WirelessMoves – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

Immich – Pictures and AI at Home

A problem that was not really pressing and hence unsolved for a long time is how to archive and synchronize images I and members of the family take regularly. Obviously, using a public cloud service for this was out of the question, my pictures are my pictures. Back in January, a friend made me aware of Immich, an open source and GNU APGL licensed ‘Self-hosted photo and video management solution’. Could this be a software to address my needs?

Shell in the Browser – ttyd – Perhaps For Online Courses?

I recently came across this article on Tecmint, which describes ttyd, a nifty program to make the Linux shell available remotely over the Internet.

I played around with it a bit and was delighted to see ttyd can be configured to request username and password from the client and provides an https channel if you supply keys and a certificate. While a relatively recent version can be installed directly from the Debian / Ubuntu repository in recent OS versions, the latest version is available as source or binary on Github. I tried installing all three variants in a test VM and even compiling from source worked without much trouble.

Anker Power Supply Revisited – Temperature Limits

A few months ago I bought an Anker A1336 72 Wh power bank with a nice display, supporting 3 USB ports, 100W charge and discharge power and simultaneous loading and discharge. All in all, a great power bank, and I reviewed it here and here. However. there are a number of limitations mostly related to prevent overheating, of which I only became aware while using the power bank extensively. So let’s have a look:

When charging or discharging the power bank, its temperature rises, and while you don’t go to the specified charge/discharge power limits you probably won’t notice. But try to recharge the power bank with a 65W power supply while at the same time connecting a notebook and mobile phones, all with low batteries and high power draw, and you will notice a quick rise in the power bank’s temperature, which in turn quickly leads to counter measures.

Dishy on Ice – Starlink in Iceland

When I was in Iceland recently, another thing I wanted to have a look at was if Starlink would work reliably there as well. So why wouldn’t it? Have a look at the Starlink satellite map image below and you see where my question came from: Most Starlink satellites are in orbits with an inclination that doesn’t bring them over arctic and antarctic areas of the planet. However, there are some that have a different orbit that brings them close to the poles for coverage of such areas.

If there are enough, then this will work, as you definitely don’t need a lot of capacity at these higher latitudes. But are there enough satellites for a continuous coverage?

Aging Micro-SD Cards

Yes, there is the rumor that the flash memory used for micro-SD cards is kind of scrap. And it’s probably true. Due to this and because speed matters, I buy more expensive SD cards such as the SanDisk ‘Extreme’ line. But even those cards start to slow down and show erratic behavior after a few years of usage.

Docker ‘Latest’ Can Be Fun – Or Not!

When I updated my Docker Compose based Onlyoffice instance today, I soon discovered that the update broke my installation. Hm, wasn’t one of the promises of container based services to prevent exactly such a thing from happening? Well perhaps, but if you have several containers working with each other in a Docker Compose setup, non-backwards compatible changes in one image can render the overall service unusable. So what exactly happened?

Flat Prices for Storage – Rising Costs

Back in December 2024 I wrote a blog post about hard disk prices having remained pretty much constant over the past decade. Also, there seem to be no price cuts in the making, the technology seems to have hit a wall. Sure, HDD capacities have increased in the last decades, but so have prices per drive, and hence the price per TB is pretty much the same it was a decade ago. This might have some interesting consequences:

2D Barcodes For Paperless Receipts

2D barcodes have been around for a while. In fact, it’s more than 20 years and I mentioned this ‘new’ technology on this blog in 2006. Mind boggling. But some things take their time and it has taken 20 years for the technology to be deployed to get paperless receipts at the bakery. No, I’m not kidding.

Beware of Your Log Files

A little anecdote today about log files and SSD wear: As you might have noticed, I’ve recently done a lot of disk drive benchmarking. The iostat command is a great tool to check how much data is written to a block device over time, and just because I’m curious, I had a look at how much data is written to the main drive of one of my servers since I rebooted it 4 days ago. When I looked I got a shocking number: 400 GB! In 4 days! Now that is impossible I thought at first, perhaps iostat is giving me wrong numbers. So I had a closer look.

In-Flight to Iceland with Viasat

I recently flew to Iceland with Iceland air, and as it was a 3 hour flight from Frankfurt, I was happy to try the on-board Internet to stay connected. For 12 euros a flight, it was perhaps not cheap, but compared to the price of the ticket, it’s almost negligible. As large parts of the trip are over water, satellite connectivity was used. Like the on-board Internet I reviewed last year on Delta when flying to the US, connectivity was provided by Viasat.