Author: jackadmin

Linux command for checking a raspberry Pi’s version…

cat /proc/device-tree/model

Found answer on this website:

I am working with Raspberry Pis again and running into this issue where I have burned operating systems to sd cards but when i try to re-use one it doesn’t come up in my PC. Diskpart to the rescue… I remember in the past I used to use this page a lot: https://www.howtogeek.com/235824/how-to-clean-a-flash-drive-sd-card-or-internal-drive-to-fix-partition-and-capacity-problems/

Servers
– Services and old web projects have been down for past two months at my place.
– I sorted through some network troubles and been providing upgrades for some of the services hardware
– New CPU fan for Radio machine
– Net gains of space on all machines due to data consolidation and regular organizational cleaning of data
–

Downtime
– I’ve needed a lot of downtime towards the end of summer to recuperate
– Had some health challenges, nothing serious, but are the first steps of what could be bad, so changing around my habits there
– Resting more, sometimes I have sleep issue
– Getting stricter on keeping my ME time from being taken over by work or other commitments. Personally I need it.
– Balancing between periods of high output and productivity, and taking the necessary periods of rest and relaxation to help with having creative ideas later

Motivation
– Been able to push myself through a lot lately
– Amazing that some extra willpower comes with age
– Always had the willpower to work through tough problems I really enjoy, still enjoy that
– Trying to capture my strengths on paper or digital for motivation later and downplay or try to redirect my weaknesses elsewhere
– All the while trying to stay mindful, in the moment, and not worry too much about my own self status, help others and ask them for help myself as needed (which is more often than you’d think. don’t want to get caught up only helping people…and shouldering your own burdens for too long…)
– Other people motivate me when they are doing well in their life
– I am trying again to help motivate others because it makes me happy when they succeed
– And another big part of motivation is having goals

Planning
– Trying to do less of this as it becomes a tad obsessive and nothing actually gets done when you are planning something out
– Been good at “DO”-ing things instead of sitting there and thinking over all the things I have to do
– Yanno, standard stuff really
– Oh and planning more time for friends, and family. With the holidays coming up, that’s always important

There’s nothing quite as relaxing. If I could say the perfect ambiance for Quake would be a gently rolling thunderstorm with a near-constant downfall of rain that’s audible. It gives a nice feeling when you are playing the one map in the game that is kinda like de_aztec (from Counter Strike), rainy, thundering and foreboding.

To get here I started google searching “run aws sam on mac” and found this AWS article:

Installing SAM CLI using Pip

I didn’t have pip installed, but I had pip3 installed, so I ran the same command it mentions and saw it install everything correctly.

pip3 install aws-sam-cli

After this I am looking at how to test the Lambdas. I’m using this AWS article:
Testing AWS SAM CLI

I want to save power at home because it becomes more costly in the summer.
I have a plethora of spare computers and servers that aren’t hooked up that I would like to make use of in a “serverless” setup.

And I have a handful of running machines that are running your typical operating systems and network services. I would like to convert that to use only as much power as it really needs, ie. creating a serverless infrastructure in my own basement. I’ve found in the past that self hosting these websites and apps has been incredibly cheaper than paying another company to host them. This serverless push is a continuation of that ideal.

I have WeMo Insight Power switches hooked up to each of the clusters of computing resources I have. They are recording my average power consumption every day, and I used to have them set up to report out to Excel spreadsheets and email them to me, although that was only working for one switch last time I checked. Anyhow, here is a table of my business hardware, and then a table of my personal/normal hardware. That way the first thing you see is what I do for my business/and then you can see what would be typical in your own household. Power costs me $0.118 per kWh where I live.

Energy Use Calculator for AC unit

Wow, today I found a free and easy solution to the problem with Alexa not having a stopwatch capability backed in.
This is the Alexa Skill I use for Stopwatch

I only have to use these commands to get the info I need from it:
“Alexa, open stopwatch” = start
“Alexa, ask stopwatch” = status
“Alexa, ask stopwatch to stop” = stop

It works ok. I think it must fudge the numbers a bit because after starting my first stopwatch I checked it with an “Alexa, ask stopwatch” command and she reported back to me that I already had 10 seconds on my stopwatch. I thought that was wrong because I had only just started the stopwatch with the “Alexa, open stopwatch” command. Ah well, I will have to watch the stopwatch!

So there’s a site out there. It’s called Whatjacksupto.com and I created it to help get a handle on what the fuck I have been working on lately. IT kInDa helps. The most important part is probably the “TODOs” section, but I often forget to check it in favor of some other, more easily editable lists I have stored on “the Cloud™”. So for that I mean Google Keep. The notes I write in there are a little more private than what I post on my public Whatjacksupto.com site. But there honestly aren’t that many interested folk perusing that website.

Anyway, as of today I have figured out what I want to do in regards for maintaining these todo lists and more easily updating the public ones in the future. Basically I have figured out a way to half-automate the generation of markdown syntax from these Google Keep lists. And that way I can publish whatever todo lists I deem acceptable in this half-automated way. I still have to manually go into the Google Doc that my solution generates and copy that markdown text to paste inside of the Whatjacksupto.com code solution. And only then am I able to run another auto-updation script that generates the required html templates and pushes the updates up to the server.

