hardware

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]

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. Img 20160612 120723 Img 20160612 120730 Img 20160612 120814 Img 20160612 120945 Img 20160612 121012 [Read More]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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. Img 1071 Img 1073 [Read More]