There is a lattice of convenience which runs my house. From ripping CDs and DVDs to Kodi, Arcade cabinet, and a shitphone army acting as media players and remote controls. These posts describe how to sysadmin my house.
Ok this is just a neat toy and something I never needed to care about, and probably will never use.
I have a 16 port Avocent serial console that lets me log into all my network hardware and watch it boot if there are any issues and you can't connect to them over the network. This is all pretty standard Network Guy nerd nonsense. It's what you do in a datacenter. Being a network guy, and one who de-commissions lots of stuff, I basically run my house like a datacenter now as well. This is especially useful since I've been working from home the last five years. I have very little downtime.
My main workstation has a physical 9-pin serial port so I figured it'd be neat have it start getty at boot so I can use a serial console and bounce to it through the Avocent. And so I set off about trying to figure out the pinout for a serial to RJ-45 Avocent cable . But what didn't really click until I read thread while I was on my search is that you can have Grub start that getty and get full access beginning at the bootloader. This makes this actually useful. If there is some problem, and I'm either not here, or the problem includes "there's no video from my machine", I can view the serial console, log in if the machine is up, reboot it and watch the startup sequence to see where it's failing. The Grub boot menu actually shows up on the serial console /before/ my monitor displays it.
On all my production server hardware we have iLO anyway, so like, what did I care about watching those servers over serial anyway? Actually from what I understand my servers will output over serial right from the BIOS so you can watch the machines post and such before they even reach the bootloader. I doubt my Asus motherboard will do that, but I'll definitely dig around in there for a while.
Anyway, while I did find enough information to make the cable, I re-documented it so the next person might find the guide I wish I had. Since some people are more "visual" I've included both a basic text "RJ45 pin 1 -> DE-9 Pin 8" and a color coded diagram. I started by testing continuity inside the connector and noting which colors aligned to which RJ45 pins, then made before and after diagrams. The 9 pin connector is "as seen from the back (inside) of the connector" where the solder points are. Most of these have labels on the pins both on the inside and outside, they're just hard to see:
Here's a PDF of that if you want to zoom in, apparently the original draw.io file is embedded in there too.
Most pins are pretty straight forward swapping a wire from one pin to another, but pin 4 on the serial connector has two wires going to it, so I just twisted them together and soldered them both in. Pins 1 and 6 on the Serial connector also need to connect to the same RJ-45 wire. So I soldered the main wire to Pin 1 and used some very fine bodge wire to connect Pin1 to Pin 6. So far so good.
I took some photos, but they're pretty blurry and I'm not ripping this thing back apart since I don't want to break anything. Honestly the diagrams above do a better job of conveying it.
To get Grub to launch getty and start listening, the relevant part of the SuperUser.com thread, and the even more dense Arch documentation they linked to was:
This is the correct way (for me) to rip hundreds of DVDs. I still wish there was a global hash table of discs whereby we could automatically name individual files, but this does the job and I'll describe my overall workflow. Ripping TV shows is stupidly time consuming compared to audio CDs and I've done everything I can to reduce the time wastery involved. It's not perfect, but I can just feed disks through my machine all day then take an hour or so a week and rename everything I've done.
Or: The shit I put up with for good TV in this house.
I had two conversations today about how I basically optimize statistical analysis and data reconfiguration...blah blah. Each conversation just wound up with me wanting to tell the same story so I though I should write it down.
Some time ago I made a colossal mistake. I have a lot of music videos.. Like a lot a lot, to me anyway. And there's organization and logic to it to build different playlists and whatever.
***UPDATE 10-2024***
I only recently learned of the massive scam perpetrated by the former owner of TrippLite in which he "donated" the entire company to a brand new SuperPAC seemingly spun up by Leonard Leo for purposes of this exact transaction. Leo then went on to sell TrippLite to Eaton Power for 1.7bn. This is scum fuckery of the highest order and has no doubt contributed directly to the deaths and suffering of innocent people. For their part, Eaton has a policy against "political donations". I do not know how they square that policy with their purchase of TrippLite, which basically became a fascist slush fund for the purpose of installing a goddamn dictator. Use your judgment. These are still by far the highest quality power strips you can buy.
I did not buy any of these prior to the Eaton acquisition, though I probably did have my TrippLite UPS by that point. Likewise I don't hold Eaton blameless here either. They knew what they were part of, they didn't just want the shiny thing.
** update update... and Schneider has been ransomware'd. Neat.
On with the show...
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With the massive Retro Youtuber explosion going back even before Covid, I've been yelling to the void about "you need a real screwdriver". Thankfully a couple of rounds of iFixit & Linus sponsorships have gotten this point across :-) And now all those LTT screwdrivers have the delightful whiff of awkward about them. (Bias: I've had Snap-On since like 1997)
I think the next tool for home gamers should be power strips. No one ever thinks of power strips except maybe to mount a super long one over their bench.
I've got these everywhere, but they're great on the bench. A lot of time you'll see Youtubers plugging a whole power strip in special just so they have a switch they can throw at a safe distance to turn on a machine (don't daisy-chain power strips kids!). I have test power cables spooled well away from the power strip just in case I want to cower at a safe distance when powering something up. The neon switches make it super obvious if the thing you're working on is powered or not at a glance:
Pair them with a bunch of 1' extensions and you can tidy up and add physical switches to all your awkward-sized wall warts or to move a plug closer to your work surface. I often have two velcro'd to my lamp:
We also have them in the living room so we can quickly power on & off a bunch of vintage computers and consoles and the LiteBrite and bling and stuff.
They're high quality and they're fast. Eaton/TrippLite has the same $25,000 damage warranty they put on their UPS products.
Next up: Desk Lamps!
*** *IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP* I don't use these on a bench through a UPS, they go straight into the wall. IMHO it's a super bad idea to have UPS power backing up something like a power supply you're testing on the bench! (there are stories here) ***
It seems like I really don't write very much, but that's kind of a massive misconception. I don't write "much", but I had a bunch of blog entries that were at least 60% written and were missing like, screenshots or links or tags or I need to make new tags for things like XScreensaver and BSDs. Haiku. Shit lots of stuff.
I'm a KDE user. I like having my ultimate control over look & feel, even though in almost every sense I'm a "leave it default" guy. But I have a nice MacOS-ey theme, handily and easily-ish customized for the proper Green on Black color scheme which is one of 1.25 acceptable palettes (amber on black):
PICTURE
Note things like the Strawberry media player window and the Dolphin windows, these will be important at probably some future date.
I've just been directed toward a YouTube playlist that apparently made the rounds last August claiming to have "Every Video Played on 120 Minutes". Well no. Not really. The claim is "2506 Videos". Reality is...less.
I grabbed the playlist and threw it into my nightly randomizing grinder. I already have a "120 Minutes" playlist, in which I just cram every video from every band who was ever on 120 Minutes in there. Since it all "spiritually" counts. I put stuff that "should" be in there too because what other slot would have played Humanwine I guess?
My mom has a Mac, and occasionally something will fuck up in a way that is best fixed by me having some control over her machine. I had one of those cases last week and it was embarrassing that there was no good way for me to get remote access. Google Meet doesn't cut it, but there's a whole other Chrome Remote Desktop app, but that was a lot of hoops to install and gave up any hope of walking my mother through the install process.