The public ones you see on that site are what I want people to know I have going on right now. Then they might be able to more easily help with something pertinent to my todo lists. In the future, for my household-centered all-encompassing AI+digital life assistant, I’d like it so my Fridge had a touch screen that would display the current “TODO” chores for me and a housemate. And then we could go up there and swipe away or check off any “TODO” chores that we completed that day. And similarly, I’d like any tasks added to Alexa’s “ToDo List” to be reflected in that same house list. But those might not always be public, so for the house assistant, the todo lists on that one are probably pretty guaranteed to be available to people with “journal” (private) access. The strictly manual -> production process for whatjacksupto.com will most likely stay the same. THat’s all for now. Apologies for the rambling, sometimes I start to think midway through my writing and then just stream-of-consciousness it all out there. Anyways, the TODOs on Whatjacksupto.com should be pretty well up to date most of the time, usually within a month’s time.

I will work on metrics and gettin’ actual truths out there to the people in due time. I’m working on ideation for a couple ideas, one being dashboards and another being timelines. I’ll touch on those in another post.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I would probably like an accompanying app for that household AI assistant so that users could log in and edit their own todo list (to be displayed on the fridge monitor) from remote. And even for this whatjacksupto.com site, I think I had in mind the idea of making an app (mostly for me) that anybody could download on the app store and just see a condensed version of my website, and then also I could log in and perform TODO app-like tasks from within there and have it update accordingly elsewhere on the website. But that’s really a lot of work, 20 hours so I think. I’m still learning as I go here and trying to polish my estimates.

Last Sunday I attended the Volunteer Orientation at FreeGeek Chicago for the first time in my life. I must say, WOW, that place has a whole lot of what I’m about. I can’t wait to go back there. Work has been keeping me busy on Fridays, so I’ll have to wait until I have a free Sunday. They are open Fridays and Sundays for Volunteer Orientation and just normal volunteering hours.

What people do there is recycle and repair computers. Two things that I care about. At FreeGeek, if a computer isn’t repairable, they “teardown” it, which really means “recycle it”. In which case, they take the different components of a motherboard, let’s say the onboard chips, the gold, the battery-like capacitors, actual batteries, plastic, etc, all that gets removed from the boards, sorted into bins, and then taken out to their respective recyclers. How cool is that?

Well, that’s not the only cool thing when you consider what else they do there…at FreeGeek, if a computer is too good to be recycled, they repair it and sell it for mad cheap on their storefront! I saw netbooks there for $40! Towers ranged from $40-100! Sometimes more! It really was quite cool seeing so much good use of old tech. I will come back there often to volunteer and help them repair their computers.

Another cool aspect of FreeGeek is the A+ training you pretty much get for free. What I mean by that is they will teach you pretty much everything you need to know to repair a computer. I’m talking troubleshooting, putting the danged thing together, installing software, troubleshooting issues, the works. And you will run into a lot of issues there. When I was there for just my orientation I saw about 12 people deep in thought, methodically debugging and troubleshooting their assigned machines. One woman I saw was so in the zone it looked like she was already thinking about what next could be causing the issue after she completed a test and replaced the older components back into her assigned machine.

This place is really cool. And I highly recommend anybody with any computer repair training or who wants to be trained to go attend a Volunteer Orientation and get working there. As a bonus, if you complete so-and-so hours of training, you can be admitted to the laptop repair training if you so desire. They sort of structure their repairing system in a hierarchy, and this laptop repair training is rightfully at the top since these components are usually smaller, and more expensive. They can’t have people muckin’ it up and rippin’ RAM out the wrong way! But seriously, very cool.

Very cool. Very cheap. FreeGeek.

*FreeGeek not officially valid for training in A+ certification, but it is an excellent and free start

That’s my current experience trying to get a React Native Android app going. Started this two and a half hours ago. And it’s looking like I’ll get to hour 3 and still have no app. I have just been debugging myriad build errors and setting up Android studio for the first time. Really it shouldn’t be this hard but it seems as if I can’t find any good documentation or examples on the Android side of things. Seems like a lot of people chose to do the iOS side first.

This is how you get started ejecting your dumb react native app.

“npm run eject”

And then getting it running on your phone.

good “fuckin” luck

And then finally publishing it to the store.

this will hopefully be easy. still haven’t done.

Also changes I make will not automatically fuckin’ reload. Yep, confirmed. Hell, I don’t think the metro bundler is even bundling correctly after I CTRL+C it and it does some magic and says “…” welp, nevermind, before I thought it used to do something. Now it looks like I have to close the metro bundler and re-run the “react-native run-android” command. That takes a long time. Now, it seems like I’m probably doing something wrong here, and I probably am, but that is just not fun developer experience. :<

I wished I could just sit down for 2 hours and bang this one out. But what with the internet being the internet and all…distractions abound.

Instead, I have spent 2 hours and just got the basic app running on my local device. Ran into issues selecting the gradleversion, and some other stuff about build sdks.

Next time, if I want to get goin on building that release build and doing my first shot on the play store, I need to follow this guide:

Well….I got it packaged and available on my android phone. No walled garden yet, but that barely took an hour. Nice.