STFN

I'm tired of computers, and other general updates

I have not written here in a while, and the reason for that is that is blog was created mostly with writing about computers in mind.

And for quite some time I have been tired of computers. One of the reasons for that is because my computer job is sucking out a lot of my energy, and the second is that I am now more into, let's call it, analogue stuff, gardening, house, biking, reading books, staying away from the screens. I don't want to touch or think about IT too much.

Also I created a new blog about those other things, and new toys are more shiny, and I am more interested in writing in that new place. It's called Słoma and Słońce (Straw and the Sun), and it's in Polish, you can find it here.

But nonetheless, some computer things have happened and I thought I could just write a general post with updates, instead of focusing on one specific area, or making a tutorial. Just use this blog as, you know, a blog.

Homelab

I'm still working towards simplifying my homelab. I rerouted ethernet cables left by the electrician, and thanks to that I was able to remove one of my switches.

I also migrated my Home Assistant from a dedicated box to a VM in my Proxmox machine. Due to sheer lazyness, I used a ready-made script to install it. The migration itself was extremely easy. I exported a backup from the existing HA, imported it into the new installation, move the ZigBee dongle the same way and that was it. I keep being amazed how a great piece of software HA is.

Cameras

I installed a CCTV camera on my house to monitor the front yard. For now it's a single one, but soon I'll buy more, first I wanted to test the whole setup.

The camera is a Reolink RLC-520A, and I chose this model, because I saw Reolink being suggested by the community and it was in my budget. It's mounted on my front wall and powered by PoE coming from my PoE switch.

For the camera recorder I chose Frigate. It's running in Docker on my NAS. I've configured it so that it uses my RTX3050 for video encoding/decoding, and for object detection and classification. I also set up the integration between Frigate and Home Assistant, and that was a bit of a pain because I had to install HACS first.

I don't want to let all of China know what I'm doing, so I blocked the camera's internet access using a custom firewall rule on my Mikrotik router, based on the camera's MAC address.

3D printing

I started designing my own stuff to print using FreeCAD, and I have to say, it's a totally different experience, and a new level of satisfaction, in comparison to printing ready projects from the internet. As a starting point, I have been using this YT tutorial, it has all that I need to print what I want. For now I have been designing simple stuff, spacers and that. I also published my first project to Printables.

Solar powered server

I updated my small PV system and a solar powered server to a new generation of hardware. I am now using a Victron 100/15 MPPT controller and gathering statistics from it using a VE.direct USB cable and a Python script on a Pi 4. Also the Słoma and Słońce blog mentioned at the beginning is hosted on that Pi. I am now producing enough electricity to not only power two Pi fours (one for the blog and the second one for my ADS-B receiver), but also charge powerbanks and my laptop on a sunny day. We'll see how it goes during the winter.

Astrophotography

White nights are over, and I can go back to AP. I (kinda) fixed my guiding issue, in short there is some problem with my hand controller firmware, and I can't guide through it, the guiding commands from my Stellarmate Pi running EKOS get lost somewhere in the pipeline. But when I use an ST-4 cable connected from my guiding cam straight to the mount, the guiding now works.

I could try updating the firmware on the hand controller, but I am a bit afraid the guiding will break again, and also the iOptron firmware update software requires Windows, and don't have the energy to mess with Windows VMs right now.

So that's it, this is what is happening with my life right now. Will all blog posts here look like this one from now on? I don't know, maybe as the days get shorter I'll go back to the IT way of life.

Thanks for reading!

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