A few months ago we moved into a brand new office which was furnished with a dozen of samsung displays. Unfortunately the basic player included in those displays isn't capable to add a webpage/url as content. Since we've setted up a smashing instance to create dashboards for each team this was a huge bummer.

While looking for a stable solution many teams brought their own raspberry pi's, chromecasts, airtame devices to at least be able to show something on the displays in the meanwhile.

Since we already had good experiences with an intel compute stick and an intel NUC …

A few months ago we moved into a brand new office which was furnished with a dozen of samsung displays. Unfortunately the basic player included in those displays isn't capable to add a webpage/url as content. Since we've setted up a smashing instance to create dashboards for each team this was a huge bummer.

While looking for a stable solution many teams brought their own raspberry pi's, chromecasts, airtame devices to at least be able to show something on the displays in the meanwhile.

Since we already had good experiences with an intel compute stick and an intel NUC …

I got some issues with my wired connection lately that the speed wasn't negotiated correctly and it felt back to 10Mb/s as default.

Did some troubleshooting by eliminating various network devices, restarting them but the results didn't satisfy. Being completely random when and when not auto negotiated.

Before becoming insane I decided to update the bios of my machine (being a lenovo T460s).

I did this already in the past and talked about it even on one of our monthly last Friday's at work. So I was quite sure I had something written about it for future reference but …

Printing

Probably like many amongst us the time of the Christmas holidays is perfect to get some IT related stuff back on track. I used to have a print server setup which got broken over time and I didn't found the energy to invest time into fixing it. But the pressure became higher and higher. 111 From both my wife and daughter, especially during the holidays where the wife want to use it to print out tickets and the daughter want to print out color plates..

So during one of the evenings I pulled myself together and installed ArchLinux ARM …

Since a few years now I'm a happy Archlinux user. I like their philosophy which was one of the major points why I made the switch back in the days.

I'm not only using it on my laptop, but do have some devices running at home which are configured with it. From a thin client which I use as a docker node through some raspberry pies running ArchlinuxARM.

Since Arch is a rolling update distro there are several updates available throughout the day. To keep on top of them I had to log in on all those devices at least …

for one of my projects, the sms-twitter wall setup, I configured a raspberry pi with 2 wireless network interfaces to connect through a hotspot enabled on an android device. I discovered on previous events that the wireless adapter failed on me from time to time. So I went to the internet to look if I could add a second interface and bond them together.

I found a lot of documentation on how to bond an active-backup strategy with a wired and a wireless interfaces but didn't found a setup with 2 wireless interfaces. After a while I figured out how …

A long time ago I was active in the local scouting group. To earn some money to keep our group in a healthy financial position we organized a so called vedettweekend. It's an event where people can have a beer, vedett obviously spin a dance, enjoy a spaghetti and have a good chat with your friends.

I always played with the idea of creating a social media wall on one of the projectors we rented for the event. But I never found/made time for it, until today.. My youngest brother is who's interests are overlapping with mine brought up …

To make the process of connecting to our local wifi at home a bit less complex I decided to create a qr code for it. That way people can easily use their camera of their smartphone to connect to our network without typing in the WPA key.

So I looked on the net for a qr generator and started by typing in our SSID, when realizing it can't be secure to fill in our wpa key too.. It may be a bit paranoia but well I don't trust anything on the interweb most of the time.

Doing some further research …

Some weeks ago I removed some files on my system I wish I didn't cause I still needed them.

Since I use some encrypted containers in dropbox I figured I could recover them from this nifty service. But in the logs of dropbox those files are obviously also encrypted. So that was a no go.

Therefore I started looking for backup solutions. The first one I tried was backintime, very easy to use, clean GUI interface but failed multiple times in restoring some files.

Looking for a more decent piece of software I found rsnapshot

And hell I like it …

Since I discovered the joy of linux servers over desktop distributions a few years ago I revived an old portable and promoted him to be my home server.

Connected him our router in the little storage room on a top shelf gathering dust I could test, configure, break (and pass sleep) a huge variety of open-source software.

Many of those adventures I also used to provide my blog with content. After a while I figured this setup isn't really needed to be powered on 24h a day 7 days a week. So I bought myself a raspberry pi which would …