Rui Carmo
August 14^th 2022, in the evening · 3 min read

Remote Endeavors

It seems that I have picked mid-Summer to catch a cold (at least I’m not testing postitive for COVID yet), so yesterday I decided to complete some low-impact TODOs I had been postponing for a while.

The Fedora container I set up on a lark a few months ago sort of became my personal desktop environment that I use from literally everywhere to run OpenSCAD, SuperSlicer and even Blender (neither of which I can run on my iPad), and I sometimes want to have quick access to it.

Hardware

I have a 27” 2560x1080 monitor that I’ve mostly been using with the Xiaomi Mi Stick to watch the news and the Z83ii that I recently sent on a solar panel debugging expedition was sitting on my desk, so everything seemed to come together neatly.

However, I wasn’t able to get my rewardingly noisy and cheap Bluetooth keyboard to work with it (I’ve had numerous tussles with the Z83ii hardware before around wireless), so I dug out a Raspberry Pi 3A+ I had set up as a Lakka box a couple of years back go and had fallen in disuse¹.

It (or a Zero 2 W) are more than enough to drive a 2560x1080 ultrawide display and render remote applications very snappily over a Wi-Fi connection, and this is one of the few use cases where its 512MB of RAM are plenty.

Software

I didn’t bother with overly elaborate customization–flashing the 32-bit Raspbian image onto an SD card and disabling the new OpenGL driver so I could tune the resolution by hand did 99% of what I needed:

# snippet from my /boot/config.txt
disable_overscan=1
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=87
hdmi_aspect_21_9=7
hdmi_pixel_freq_limit=400000000
hdmi_cvt=2560 1080 50 7 0 0 1
max_framebuffer_width=2560
max_framebuffer_height=1080
framebuffer_width=2560
framebuffer_height=1080
dtparam=audio=on

# disable new driver
#dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d

The rest was mostly replacing Chromium with Epiphany (which is enough for accessing Jupyter notebooks, router status pages and the like), installing Remmina and taking all of 30 seconds to set up my keyboard and my M720, because Raspbian Bluetooth support is just excellent.

For good measure, I also added [Tailscale] since I also want to access some of my Azure boxes, but were it not for force of habit and my particular needs, 100% of this could be done via the GUI and would “just work” out of the box.

Audio

I had a few issues with audio, because Remmina at first apparently refused to play audio from my remote server. That turned out to be due to a pending update and was fixed with a restar, but it was a bit annoying.

In the process of debugging it, however, I realized you can now switch your audio output to and from HDMI by just right-clicking on the speaker icon in the tray, which is a nice touch in Raspbian.

Performance

For a completely silent, essentially throwaway setup, this has a lot of bang for the buck.

It bears noting that the Pi 3A+, even over Wi-Fi, is more than fast enough to give me very low input latency, tolerable full window dragging at 32-bit color depth and even the ability to watch (and listen to) YouTube videos in a pretty smooth way on both Linux and Windows remote servers–that is because Remmina is now capable of negotiating GFX acceleration, and it shows when I play video or rotate OpenSCAD objects in the editor (it’s not buttery smooth, but it works fast enough to not break my flow).

This makes using a thin client all the more appealing, and given the time I spend using RDP on my iPad alone I should probably spend some time investigating an upgrade to my six-year-old closet server, especially since I know xrdp now has some support for GPU acceleration.

But I’m not made of money, and there is plenty more to do in the meantime…

Ironically, this was one of the boards I have run Plan 9 on and used as a very similar SSH/VNC terminal before. It even has a cutesy 3D printed case that is half the size of a power brick, so it can be hidden away anywhere. ↩︎

Rui Carmo
August 8^th 2022, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Unity and Microsoft cloud partnership ※

This makes such an overwhelming amount of sense that I’m worried it may be an outlier amidst Unity’s various recent announcements.

Still, the mention of Digital Twins and other things that dovetail likely with Azure are worthy of note, and I’m curious as to the impact in the Xbox ecosystem, but I know enough not to ask and have a ton of other things to worry about in telco consulting land right now.

