The USB hub is powered, and the Pi needed a driver swap for better stability. So far works great.

Here we gooooo, the king of all junk setups.

Yeah, I’ve collected some used disks over the years.

The housing has been drafted in FreeCAD and then sliced out of scrap plywood.

And yes, the temperature is okay.

What’s currently running on mine:

• 10 commodity SSDs through a powered USB hub forming a poor man’s NAS with snapraid + mergerfs
• Podsync for converting my favorite YouTube channels to podcast feeds
• Syncthing for generic file synchronization
• K3s for whatever projects coming to my mind
• Retroarch for occasional gaming needs
• MPD with a floppy disk interface as my music station
• CUPS for printserver

Homebox supports the https://<hostname>/a/<inventory_id> shorthand and does a 302 jump for you. Otherwise yes, I would have implemented the API search in a microservice.

It’s Nelko P21, around $20.

For now I use the vendor provided app, given it supports a share intent, so I can simply toss a PNG from Vivaldi at it and make it print the label. It does the job, and more importantly, it bypasses all possible obnoxious advertisement.

Surprisingly, it works! I just checked it on my microservice, indeed now QRs are smaller. This is a lifesaver tip, thanks a bunch!

I keep track of lots of vintage devices in my basement, these lay on a CD shelf with narrow walls, and I want to keep track of their maintenance status, i.e. when did I charge the battery last time.

This little printer is pretty handy for labeling tasks, with one noticeable problem: the resolution is quite low, so I cannot afford printing full length domain name on such a tiny label. What I ended up with is writing my own microservice that puts fake http://i.nv/ domain in front of inventory ID. That domain is provided by DNSMASQ that I run on my server, and there’s also NGINX listening for that domain and doing 302 onto an actual Homebox page.

Homebox sends URL parameters to the specified endpoint, and given that information it is possible to construct any label of any shape or form, it only needs to be a PNG image.

Grab Homebox here and start tracking your inventory!

I see it’s an Ericsson-branded Psion, the first to carry the Symbian logo!

Pretty dope, need to try that myself some day. But first I’d like to setup URAN-1 SDR to spawn a DIY 2G cell tower 👀

I simply wonder at this point what sinister kind of delirium awaits us when the AI hype is over.

It’s not the AI itself driving me crazy, LLMs are actually pretty good at some tasks (I do translate my own blog posts from time to time, and it’s much better at preserving nuances). It’s the tech industry hopping onto another bandwagon in attempt to squeeze all possible money from what had brought success to someone else. It’s circlejerk, a VC cargo cult where they cluelessly ape one another hoping that doing the same thing will get them rewarded.

Remember early 2010’s? Facebook took off, and then Google started sprinkling every damn thing they make with Google+ that no one actually needed since there was already Facebook. Took them 5 years to realize it was an utter failure and several years more to phase this nonsense out.

Remember late 2010s? Suddenly Snapchat takes off, and now Facebook is in chasing position. So they ape it with Instagram stories, and guess what? Now even your banking app displays stories. A feature so out of place that no one ever asked for, yet here we are.

Remember early 2020s? Suddenly Tiktok takes off, and guess what? Correct, Meta apes it immediately, and everybody else follows. I can go on for hours, but to sum it up: VCs will keep throwing money at whatever brought somebody insane revenue once, hoping for fat ROI. It’s never guaranteed though.

Well, this path seems to be the most appropriate for what I am for.

And more to that, both mergerfs and snapraid are available out of the box in the latest stable Debian release.

Thanks for pointing me at it!

Clippy made sense, was very likeable, and I enjoyed interacting with it as a child.

This featureless blob I find rather disgusting. A pure depiction of an era we live in, where the market thinks it’s good enough to spew out “something” to cater the customers, and have the audacity to ask hard earned money for it.

To my knowledge not really much is available. You may use an intent to trigger database export and then use SQLite to scrape data.

Also keep in mind that data is kept in device specific tables.

https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/wiki/Intent-API

Gadgetbridge allows automatic SQLite database export to the location you specify.

Navigate to Settings -> Automations -> Auto export database, and from there you can configure the details.

You can put it into a shared Syncthing folder, or something alike, or process it with Termux + Tasker. Personally, I hesitate to send megabytes of data over the wire every couple of minutes, so I rigged up a script that extracts the required metrics (for now its my steps only, the rest does not seem to be accurate) and sends a payload to my queue, where a consumer script later adds it to the DB.

FTR: currently experimenting with scraping Gadgetbridge data into Grafana.