"I'm not proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it."

Mon 19 February 2024 | -- (permalink)

For Reasons, I got interested in using a Raspberry Pi as a video streaming source (think small relatively inexpensive box that can be left on a mantle during a banquet to stream video for guests unable to attend in person). Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be a deep rabbit hole …


Sun 07 May 2023 | -- (permalink)

For Reasons, I recently needed to install unbound on a Raspberry Pi running 64-bit Debian (not Raspian). For the most part this was trivial: just download the appropriate Debian Raspberry Pi image, follow the instructions, and Shazam, you have something that feels frighteningly like a Debian server running on a …


Thu 08 December 2022 | -- (permalink)

At $dayjob we make heavy use of a build system which creates pre-formatted bootable disk images for various platforms. Some of the tricks involved in getting this to work are kind of nasty. In particular, GRUB puts up a fight when asked to configure boot information for something it doesn't …


Mon 05 September 2022 | -- (permalink)

I've been using BIND9 as a hidden bump-on-the-wire DNSSEC signer for about a dozen years now. The configuration was excessively complex, mostly for historical reasons that were my own fault, but it was time to clean it up, and I wanted to try Knot as an alternative to BIND9.

Basic …


Thu 01 September 2022 | -- (permalink)

In a previous episode, we wrote about a method of setting up selective HTTP proxy through a firewall via a tunnel. We've been using this technique for years now, and it's held up quite well. But it doesn't cover all cases, because it relies on using a "real" browser like …


Mon 31 January 2022 | -- (permalink)

So I've been playing with Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 4B as a media center. There turn out to be a lot of different ways to do this, documenting what I've learned so far in case it saves somebody else a bit of effort.

All of the following were on …


Sun 06 December 2020 | -- (permalink)

This is a tech story, but the starting point is personal.

Background

I lost my dad a couple of years ago. He was an electronics engineer and a music lover, and Mom had no use for his old desk computer after he was gone, so after extracting his photo albums …


Fri 17 April 2020 | -- (permalink)

More silly Python tricks.

If you've done much work with XML in Python, you probably know about the lxml.etree toolkit, an excellent Pythonic API on top of the libxml2 library. For most purposes, this is by far the best set of tools for dealing with XML in Python (or …


Sat 21 March 2020 | -- (permalink)

If you've done much work with old-school Internet protocols, you'll have encountered a lot of densly-packed protocol header definitions. One sees this less often now, but back in the day, bits were expensive, each bit of core memory having to be whittled by hand by a master craftsman, so we …


Sat 07 September 2019 | -- (permalink)

A previous article mentioned strange games running Xvfb inside a Docker container. Today we have a few strange games using VNC and X11.


Sometimes you need to run something dangerous in a web browser, or need to run a web browser somewhere you're not. An example of the first might …


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