But it does explain why they were recruiting Azure skillsets recently. Might be a very fun gig, if you can get it.

Rui Carmo
August 4^th 2022, at breakfast · 3 min read

Miscellaneous Summer Updates

The past few weeks have been a mad dash towards an as yet unspecified (and as yet completely unscheduled) summer break, so although a lot has happened most of it will pop up in retrospective posts somewhere down the line. There are, however, some odds and ends worth pinning to dates, so I’ve bundled them together here.

Rui Carmo
July 22^nd 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Analyzing iOS 16 Lockdown Mode ※

This seems like an eminently sane thing to have on.

I would much rather use it than a corporate profile with Microsoft Defender, but I need the latter for work access and there appears to be no way for both to coexist right now.

Rui Carmo
July 20^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Butterfly Keyboard Settlement ※

This is but a drop in the bucket and US-only (not to mention entirely too late), but it is something. Of course, brand confidence is an entirely different matter, and that was eroded for years until the hardware was revised…

Good thing Apple walked back the keyboard designs to something usable.

Rui Carmo
July 16^th 2022, at teatime · 5 min read

Heat Pumping

It was somewhat of a letargic week, especially if you consider that in the quasi-apocalyptic reality we now live temperatures above 40^oC have become the new normal. So I spent some time investigating my office air conditioner.

Rui Carmo
July 15^th 2022, at dawn · 1 min read

Unity is merging with IronSource ※

This has been ricocheting through Twitter (and Slack) all week. I honestly don’t know what Unity is thinking here (okay, other than monetizing games via ads, possibly installed sneakily), but the string of weird, shady decisions on their part is becoming… a turn-off.

Rui Carmo
July 13^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

DOOM inside of DOOM ※

The weird “Doom running on things” obsession that has been doing the rounds for years has just gone meta.

Rui Carmo
July 9^th 2022, in the morning · 10 min read

Reviving my ancient BQ Prusa i3 Hephestos with Klipper

While I wait for a good deal on a new 3D printer, I decided to see what I could do to improve printing on the ancient Hephestos I built from a Maker Faire kit I got eight years ago, when I was organizing the first events in Portugal (which I’m thus quite attached to). And having heard good things about Klipper firmware, I decided to give it a spin.

Rui Carmo
July 3^rd 2022, in the evening · 6 min read

Keen On Keys

A lot has been happening on the 3D printing front, but that is still ongoing to a point where it will end up on a later post, so I decided to write a little follow-up on Cheap Keys. And if the title seems familiar, that’s because I really like this YouTube channel, which covers keys of other kinds.

Rui Carmo
June 30^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Raspberry Pi Pico W ※

I’m not enamored with the form factor (it’s way bigger than the ESP32s I have been using), but am quite excited by the possibilities since I already have a few tiny RP2040 boards and can see third parties doing new twists on those with a Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth) chip.

Really great news for tinkerers overall.

Rui Carmo
June 26^th 2022, at dinnertime · 9 min read

The Xbox Series X

A couple of months ago I got a great deal on an Xbox Series X, which kind of explains why some of my free time has evaporated. Well, not all of it, but here are my thoughts on it so far.

Rui Carmo
June 19^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Spaceship! ※

This is so cool to see. I owned the original LEGO Galaxy Explorer 497 set, and it was the one I loved the most (at least until I got into Technic).

We still have most of the custom bricks (like wings and landing struts), although the lunar plates seem to have been lost in the intervening years.

Rui Carmo
June 18^th 2022, at late afternoon · 3 min read

Inverse Weekend

As it turned out the July bank holidays were too tempting to resist, so I just took a day off and am enjoying an “inverse weekend”, working only 2 days out of 7…

Rui Carmo
June 16^th 2022, in the morning

Darth Vader On A Portuguese Beach

Let's comb the beach! — I was given access to DALL-E 2 today, and am clearly having too much fun.

