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iPhone 3G frame by Grid review
Some days ago I received a cool piece of “contemporary art”: the iPhone 3G frame by Grid, and I want to share my review of it because I think it’s an interesting product for the geek/Apple lovers and it has a correct price tag (in my opinion). Disclaimer: I’m not involved with Grid and I (unfortunately 😁) paid the full price for it and nobody asked me for a review. What is? It is an iPhone 3G, my first iPhone, and the first iPhone sold globally, with -almost- all the components exposed under a nice transparent Plexiglas panel framed (in A3 paper size) with a black border. Starting from the package, it is very well-made and it’s almost impossible to damage it with the sturdy plast... Read More
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My network home setup - v2.0
I spent my last two months to build/optimize my home network from scratch and I want to share my setup, info and troubles that I discovered during this work, so you can take some inspirations or ideas here and there. This post will be quite long, so I start with an overall description of the hardware/software/setup and then I’ll go into the details. The hardware and software Netgear R7800 with OpenWRT as main router The ISP default modem because works the best for my FTTC connection (still waiting for the 1000/200mbps FTTH upgrade) One Raspberry PI 4B 1GB RAM as Pi-Hole server One Raspberry PI 4B 2GB RAM as Homebridge server One Raspberry PI 4B 4GB RAM as Prometheus se... Read More
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So, I have 3 RaspberryPI 4B with 3 'differents' board/CPU/Revision?
Browsing the info of my Raspberry PI 4B I found that all the three devices I have, are different. And not just a few differences, but quite substantial, at least according to the info loaded by the kernel. Data: My older Raspberry PI 4B is a Rev 1.2 with BCM2835 SoC (more info on it later) with 4GB ram but just received (after a long research and wait, due to the chip shortage) another two RPi 4B, one with 2GB ram and the other with 1GB. But here are the curious specs, the (new) one with 2GB of RAM with BCM2711: processor : 0 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 3 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 126.00 Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm crc32 C... Read More
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PADD v3.7.1 for 800X480px display updated
yubiuser has updated the cool script PADD to v.3.7.0 for monitoring Pi-Hole stats, with some new cool features and optimizations. But since his version doesn’t fill a display like the Pimoroni HyperPixel 4” (800x480px) I have modified it to fill all the 800x480px screens and to have other usefuel info of the hardware and software (and the beautiful old logo). Here it is: Consider that this version is optimized for running on DietPI and with Unbound as recursive DNS provider. It should work also with standard RaspbianOS but I have no idea since I haven’t tested it. [Edit: updated to v3.7.1] To test it, save the PADD v3.7.0 800x480px code as padd.sh (or download the file), backup the o... Read More
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GeekPI Raspberry PI fan hat with OLED Adafruit display fix and mod
Few days ago I bought for 16€ a very nice and useful Raspberry PI 4 fan/hat with a small OLED display, that fits perfectly on the Pimoroni Pibow Coupé 4 and can be turned on only when the CPU reach x ºC (60°C for me). Here are some photos: P.S. I haven’t followed the original instruction for the bolts and screws, but I reversed them, because I think that is nicer to have the screws on top and the bolts hidden on the rear (image). Here is mounted with the original instructions: image But I noticed that the official tutorial, reported on the instructions and on Amazon, (available here: Raspberry Pi Fan Expansion Board Plus 0.91 OLED V1.0 ), uses old/discontinued Adafruit libra... Read More
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Lesser-known features of the Apple Studio Display
Few days ago I received (finally) the Apple Studio Display that I have ordered and I found some tips that I’ve rarely found in other reviews. So, I want to write about these less known features: Use ‘Hey Siri!’ with the Mac in stop I found that you can enable Ehy Siri! also on the unsupported Mac and it can also be triggered when the Mac is sleeping, the display will wake up, execute your command and after going to sleep. Watch/listen the short videoI made. Ambient light sensor is not on the center near the camera Usually the ambient light sensor of the Mac/iPhone is in the center near the camera, but not on the Studio Display that, instead, is in the upper left corner. The color p... Read More
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Fix Pimoroni HyperPixel display with Raspberry Pi OS 11 Bullseye
I recently updated my Raspbian Buster to Bullseye on the RaspberryPI I use as DNS server with Pi-Hole. But unfortunately something went wrong, or at least I thought I made something wrong during the update process, because when the Raspberry PI rebooted, the attached Pimoroni HyperPixel 4” display was blank. I mean, the backlight was on but there was nothing on the screen. So I tried to ssh in to it but the ip was changed itself. I don’t know what happened but I caught the opportunity to switch to another Linux distribution that I’ve always wanted to try: DietPI. Obviously I had all the backup so I wasn’t particularly angry. So I went to DietPI website, downloaded the installer, flas... Read More
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Spot your Automator folder actions on macOS when Spotlight fails
I had made some workflows that automatically moved my routers backup to a backup folder, but since I’ve switched from DD-WRT to OpenWrt, and I’m not using two routers but only one, I want to delete them. The problem is that I absolutely don’t remember where I put those workflows but I know that are somewhere on my disk since every time I download a file, the Automator icon appears on my menubar: And -second trouble- I also don’t remember the name of them. So I searched for any workflow file using Spotlight on my Finder, but Spotlight has found only one, and I remember I have created more than one (probably the others are inside some hidden-to-Spotlight folders). Here’s where the v... Read More
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My backup with Carbon Copy Cloner
This post is about how I’m doing the backup of my Mac using (the great) Carbon Copy Cloner software. Maybe you can take some inspiration. My setup is to have an external SSD that is always connected via USB-C to my Mac, but I don’t want to leave it mounted on my macOS system every time, due to security and because this would cause more disk wear. So I leave my disk attached to my Mac and CCC should mount it and do the backup, just in case that CCC fails to mount your disk, you can add a bash preflight script to mount it before the backup begins. The script is very simple but you have to identify your volume using diskutil list In my case the volume is the disk4s1 due to size and name... Read More
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LG microwave tricks (not to cook)
Some months ago I bought a new microwave from LG (model MH6535GIB), that is a very nice microwave for the price tag but… by default it had a big, enormous problem: the sounds. Alert sounds for everything, every button that was pressed and every time it was ending the cooking, and not one time, but once a minute for five minutes after the end of its cooking cycle. Simply crazy. 🤬 The model is the MH6535GIB, this: but there are lots of similar models-Serial Number with different capacity or similar functions, that I think use almost the same firmware. So I simply checked the manual to disable it, but the manual didn’t help, since there wasn’t any info. So I emailed the LG support and t... Read More