WirelessMoves – Page 37 – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

TinyPilot For Advanced Remote Server and Notebook Control

When it comes to controlling or using remote PCs or servers, I use SSH connections and VNC or RDP for interaction with the graphical user interface. But there are cases when installing remote access software is not an option, or one needs to control the remote notebook / PC / server before the operating system is up and running. For such cases, remote-KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) devices are the solution. There’s one brand that is quite famous for such solutions but their devices are expensive and they use a Java (!) based web browser interface. While a web browser interface is great, Java is definitely a no-go in this day and age and shows that product development must have ceased many eons ago. So I was looking for an alternative and found a cool open-source Raspberry Pi based solution: TinyPilot.

Taming Windows in a Virtual Machine

When most people talk about virtual machines, they mean Linux based VMs in the cloud. But there’s much more that can be done with the technology. Before turning to the cloud, I’ve actually started using virtual machines many years ago on my Linux desktop to have access to a Windows environment to run a number of programs I need for work. It’s nice to have Windows in a VM rather than running it on bare metal, because it’s limited to the files in a configured directory tree and hence, things can be contained very nicely. Recently, I’ve also experimented with using Windows running in remote virtual machines and access them via RDP or VNC. This works great in general but there are a number of things that can be tweaked to improve the behavior when using the system over the Internet. And here are my top 3:

Several Desktops On A Single VM In The Cloud

Earlier this year, I discovered how to run a graphical desktop in a virtual machine in the cloud. I promptly put this to good use and ran a couple of online hands-on workshops on various topics in recent months. In combination with Guacamole, participants don’t even need to install a remote desktop viewer, but can use the remote desktop right in the web browser. My latest improvement: Run several desktops on a single Virtual Machine.

My First Use Of 5G While Roaming

And while I’m already writing about recent personal roaming firsts, I should also mention that I saw my first personal 5G use while roaming in Austria in May 2021.

A Dummy Display Dongle for My Headless Workstation

Since back in December, I have a ‘Headless’ HP Z440 workstation under my desk with lots of RAM, storage and an Nvidia graphics card to run virtual machines and compute intensive stuff there instead of on my notebook. This works very well in practice and I use X over SSH a lot with virtual machines on the Workstation. There is one application, however, that doesn’t work very well this way: The Virtualbox management GUI. For some reason, the window doesn’t render correctly, and while it is usable, it’s a pain. One way to fix the problem would be to run the Virtualbox GUI on the display of the Z440 and then use VNC to access the screen. However, since I use the Z440 without a screen attached, this does not work, as no real display buffer is created during startup if no screen is attached. A few days ago I came across a “Display Port Dummy” adapter, and I immediately knew that this would fix my problem.

Andy Weir’s New Book: ‘Project Hail Mary’

If a book is good and the story is engaging, I tend to read it over the course of a week or two. But every now and then there is a superb book that I just can’t put down, which then has a serious impact on my work/live balance and my day/night rhythm. Andy Weir’s latest book ‘Project Hail Mary’ definitely falls into the second category, and I was glad I stumbled over it while I was on vacation.

VoLTE Roaming in the Wild

Due to the ongoing pandemic, it’s been a while since I last traveled abroad and had some time to have a look how roaming has evolved. But things are slowly getting better and I recently had the opportunity to go on a quick trip to Austria. And I’ve been very positively surprised that my favorite home network operator and my favorite roaming operator in Austria have switched-on VoLTE Roaming in the meantime!

Radio Streaming on the Road

Once upon a time, cassettes, CDs and then memory sticks were ‘ the thing’ in the car apart from the good old (broadcast) radio. On longer trips, the downside of broadcast radio always is that sooner or later, you leave the coverage area of a station. In the age of the mobile Internet, that’s no longer a problem: Simply stream your favorite radio stations from the other end of the world over the Internet on your mobile device while driving, and pipe it via Bluetooth to the car’s entertainment system. So how good does that work in practice?

Upgrading to BBB v2.3 and Ubuntu 18.04

I’ve been running a BBB server for well over a year now and recently it was time for a somewhat bigger update that was a bit out of the ordinary. For some reason or other, BBB v2.2 could only run on Ubuntu 16.04, which was already hopelessly outdated when I first installed the server last year. At the time, first efforts were done by the developers to base the next major version of BBB on Ubuntu 18.04. A bit of an odd decision from my point of view, as Ubuntu 20.04 was just around the corner and the current stable BBB release that requires the new OS version was only released a year later in May 2021. As the developers recommended not to update the OS and BBB, but rather start with a clean slate and install everything from scratch, I decided to do just that and was surprised that the approach is relatively painless, and can be done with a few commands. The only quirk I encountered was during the re-import of the user database on the new server that required some thinking.

Antenna Games & Anti-Static Bags

When working on radio related things in a lab, there are usually shielded boxes with antenna connectors and attenuators, so it’s easy to simulate bad RF conditions. That’s quite useful when testing how devices behave under such conditions. Recently, I wanted to see how a router with an LTE modem behaves when RF is bad from home, so I had to come up with a different approach: Anti-static bags.