Of all of the doors in a normal US McMansion, the garage doors are the biggest, and are almost always motorized. This means they are an easy target for automation, since most of the hardware is already there, we just need to bridge it to the virtual space. The cheapest way to do this is to use a door contact switch and dry contact relay which are compatible with Home Assistant, and some YAML magic to bridge them together.

Today I got my first upgrade to the studio setup: A new microphone! I chose a Rode Videomic Go II, which has USB-C and 3.5mm outputs, and they have a USB-C to Lightning cable available to connect to my phone. Since I use my iPhone for filming (often my older iPhone SE), this was important to me, but the ability to connect digitally to my desktop for recording screen capture with high quality audio was also important, so I didn’t want to get the smaller mics that clip directly on to the phone’s lightning port.

I’ve been playing with the Dell Wyse 5060 I bought before and I …. might have bought a few more. I was so impressed by the performance for $35, the CPU and GPU were very functional, and the system had enough SSD storage and RAM to do actual real work. So, considering people have tried to run Proxmox on the Raspberry Pi 4, these things must be adequate for a Proxmox HA cluster.

When I reached 100 subscribers, I was very excited and posted about it here. But now, I’ve crossed 1000. After reaching 100, I was excited for the next hundred, but it came by so fast that within a few weeks I blew by 200,300,400… and was at 1000. The next goal becomes not a doubling, but the next order of magnitude. Exponential growth. I don’t expect to reach 100k (two more orders of magnitude), but maybe I’ll eventually reach the next order of magnitude.

In previous posts, I’ve been building up a thin client / VDI infrastructure based on Proxmox hosted virtual machines, using the SPICE protocol. This has gone well. However, the current setup basically launches the computer into a purely thin client mode, where it’s hardcoded to a specific VM and can do nothing else. There has been some interest in making some kind of launcher to select VMs to log in to, and I decided to find a solution for this.

As promised in my previous blog post on the topic, the SPICE protocol is capable of USB redirection. I didn’t dive into it for that post, but now the future is here and I’ve added USB redirection to my Raspberry Pi thin client. I’ve tested it with USB flash drives, webcams, and pretty much all of the USB devices I could find. And I’m here to tell you how it all works.

As of today, my Youtube Channel has reached 100 subscribers! It’s really exciting to me, slowly starting to build a brand and produce content that I enjoy. I’ve enjoyed documenting my hobbies and projects on this website for almost a year now, and making videos is a fun way for me to expand that. Thank you to everyone who’s enjoyed and commented on my content so far, it’s great to see that others are enjoying it too.

I recently was browsing eBay for used computer parts (as one does) and I found how cheap some used thin clients are. These are mini desktops with minimal IO which are designed to act as a modern terminal for modern VDI setups, something like Citrix or Microsoft Remote Desktop based enterprise systems. The thin client itself just has to deal with the local displays, keyboard, mouse, and local USB ports, the actual computation is done on a server somewhere else.

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’m exploring the options for pulling a backup of a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host to TrueNAS SCALE server. In this case, PVE host has local ZFS storage, and the TrueNAS system is acting as the backup server. Ideally, PVE would snapshot in ZFS and we could sync those snapshots with a TrueNAS Data Replication task, but PVE doesn’t use the ZFS snapshot features by default.

Previously, I described my ‘Ultimate’ OctoPrint setup, and part of that setup process including remounting a lot of OctoPrint folders to locations on my NAS. This setup worked well until I added OctoLapse, and wanted to backup folders not part of the folder path configuration in OctoPrint. To solve this, I used a different approach entirely, using symbolic links instead of a bunch of network mounts to cleanly and easily relocate OctoPrint data to network storage.