thirdBreakfast

Has anyone seen a drop in magic DNS performance in the last month?

I'm having this in situations where the DNS would be getting hammered - for example my apt updates ansible script, or Uptime Kuma checks. If I switch to IP addresses it works fine.

I recovered from a small disaster today using the neko dockerised web-browser.

I set up a remote backup with Proxmox running on a HP mini and a Synology a month ago at a friend's house 3000 km away. I thought I'd reserved all the IP addresses, but last night the Synology IP address changed, so the NFS shares to Proxmox and Jellyfin broke. That wasn't to hard to fix remotely, but I don't want it to happen every time the DHCP lease expires.

So now I need to log into their router and reserve the IP addresses...

I can get on the local network there by ssh-ing into one of my entities (via Tailscale), but how do I get to the web interface of the router?

Enter neko. It spins up a browser in a Docker container that can be accessed over a web address. So I created an LXC, installed docker and spun it up, then was able to use that to open the local-only web interface to the router.

neko is intended for watch parties, so multiple people can be logged in to the same browser window at a time - there's a toggle to take control of the window for clicks and typing, but apart from that it's all pretty straight forward. There's a very noticeable lag, but it got the job done.

Perhaps there was an easier lighter-weight way of doing this? In the old old days there was a text browser called Lynx - so perhaps there's some modern iteration that could have done this job?

Edit: There is an easier lighter-weight way of doing this!

Thanks to @[email protected], @[email protected] and others who mentioned 'ssh tunneling' - TIL I could just connect a local port (8080 in my case) to port 80 on the router (192.168.1.1:80 in my case) via the VM I have ssh access to over tailscale ([email protected]) with:

ssh -L 8080:192.168.1.1:80 [email protected]

ssh -L <local port to use>:<remote machine to access with port> <ssh address of jump machine>

When executed, that looks like I've just ssh'ed into that machine, but until I log out of that connection I can open up 127.0.0.1:8080 in my browser and I'm in the router's web interface - still a tiny bit of lag, but way smoother experience with less carry on.

Amazeballs.

Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.

A bit of a YSK for noobs (like me).

I was setting up the RG35XX-SP with Knulli last night. They have an excellent little tool in the menus for checking for any missing bios files for the emulators. A few of the files I couldn't find anywhere, but I had similar (but not exactly) named files. For example, a DS emulation bios I was missing was dsi_bios7.bin but I had biosdsi7.bin.

Amazingly, the (I guess Batocera) developers include an 'MD5' hash of the required files in the message with each file name, so I was able to confirm these are actually the same files. eg for the file dsi_bios7.bin the MD5 was given as 559dae4ea78eb9d67702c56c1d791e81.

If you're not a software developer, you might not be familiar with hashes. They are basically a big number computed from every byte in a file such that if two files have the same hash, for practical purposes, the files are exactly the same.

To find the MD5 of a file in mac or Linux you just type md5 <filename> in the terminal (ed: md5sum <filename> on Linux - thanks @[email protected] ), or for little files like these, just drop them in an online MD5 calculator.

I've had a fitbit wifi bathroom scale for a while. Getting the data out got suddenly more difficult when Google bought them, and I didn't love giving that data to google. It's finally died, and I'm looking at replacement options.

In a perfect world, I could just go to a store and buy a "HomeAssistant Ready" scale. If I can't have that, I'd like a scale that is on my local network and exposes the last x weigh-ins as an API on the device, then I could write something to poll it.

I haven't seen anything like those, but have turned up:

• a project to decode the bluetooth transmissions of a number of scales (after you build an ESP32 device for it)
• the Withings cloud based scale, but with a well documented API

Any other good options?

Today, we took apart the ModRetro Chromatic: a new entry in the handheld gaming market that might remind you a bit of something from the past. The ModRetro Chromatic really does hit us hard in the nostalgias, bringing home that Christmas morning feeling. - ifixit

For context, I'm new to retro-gaming & emulation.

How I got here:

The Steamdeck became available in my country, and I instantly desired one, but since I have a considerable Steam library that doesn't get played on my laptop and an Xbox S that hasn't been turned on for a year, I had to question if I really could justify something that expensive that might not get played much after a couple of months.

I've heard of Pico-8 games on an unrelated tech podcast, and that interested me. So I googled what handhelds I could play those on, and a few rabbit holes later I was here - a sub $100 handheld that can play retro roms, "up to" PSP - which I own a shoe box of UMDs for. I know my way around Vice City and would like to go back some day.

Screen Format:

The idea of playing PSP games was what tipped me towards a 16:9 screen rather than a squarer format. Perhaps that will turn out to be right for me, but right now I'm regretting it since I'm in a deep nostalgia dive of squarish format games.

Physical:

A lot of youtubers recommending the RGB10 Max3 point to the bulbous back as making it nicer than some others to hold for a while. It's fine - no where near as comfortable as a stock Xbox controller. A lot lighter than my distant memory of the original PSP and the buttons feel cheaper.

I got the transparent black one - I can't read the labels on the "start" and "select" buttons, but that's already staring to not matter at all after a couple of hours of on and off use. The power LED (which I understand can be turned off) is blinding in bed.

System:

I took the common advice to buy better quality SD cards and copy stuff over. In the process I flashed the system card with RockNix. I believe it comes stock with JELOS, but I never booted it with the supplied card so can't confirm. Even though this system is a collection of things from diverse developers, it's very manageable.

My only previous brush with emulation was helping some kids building an arcade machine around a raspberry pie (a while ago) and I remembering it being a lot clunkier to move between emulators etc and getting games going properly. Rocknix/Retroarch is pretty great. A few key-combos to learn but that doesn't take to long. I haven't been getting into tweaking emulator settings, but the out of the box experience for just playing some games is good.

Screen:

Is really good. It's been a long long time since I saw my PSP so it's probably not fair to compare, but I would say the RGB10Max3 is better. Certainly better for viewing angle (which hardly matters for a handheld device).

Controls:

Nearly every review (I've obsessively consumed waiting for this unit to arrive) mentions the poor D-Pad. In some games I don't notice any problem at all, in others I get repeatedly squashed by barrels or eaten by ghosts because of it. Sometimes, swapping to the left joystick solves the problem.

So far:

I'm having a lot of fun. If I am still picking this up and playing with it in a year, that's probably an indication I should have gotten a Steam Deck, but if I've lost interest and passed it on to someone else I probably would have already gotten good value out of it. A third possible outcome is that if it turns out I keep playing 4:3 and similar format games (and especially if I have a go at developing some PICO-8), I might look at one of the DMG shaped devices instead - and possibly in the more pocket-able size since those less story-based games are consumable on the go.

Does any one have any experience of this low cost conical burr grinder? I'm getting sick of my (rather good Timemore C2) hand grinder.

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

Has anyone got some experience/advice for choosing between the options? It seems like they are:

• Minio
• Garage
• SeaweedFS

My usecase is just to have a local single instance for testing apps against. I prefer to spin stuff up in Docker on the homelab.