Its_All.Lost

Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

PCDuino and Filespace

I hate PCDuinos. But it was on sale, and I didn’t know any better at the time. Fast-forwarding… after using dd or the Apple Pi Baker to transfer the (old ass) image to the SD Card you can boot right up, that much actually works. But soon you will run out of disk space. The image is 1.9gb and I am using a 4gb card. Plenty of space. If this was a Raspberry Pi you could us the config menu and resize the partitions with no problems. That shit works. This shit doesn’t work. Stay away from PCDuinos, please. Their support sucks balls. Using the default PCDuino resizer from their menu causes the unit to not boot once you reboot it, the shit just hangs. I have also tried a few other methods of resizing the card with zero luck. It always just hangs, or has a kernel panic. But, the PCDuino config is still important. It has a few things you may need. Such as changing the boot to desktop option.

The best way to get all of you file space with no headaches is GParted. Just download GParted to a USB drive and use that. I used it on a laptop I have laying around, tossed in the SD Card and resized the partitions in seconds. Why didn’t I try this earlier?

Just do it really, it fucking works. Make the USB it doesn’t take long. You will actually save time. Trust me, I have tried all the other methods and they don’t work. At least not with my image for the PCDuino Nano Lite.

Fucking Comcast

I type this from my phone because for some unknown reason I cannot access the site, or my cpanel for that matter. The cpanel is down for everyone but the site is up as long as I am not on my home network. I haven’t done shit to the network. I have actually been busy, either web coding or working on the security system in the garage.

The Comcast service in this area is fucking atrocious. I am constantly having fucking problems. Fuck you Comcast. Wish AT&T was in the area, at least I know how to fix that shit.

Monitor your security system with a RPi

I had programmed a page of goodness in Node-Red for being the middle-man between the internet and my security system. Here’s the schpeal…

I used to work for an alarm company for a number of years. It’s a job that has kind of stuck with me, specially all the shit and skills that I learned while doing it. So I still have friends in the industry and I still have equipment from when I worked there. Naturally I install my own security system. Not wanting to pay for monitoring but still wanting to be notified with issues gave me a problem. I happen to know Pies so I decided to use a Raspberry Pi with Node-Red to solve that problem.

There are many ways to get notifications from your security system these days but they all require some kind of monitoring or to be activated by an alarm company (someone with a license). Using the Raspberry Pi I could do everything I wanted to. Node-Red just made it that much easier.

I programmed all of this via NR on one of my Raspberry Pies. I believe at the time I was programming in Node-Red v0.12 (around May 2016 I think). Here’s the flow:

https://github.com/jhaury/rpi-nodered-security

I cannot be held responsible for anything bad that may happen. This has been coded to the best of my ability but there may be bugs and some of it may be unfinished. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

An angry mob with pitchforks and torches

They have officially had it with me. They being the wife and daughter. My daughter has a website that I was (was) hosting on our home server along with my sites, well with the server constantly going down due to me fucking with it (mainly ClearOS not fucking working) and Comcast sucking balls they are now officially angry. I don’t blame her (the daughter), when ClearOS had to be reinstalled (how many times?) I lost her database for her site. Whoops. But really in my defense I didn’t lose it. She used some kind of plugin that flooded the database with IP addresses of visitors for page-clicks. Tons and tons and tons of IP addresses. It farked the database when I backed it up before I reinstalled Clear. So it’s there but I cannot import it, it’s all corrupted.

So now that the mob is officially angered we need a happy solution. That turned out to be Siteground. I got an “Official Server”. Moved the majority of my sites to it, specially my daughters, but left one behind on the home Ubuntu server for playing and testing purposes. I’m excited, it’s been a long time since I have had an actual server. Got a nice account with Siteground for a decent price. I have all kinds of goodies to play with! Now the mob is satisfied, pitchforks put away and torches extinguished.

Plex where are you?

Running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, fresh install 48 hours old. I have tried Plex from the official site. Downloading and installing via dpkg. Installs fine, doesn’t load.

I have tried the old PPA, installs fine, goes through the motions. Won’t start.

I have followed like three different tutorials on Plex installs, which is a dead simple process.

I have purged and removed all Plex files. I have tried multiple time. No love.

I don’t know what any of that bullshit means. Oh wait I do. Plex won’t start.

Oh and did I mention the Plex.tv forums are not working. They won’t let me login to post for help. Even tried to create a new user. Fuck my life.

Update: I rebooted a few times and ran the official install process, what the fuck it works. Not sure why I had to reboot for it to finally work.