neilwebber

Category: Tech

  • Ordered replacement for my last Soekris router

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    neilwebber
    in

    I am down to my last (and largest configuration) www.soekris.com net 6501 pfsense router, and just ordered a replacement for it from netgate. I’ve already replaced two other routers in my world (at other locations) with netgate products. The nice thing about them is they are directly supported with pfsense, so it’s just an easy…

  • Amazon AWS Route53 Region: us-east-1

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    neilwebber
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    This is one of those things that seems hard to find even though it is in fact documented, so I thought I’d post this note in the hope that someday it will pop up on someone’s google and be helpful. So, here are some keywords of note: This is about Route53, the DNS service in…

  • Oldest “Neil Webber” reference

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    neilwebber
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    Inspired by finding some thirty-year-old code of mine online, I wondered if there were any even older references… and I found one! In the summer of 1979, having just graduated high school, I worked on a macro intepreter for the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification while I was a summer intern at the National Bureau of…

  • Thirty year old code almost still compiles (and does still work!)

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    neilwebber
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    Thirty years ago, in February of 1987, I published some code of mine on net.sources:                 There is so much deliciousness in this old post, including evidence that my affinity for the word “actually” goes a long way back. Because I was a hardcore Amiga nerd back then…

  • Motorola MC68020 Processor Board from 1987

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    neilwebber
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    In 1987 a company I worked for (Epoch Systems; it no longer exists) designed and built this custom 68020-based processor board for a file server. I did the Unix port (4.2bsd from vax) for this system. A few notes for the hard core nerds. Bring up the full resolution version to see some of these…

  • Making a simple systemd file for Raspberry Pi jessie

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    neilwebber
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    I wanted to write a systemd service file for a daemon I wanted started automatically at boot on my Raspberry Pi running Debian Jessie. This used to be a lot simpler in the old hardcore Unix days. Well, no, actually, it’s simpler now. But figuring out how to do it was anything but simple and…

  • User Interface Rant

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    neilwebber
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    I have one of these: You get it from these guys: https://bt.tn/ It is, in fact, the simplest internet user interface in the world. It’s just a big red button with WiFi. Without doing any programming you can set it up to send an email, a text, tweet, interface with IFTTT/Zapier, etc. And if you are…

  • Traffic Light shows Air Quality Index

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    neilwebber
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    I recently saw this project: Traffic Light Shows Internet Status at the “WTH” (whiskey tango hotel) website and decided it would be fun to build. So here we go. I found the same traffic light available on Amazon: http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IX73BGW I decided (of course) to make a few changes to the project: I used a BeagleBone Black (BBB), simply…

  • Geeking out even more with Pythagoras and Lego triangles

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    neilwebber
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    In case my previous musings on lego triangles weren’t geeky enough for you, here’s some more. 60 degree 3-7-8 / 5-7-8 math In my prior note I pointed out that you could construct an exact 60 degree angle with a 3-7-8 or 5-7-8 construction, such as this one: The blue technic beam is the “7”…

  • New versions of www.numerousapp.com API libraries

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    neilwebber
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    Released new versions of both the Python and Ruby interfaces to the Numerous APIs. This update allows you to call write() with the “only write it if the value changed” feature and just ignore any exception that comes (when the value hasn’t changed). This is probably a more common usage pattern. So now, for example,…