wall

I find it useful to hang as much stuff as possible on the walls, instead of using shelf/floor/desk space for that. Here is just a quick hack I did to allow filament spools to be mounted securely to a wall. It turns out that if you cut off the bent part the rod it fits perfectly into the spool’s handle hole.