Rui Carmo
June 11^th 2022, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Short Break

Thanks to a serendipitous alignment of Portuguese holidays this turned out to be a 4-day weekend, so I decided to spend a chunk of it dusting and cleaning my office throughout, which entailed unplugging, untangling and cleaning all the cabling.

Rui Carmo
June 9^th 2022, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Xbox on Samsung TVs, and more... ※

With the upcoming availability of xCloud on Samsung TVs, I’m reminded that Apple explicitly locked themselves out of this due to their preposterously insane requirements of having every streamed game reviewed and packaged independently.

With Game Pass eventually allowing you to stream games you purchased (i.e., technically off-catalog), that requirement sounds even more out of touch… And I can’t help think that Apple shot themselves in the foot here in more ways than one.

Good thing I decided to get an NVIDIA Shield and sideload the Android app nearly two years ago…

Rui Carmo
June 6^th 2022, in the evening · 1 min read

WWDC 2022 keynote announcements ※

I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say this was the best WWDC keynote yet if you use an iPad.

After all, we got much better filesystem and window management features (including massively improved external display support and scaling adjustment), full iOS 16 parity and… a weather app.

Who knows, next year we might even get a calculator!

Rui Carmo
June 4^th 2022, late night · 4 min read

Weekend Updates

Since last week I got something like 15 little packets from AliExpress, so I finally have all the parts for my electronics builds and can get to finishing them.

Rui Carmo
June 2^nd 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Rediscovering the Mac ※

Federico realizes the Mac is, after all, a better computer than the iPad because (surprise) it is less restrictive about what you can do.

This is not even news, and somewhat cringe worthy, to be honest.

Even though most of the stuff I write here is actually written on an iPad mini (which is still the first computer I pick up in the morning and the last I put down before bed) and I do use it routinely for coding and accessing remote machines, I see the iPad as the modern equivalent of the Newton – a very personal (single user) computer that can help you manage most of your life (communications, notes, entertainment, even many creative activities) but for which Apple has failed to build software able to raise it to its full potential.

I endure it, but would swap it for a Mac tablet without a second thought.

Rui Carmo
May 31^st 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Check Your Mailbox Using The AirTag Infrastructure ※

This is genius. I’m quite curious as to whether this is feasible to do for tampering/presence detection (like whether someone has opened an utility closet and the like).

Rui Carmo
May 28^th 2022, at night · 9 min read

Build Updates

Following up on my recent post on hardware projects, I managed a fair bit of progress in the intervening days.

Rui Carmo
May 24^th 2022, at teatime · 1 min read

Azure ARM Virtual Machines Preview ※

This has been a long time coming, but it’s here “now”, and is just one of the ARM-related announcements at MS Build (the other is Project Volterra, a Snapdragon-based ARM developer workstation, but I already have plenty of those…).

Since these are based on Ampere (not really a surprise to anyone), the core-to-RAM ratios are pretty nice for server applications, and I expect a lot of interesting solutions to be deployed on them.

Rui Carmo
May 21^st 2022, in the morning · 5 min read

Notes on Fedora 36

Sometime during the past two weeks I decided to install Fedora 36 on my Lenovo, and this is my usual roll-up of notes and sundry. Most of it was OK and unremarkable (which is good for technology these days), but (spoiler) there are always a few odds and ends that could be better.

Rui Carmo
May 18^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Turing Pi 2 Kickstarter ※

I want to like this, seeing as it would make a lot of sense (such as things are) for me to get one, but with compute modules being sold out everywhere, ready access to vastly more powerful cloud (and local) resources and little time to tinker beyond a couple of hours a week, I just can’t justify it–especially since I gave away my Raspberry Pi 2 cluster last year, and just haven’t missed it.

But it would be really nice (budget permitting) to fill one with NVIDIA Jetsons since those would let me tinker with PyTorch in earnest (even if more slowly than a consumer-grade GPU).

Guess I need to become a YouTuber or something.