Notes

I wanted to showcase some of our personal photos on an always-on-ish Android tablet at home. Some thoughts from that project: Hardware: ”Digital photo frames“ seem like a good idea but only for less tech-savvy people. Tablet seems most extensible as we can later use it for other purposes too. Apps: Fotoo is a nice app for Android tablets. Samba, local and cloud libraries. Maybe find a way to sync photos to the tablet. “Public” album on Immich. Though, no way to get random images from such an album. Can show slideshow from their app but I’ll need to create a new guest user plus manually start it every time on the tablet. https://www.fully-kiosk.com/, plus it integrates with Home Assistant. Can make the tablet sluggish. Immich public albums don’t have slideshow feature. Wall panel - add on in HA. https://smarthomescene.com/guides/wallpanel-home-assistant-screensaver-for-your-wall-mounted-control-panel/ https://github.com/j-a-n/lovelace-wallpanel There is no get random image from shared album API. Huge benefit is that this is infinitely customizable through HA. For e.g., adding a music control. https://github.com/outadoc/immich-home-assistant

Here are some interesting thoughts I found in the Atomic Habits book. Identity-oriented > action-oriented > goal-based approaches to form habits. Time and location to be part of a new habit: I’ll do X at time Y in location Z. Habit stacking. Design your environment so that good cues are more visible than bad ones. (There were more good ideas but I didn’t note them down.) Good habits that I’d like to create: ...

I used static-auth-secret to setup my Coturn instance. So, as per this, I can run the following to generate credentials: secret=staticAuthSecretHere u=$((`date +%s` + 3600)):test p=$(echo -n $u | openssl dgst -hmac $secret -sha1 -binary | base64) echo -e "username: $u\npassword: $p" Then, test here: icetest. There is also this, but I found the previous better: Trickle ICE: URI format: stun:turn.ketanvijayvargiya.com:5349. A Done at the end means the test succeeded.

I looked (quite a lot, actually) into creating DIY smart speakers but I couldn’t find the right hardware. For both of these, my only remaining hope is a “Raspiaudio ESP Muse Proto”. Snapcast: https://github.com/sle118/squeezelite-esp32#esp32-wrover--i2s-dac - ESP-32 with a cheap digital to analog computer. https://paulusschoutsen.nl/squeezelite-esp32-install/. Or, better https://sle118.github.io/squeezelite-esp32-installer/ More features than the other one. I couldn’t install it on ESP-32s from 2 different brands. ESP Home: Media player here: https://esphome.io/projects/index.html The M5Stack Atom devices look basic and low quality for playing good music.

Ask lawyer: Do they help with creating LLC? Property management: https://www.ziprent.com/seattle-property-management charges flat fees. https://www.mapleleafmgt.com/ - local one from earlier. Apart from plumbing, handyman and appliances (which I’ll anyway order from Costco), what is their value add? Deal with HOA if there is any complaint. For vetting tenants before starting lease, we can use Darshan or Sanjay Lakkad. Tenant screening (but even Zillow makes this easy). Notes from lawyer: What to look for: Notice requirement. If you don’t include some required language (“timeliness”?), then could be bad. Redmond: Rent increase: depending on %age of rent increase, more severe than Washington (WA RLTA?). Washington is the floor. Washington: Termination of tenancy: month-to-month used to be 20 days earlier. Now, need good cause to terminate. Terminating month-to-month is harder now. Best is long term. Incorporated municipal: County doesn’t come into play, such as Seattle. Unincorporated municipality, such as Vashon Island. Rent increase: Seattle: 180 days. If increase is too much and tenants doesn’t have money, you may need to pay 3k to them. Leases: Seattle: “Renter’s handbook”: needs to be given for every new/renewed lease. Disclosure to give out: mold, lead paint etc. During a lease: Repairs to be made etc. - there are deadlines for “severe”, “major appliances” and “everything else”. Security deposits: Seattle has a cap. Plus, need to sign a checklist by both parties upfront. Need justification if you want to withhold after lease expires. Right to re-entry: 24 hours if you are showing to someone else, 48 hours or so otherwise. No matter what, you can’t enter without tenant’s consent. Damages: If anything goes out of code, important to fix it quickly. If house becomes unhabitable for any reason, you may be liable for relocation. Seattle: likely need to be certified by the city. Avoiding eviction is critical: Pretty difficult just about anywhere now. (Almost illegal in Seattle.) Never do it on your own, change the lock etc. Areas: Seattle is hardest.

I recently used imapsync to transfer my emails from one mail server to another, and it was so easy! All I did was: imapsync \ --host1 imap.migadu.com \ --user1 [email protected] \ --password1 "foo" \ --host2 box.ketanvijayvargiya.com \ --user2 [email protected] \ --password2 "bar" Plus, I could migrate without downtime: I setup the new server, migrated emails and then changed my MX records. That way, my older server was fully active during the migration and I switched only once I verified the new server was fully setup. ...

