Writing tagged "tinkering"
Cat classification with Frigate
My Frigate surveillance setup’s primary purpose is to keep an eye on my cats while I’m away.
An older setup supported only motion detection, but reviewing all motion events of the day while on vacation to make sure that each cat is doing fine was somewhat cumbersome. I switched to Frigate to leverage its entity detection capabilities so I only have to review events that detected cats, and could skip random motion.
The (ongoing) quest for 1 second Linux boot to desktop
Micro VMs are becoming more popular as a more secure alternative to containers, but VMs traditionally suffered from long boot times that containers typically haven’t. Boot time optimizations make VMs more accessible for ephemeral loads that need to spin up quickly.
That’s not why I’m interested in fast boot times.
Reinventing my rack cooling solution
Most of my computers have been sitting in a noise-insulated 19“ rack for 6 years or so. Although I’ve been administrating real servers for more than a decade, I still get a kick out of cosplaying as sysadmin with machines that I can actually touch, rather than being located in some rented data hundreds of kilometers away.
The rack I bought came with a temperature-controlled fan that pulled air through the whole box (just tall enough to fit under a desk), but could only run at 0% and 100% speed, because the temperature control was just a binary switch. That kinda defeated the point of the rack being noise-insulated, because even Noctua fans make some noise at 100% speed.
Static site search optimization
I get this recurring urge to have a nice website, and usually fail to pull through after doing some interesting things and subsequently losing interest. The jury is still out on how it’s going to go this time, but I certainly reached an interesting thing: Search without a full-blown search engine.
Zola, the static page renderer that’s in use here, comes with support for two search libraries out of the box:
- Fuse.js (a few more features)
- Elasticlunr.js (leaner bundle)
Both have as basic operating principle that the static page renderer generates an index file that is loaded and searched directly on the client. Elasticlunr.js has a bit smaller footprint, so I went with this one.
AI entity detection with Hailo accelerator for containerized Frigate on Debian Trixie in 2026
Frigate is probably the most comprehensive FOSS video surveillance solution out there. It comes with rich entity detection support using relatively small neural nets, and supports various hardware acceleration strategies out of the box, as well as sporting first-class support of energy efficient single board PCs like the Raspberry Pi.
Alpine Linux on Raspberry Pi
Raspbian, a Debian Linux derivative, is the standard operating choice on a Raspberry Pi, developed and recommended by the makers of the device. As someone who always favored Debian and sometimes its derivatives as well, I never gave much thoughts to alternatives on this platform.
When Docker emerged, I started noticing Alpine Linux, because it was a popular choice for small images, and I started using it for my own images. I always thought that Alpine is a child of container architecture, but the distribution is actually twice as old as Docker, and still a couple of years older than the concept of containers on Linux.
Getting my pollen forecast into Home Assistant
As someone who is affected by various plants’ pollen, knowing in advance how bad it’s going to be helps planning the day and anticipate allergy-related malady.
My country’s meteorological service publishes pollen forecasts on their website, including per-state maps. It has become a ritual to visit their site every morning to check out the updated forecast, which is slightly inconvenient.
Switching PoE devices attached to a Linksys switch with Home Assistant
Some recent office space restructuring enabled employees to take home certain now-unused pieces of equipment that the company would otherwise have to sell off or trash. I was lucky to get a Linksys LGS124 PoE-capable managed switch to simplify wiring in my rack at home.
Being able to power cycle devices remotely is really useful to get crashed/locked-up stuff to work again, but the switch web UI is a nightmare and borderline unusable on touch devices, which are sometimes the only available option on the go, so I looked into API options.
Putting to sleep and waking up Windows machines with Home Assistant
I begrudgingly tolerate some Windows machines on my network, because some games’ anti cheat malsoftware consider virtual environments cheating. While VMs do make it easier to manipulate the state of a video game to one’s advantage, it’s annoying.
Balancing between power saving and convenience, I want these machines up as quickly as possible when I need them, so I keep them in sleep and wake them up with Wake-on-LAN. Putting them back to sleep via remote desktop is mightily annoying, so I searched for remedies.
Running ESPHome on the AZ ONEBoard
The AZ ONEBoard is a development board from the electronic components seller AZ Delivery based on ESP8266. Similarly to Adafruit’s STEMMA system, it’s intended to ease the entry into embedded development with sensors that can be easily plugged into a standardized interface, without requiring soldering.
I got a few sets of those with sensor modules for temperature, humidity, volatile organic compounds (VOC, and by extension eCO2), and brightness so I could get some sensors into the still-sensorless spots in my apartment.
Working around a broken SD card slot on a Raspberry Pi
While moving a cable, I violently ripped the SD card out of my Raspberry Pi by accident, breaking some of the slot’s plastic in the process. I was certainly careless, but using flimsy plastic for a component that can receive quite a bit of physical stress is probably not the best idea.