April 7, 2020
Some time ago my blog software broke and I could not help but did not feel like fixing it. That was now the situation for almost one year and until today and it was never supposed to take that long, nor does it mean that I will quit with anything. I am still here, I still work on my projects and below you find a picture of my latest project, which I will eventually release as an open source project.
...
March 17, 2018
Apart from looking so crude: This device actually worked! I was able to
re-flash the UEFI BIOS directly on the motherboard and the computer
starts again! More important is though, that after that worked, there is
no reason to NOT further play around with the BIOS anymore. Watch out
for news or try it on your own. An interesting low-level world has
forgotten to lock its gate ;)
The whole story: I faced a serious issue with my computer the other day,
when it wasn't booting any more and stuck on the BIOS logo screen. I
tried DEL and the F* keys, but the system did not respond by any means.
But I further noticed, that -within a certain time frame- the NUM lock
key worked with a remarkable delay before the LED reacted. I removed all
components, even one of the two RAM sticks I have- still the same thing.
Since the board had a dual bios, I tried to re-flesh the first from the
second by holding the on switch for a few seconds. Although that seemed
to work it did not fix the issue. I removed and reinserted the bios
battery and started bridging pins of the BIOS chip in order to erase it
until I managed to get the computer in an even worse state in which it
turned on and again off very quickly without showing anything on the
screen. I managed to destroy my BIOS and that used to be something for
which you have send your board back to its manufacturer or buy a new
one. But I was still not ready to give up on it and after some soldering
and bug fixing I came up with a really crude solution, which I now want
to share with you, because this thing looks so terrible, even though it
worked :D Note: I also tried a direct connection with a more recent
Raspberry Pi 3, but for that additional resistors would be required.
January 27, 2018
Upcycling of an old and defective ATX power supply by using its case, because that already has a hole and a huge fan and a carbon filter can easily be placed inside…
At least one switch is required to turn the fan on and off. That is if you ever like to enjoy light and silence altogether ;)
...
October 10, 2017
February 17, 2017
January 11, 2017
Its ridiculous how bad I am in drawing. Because of that I started to learn Blender some years ago. One of my last drawings was a scene from a dream I once had. With Blender I was finally able to catch the mood of that scene in an image:
December 13, 2016
Again on lighting. This time it is a 4x4x4-LED-cube I had laying around for several month. Building such a thing takes a bit of patience, but turned out to be relaxing as playing with lego. Programming it can get challenging, but the software provided does a good job in simplifying it by providing graphics primitives.
Mainly I wanted to have one, because they look so great. On the other hand this is also an interesting project, because the exercise is to control 192 light emitting diodes (LEDs) with a single microcontroller.
...
December 7, 2016
Now that the dark season of the year is coming, I felt the need for a better lighting concept in my room. The blue light is meant to remind me on how the blue summer sky looks alike. I liked the blue energy saving lamps even better than its LED counterparts, because they deliver cooler light. The construction of the lamp is kept as simple as possible.
An IKEA PRÖJS desk pad forms the lamps body and acts as diffuser. It is held together with a punched metal strip and M3 nuts and bolds and 3M double sided tape, all of which I had lying around.
...
August 29, 2016
Not only does it serve virtually 'everything' much faster, but is also highly configurable and therefor tweakable. I am really satisfied with the result. Besides from that I have also set up a system monitor and log file analyzer, which I haven't had for a while. But in order to deliver relevant content the importance of such tools should never be underestimated. I also have moved my voice mailbox from an old raspberry pi b+ to this server. This simplifies my backups, improves its reliability and as a bonus I do not have to deliver my voice mails across the internet or at least I don't have to let asterisk know any of my smtp passwords ;)
...
June 30, 2016
I have moved my infrastructure to my own virtual server and now have a central point to administrate everything. Thanks to FreeBSD and it's jails I was able to separate services, which are known to have security issues regularly. Also I have already operated that server for two years and fine tuned many things, like firewall rules and kernel parameters. I am now pretty happy with the result. Among many other advantages which I gained by doing so, I have also improved the accessibility for my visitors: My sites are available over IPv6 and HTTPS, which tended to be too expensive on my previously used shared webspace. I am currently thinking about writing an article or creating a video about what I have learned about the differences and similarities between self hosted environments and shared webspace, because I managed to run unsupported code and languages on my shared space for years, which some of you may find interesting.
...