I recently got a new machine from HostHatch. Here are its YABS result: root@box:~# curl -sL yabs.sh | bash # ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## # # Yet-Another-Bench-Script # # v2024-04-22 # # https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script # # ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## # Sat Jun 1 01:30:49 UTC 2024 Basic System Information: --------------------------------- Uptime : 0 days, 1 hours, 29 minutes Processor : AMD EPYC 7402 24-Core Processor CPU cores : 4 @ 2799.996 MHz AES-NI : ✔ Enabled VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled RAM : 7.8 GiB Swap : 0.0 KiB Disk : 91.6 GiB Distro : Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) Kernel : 6.1.0-21-amd64 VM Type : KVM IPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ✔ Online IPv6 Network Information: --------------------------------- ISP : HostHatch ASN : AS63473 HostHatch, LLC Host : HostHatch LLC Location : Los Angeles, California (CA) Country : United States fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/vda1): --------------------------------- Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ---- Read | 167.60 MB/s (41.9k) | 1.94 GB/s (30.3k) Write | 168.04 MB/s (42.0k) | 1.95 GB/s (30.5k) Total | 335.65 MB/s (83.9k) | 3.89 GB/s (60.9k) | | Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS) ------ | --- ---- | ---- ---- Read | 3.82 GB/s (7.4k) | 4.02 GB/s (3.9k) Write | 4.02 GB/s (7.8k) | 4.29 GB/s (4.1k) Total | 7.85 GB/s (15.3k) | 8.32 GB/s (8.1k) iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4): --------------------------------- Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed | Ping ----- | ----- | ---- | ---- | ---- Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 1.11 Gbits/sec | 688 Mbits/sec | 132 ms Eranium | Amsterdam, NL (100G) | 1.02 Gbits/sec | 1.06 Gbits/sec | -- Telia | Helsinki, FI (10G) | busy | busy | 153 ms Uztelecom | Tashkent, UZ (10G) | 561 Mbits/sec | 461 Mbits/sec | 239 ms Leaseweb | Singapore, SG (10G) | 825 Mbits/sec | 1.02 Gbits/sec | 288 ms Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 9.30 Gbits/sec | 4.85 Gbits/sec | 1.13 ms Leaseweb | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 2.02 Gbits/sec | 1.52 Gbits/sec | 69.2 ms Edgoo | Sao Paulo, BR (1G) | 808 Mbits/sec | 930 Mbits/sec | 166 ms iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv6): --------------------------------- Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed | Ping ----- | ----- | ---- | ---- | ---- Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 1.17 Gbits/sec | 1.19 Gbits/sec | 133 ms Eranium | Amsterdam, NL (100G) | busy | busy | -- Uztelecom | Tashkent, UZ (10G) | 576 Mbits/sec | 411 Mbits/sec | 239 ms Leaseweb | Singapore, SG (10G) | 446 Mbits/sec | 554 Mbits/sec | -- Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 9.14 Gbits/sec | 5.06 Gbits/sec | 1.02 ms Leaseweb | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 1.80 Gbits/sec | 1.57 Gbits/sec | 69.1 ms Edgoo | Sao Paulo, BR (1G) | 816 Mbits/sec | 920 Mbits/sec | 166 ms Running GB6 benchmark test... *cue elevator music* Geekbench 6 Benchmark Test: --------------------------------- Test | Value | Single Core | 1072 Multi Core | 3474 Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6340841 YABS completed in 17 min 33 sec

Motivation I have a couple of hard drives on my Proxmox server that I’d like to combine through MergerFS. Earlier, I did that through an OpenMediaVault VM but that gave me a fair amount of grief (because of the dependency between that OMV VM and the LXC that mounted the NFS storage). So, I got rid of OMV and setup MergerFS directly on Proxmox. Step 1 Add the hard drive as a Directory on the Proxmox node (not the Datacenter). Name it hdd-foo, where foo could be hard drive serial or something. ...

Longer version of the test: smartctl --test=long /dev/sda See results: smartctl --all /dev/sdc

Last year, we traveled to Europe for a few days around my birthday in May. As much as I wanted to go back this year, we couldn’t because of some visa issues. So, we came to the east coast instead. We had a rocky start as we flew into Boston. The Pacific Northwest area witnessed a spectacular show of northern lights right when we were in flight. (What coincidence!) The view was so great that, if we were home, we’d just have to step out to see all kinds of colors - green, purple etc. I made a mistake in the rental car reservation: since the flight was overnight, I started the reservation one day early. So, the car that I had booked - a BMW SUV - was no longer available by the time we reached to pickup. I then had to shell out $300 more, on top of the original $1200, for a BMW sedan. Fortunately, the smaller car (barely) worked out fine for us. Our first few days were in Acadia National Park. The tourist season hadn’t begun yet, so a few activities weren’t available. Still, we got to enjoy fantastic views from Cadillac mountain, Sand Beach and other points in the park. Bar Harbor was nice too. We took a boat ride where the tour guide educated us about Maine and its fishing culture. Then a couple of days, including my birthday, in Salem. As a pleasant surprise, Salem turned out to be a quirky witch town. Next, we made Hyannis our base and spent a day each in Nantucket Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Provincetown. Nantucket was wet and windy but I liked the small town experience in all three places. We then spent a day in Newport, Rhode Island. The highlights were a visit to a fantastic car museum and a couple of Chateau of Versailles style historical houses. Last, we spent a couple of days in Boston. We didn’t do a lot there but we enjoyed the company of a few friends who were with us almost all the time, so that was refreshing. On personal front: I had lobster rolls on three occasions and those were a novel experience. I did a lot of side projects around self-hostring. For instance, I got a cheap VPS (i.e. virtual private server) and installed Headscale on it. My Jellyfin server back home gave us grief, probably because there was a lot of distance between us, so I explored some alternatives. I enjoyed uninterrupted time with the kiddo.