About me

Music producer, (ex-)DJ, electronics tinkerer, Linux enthusiast and coder.

Trapped

  Thursday, October 26, 2017    

I felt compelled to write about music for a change, since it's mentioned in the blog header and all, so here's some criticism to begin with.

As a DJ I had the pleasure of closely following the development of rap music ever since the 80's, and IMO the "golden age" of the 90's was truly that. From 2000 onwards I've felt rap becoming too mainstream, too dumb and lacking meaningful messages.

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LED wall control with Raspberry Pi, part 1

  Saturday, October 14, 2017    

My IR camera project has been on hold for a while, because I've come up with other more interesting ideas, such as a LED wall. Initially I was inspired by the Aurora LED wall project, but I've realized that with the power of a Raspberry Pi and some Linux audio magic (PulseAudio and GStreamer) I could do much more.

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Pre-enabling wifi and SSH on a Raspberry Pi SD card

  Saturday, October 14, 2017    

I've bought many Pi Zero W's, as they're just irresistibly cheap, so I have a lot of little Linuxes (or is the plural Linuces?) running around the house.

Unfortunately I keep forgetting how to pre-enable wifi and SSH on the SD card for a headless setup, and every time Google finds me old, incomplete tutorials, leaving me wondering why a Pi is not connecting, so it's best I finally write my own.

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Infrared motion sensor camera with Raspberry Pi Zero W, part 2

  Thursday, August 24, 2017    

I decided to start with something simple like watching live video from the Pi camera on the local network. Raspbian comes with the raspivid utility, often used to simply record or pass camera picture to the HDMI output, but it's suitable for much more than that, especially with VLC, a multipurpose video toolkit.

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Infrared motion sensor camera with Raspberry Pi Zero W, part 1

  Wednesday, August 16, 2017    

I've been planning to build a prototype battery-operated motion sensor camera using the latest addition to the Raspberry Pi family tree, the Zero W, which is quite a remarkable device for something smaller than my thumb. Even the wireless antenna seems quite revolutionary. With WiFi and Bluetooth built in, this tiny computer will be more than perfect for many IoT projects.

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Context menu additions for sharing files in S3 buckets

  Tuesday, August 08, 2017    

Some time ago I wrote about mounting Amazon S3 buckets into your home directory, and I wanted to get automatic public URLs for sharing some of the files I stuff in my cloud buckets. I got it working quite effortlessly by writing a small script and adding a context menu item to my file manager.

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Using systemd to mount S3 buckets into your home directory

  Wednesday, August 02, 2017    

If you do web development or use cloud storage for backups, you may have heard of Amazon S3 which offers dirt-cheap storage for both private and public use. Data in S3 is split into "buckets", which can be configured individually and may contain folder structures.
 
Then there's S3FS (S3 File System) that allows accessing S3 just as easily as local files. The few tutorials I found used /etc/fstab to auto-mount buckets, but that's not very smart on a desktop computer with multiple users, each managing buckets of their own. Besides, editing /etc/fstab can be very dangerous to newbies. That's why I looked for a way to achieve the same and more without touching any system-wide configuration. The only part that even needs sudo privileges is installing the S3FS package.

If you've used Linux servers or desktops for some time, you've probably heard of systemd, which allows creating your own background services (daemons) relatively easily. The real beauty about it is that adding user-specific services is equally easy, and in my experience they are more reliable than processes started using the classic "Startup Applications" tool.

I'll walk you through to combine those three building blocks into an automatic service that brings your S3 files right under your home directory on a Linux desktop computer. This should work as-is on any recent Debian, Ubuntu or a derivative operating system, and with some changes on others, too (forget about Windows, though).

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Oh, so now I'm a blogger

  Wednesday, August 02, 2017    

Since I pretty much write for a living these days, I never thought I'd find enough energy and time to start blogging, especially after I ended my Twitter life as too time-consuming, but here we are.

I noticed that I've written a huge collection of notes that, with some refining, might be useful to others as well, and writing helps me remember new stuff that I keep learning. I guess those are valid reasons to start blogging.

I'm not quite sure which subjects I'll concentrate on, so that remains to be seen. Right now I'm building some exciting things with Raspberry Pi and a few other single board computers, so those might provide something to write about. I'm also studying Ardour and OpenShot for music and video production in Linux-based operating systems (currently I'm running mostly Ubuntu MATE, which I can recommend for both beginners and professionals). I've grown to hate Windows with all its weirdness, slowness, security problems, privacy issues and whatnot, so I really don't want to rely on it anymore. That's not a problem these days, as free, open-source software is plentiful and mostly good enough – occasionally even better than their commercial alternatives.

So, welcome, random reader. I'll publish my first Linux- and cloud-related tutorial next.

P.S. If you wonder what "Maniacland" is, it's how I misread "Manicaland" when I first visited Zimbabwe, and the locals thought it was hilarious.

  

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