Last month I posted about being absolutely stoked with my new monitor setup and the remaining monitor that couldn’t be connected to my PC finally has a purpose. For a while now I’ve wanted a cool monitor just displaying a constant feed of information, but without the aesthetics of modern dashboards. To be honest I really wanted something that had that an old-school terminal effect and now it’s finally starting to come together.
I purchased a Logitech/Saitek PZ55 Flight Switch Panel recently and set it up so I could control my computer:
Your browser does not support the video tag. It can now do the following:
Start my gaming PC via Wake-On-Lan. Open Task Manager. Open explorer.exe. Start Firefox, Discord, Steam, Spotify, Blender. Start my favourite game. Start a Chrome session with Special Business™ tabs already open. Switch Controller The switch is connected to a Raspberry Pi 4B which runs a Python script as a SystemD service.
For a long time I’ve wanted to run some form of “cluster” at home. Given I make less than $500 million in annual revenue Cray won’t return my calls and I’d rather suck eggs than deal with IBM, so I eventually had to set my sights a little lower.
So for about 5 years now I’ve wanted a Raspberry Pi cluster. I had my eye set on a PicoCluster five node kit, but with the Raspberry Pi 3B+ still being limited, I wasn’t super convinced.
I discovered Funkwhale a while back, but didn’t go further than understanding where it fit as a cool “Fediverse” project.
But ever since my 2021 ICT Goals post, I’ve been wanting a media player that lets me play my own music. Stuff that I’ve purchased from Bandcamp/BeatPort/iTunes or from CDs that I’ve purchased and ripped onto my computer. Unfortunately I have three regularly used machines (1 desktop, 2 laptops), plus my phone, meaning a standard music player application isn’t appropriate for managing my library.
For a long while now I’ve loved the idea of computing using devices with less capability. My six year old Macbook Pro (dual core i5, 8GB RAM) chugs when opening and browsing Facebook on Chrome. The way I use Facebook, it’s not doing anything different for me compared to how I used it six years ago when I got it, so why should it (or Chrome, or the underlying OS) start performing so badly?
So the reason I needed to back up one of the SD Cards from my RaspberryPi earlier (and I wrote a tutorial about it) was I wanted to explore PirateBox, a free software implementation of a private network for users to anonymously connect, chat and share files.
I utilised the tiny, 802.11n USB adaptor that I got with my RaspberryPi and a 16GB thumb drive I had lying around to build it.