Category: Personal Computing

It’s Here, It’s Up, It was an Adventure

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 8, 2025

Introduction

Loyal readers remember that Sherman had lost his magic smoke, dying in his sleep with disk errors being logged. Dismal Wizard decided to replace Sherman with a TrueNAS Mini+ like the one already here. Still needing a machine to tinker on, he ordered a 45HomeLab HL4 purpose built for the role. The machine has arrived, is unboxed, disks loaded, and ready to go. A modern Merlin, he shot the works … and did something work? Read on to find out.

This post includes the following:

Hardware first impressions
First boot and related activities
Filling the ZFS storage array
Reclaiming Sherman’s disks for the new pool
System software options and choices
Application software we tried
And our disk backup strategy

Personal Computing Technology

New Home Lab Host

Post author By davehamby
Post date February 15, 2025

Introduction

After many years of watching Apple computer trends, I realized that I had to prepare for the time when my data was bigger than the storage I could fit into something from Apple. So I home-brewed a NAS using FreeNAS (now TrueNAS Community Edition) to store photos, video clips, and music. And the odd movie. After 8 years of faithful service that included several disk replacements, a motherboard failure forced replacement of Sherman, my OG NAS and home lab host. After the break, plans for Sherman’s successor.

Personal Computing Technology

Installing UniFi Talk at Home

Post author By davehamby
Post date January 18, 2025

Touch Max Phone Image courtesy of Ubiquity

Dismal Manor has been an OOMA Telo subscriber since the late naughts. OOMA began as an alternative residential carrier offering VoIP service to homes having fast Internet service. With the rising generation ignoring home phone service, OOMA has changed focus to small businesses.

While we weren’t looking, Ubiquity UniFi Talk has matured into a substantial product with residence and small business friendly tariffs. The Wizard took a look and liked what he saw. He decided to switch home telephone carriers form OOMA to Ubiquity.

This post introduces the reader to UniFi Talk product and Talk home deployment planning. This post emphasizes the benefits of using Talk and the resources needed to deploy Talk including rough order of magnitude costs for additional equipment and for a router update deployment.

Personal Computing Technology Video

PlexGoes to Jail

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 18, 2024

Last month, I wrote about commissioning Plex Media Server on a ZimaBoard. All appared to go smoothly except that the service kept failing. The transcoders just wouldn’t run on the little Celeron processor in the Zima Board. Plex Media Server was not stable on the Zima Board so I sent it to jail. After the break, I describe how Plex was failing and what I tried next.

Home automation Home Economics Personal Computing Technology Video

An Introduction to ZimaBoard’s Docker Environment

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 5, 2024

Dismal Wizard (DW) was having difficulty finding TV programs to watch although we had multiple program sources. DW decided to try Plex Media Service. Plex needed hardware support so he bought a ZimaBoard, a small X86-64 computer. DW had a go setting it up to run Plex. This post summarizes our experiences with ZimaBoard and and its CasaOS Docker working environment. There was a learning curve but nothing experimentation couldn’t conquer.

Personal Computing Photography

Dismal Manor Photos Virtual Shoe Box

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 27, 2024

plastic sewer pipe and water line in trench — 2005 Water and sewer lateral replacement

I’ve probably written about CYME PeakTo before but today seems like a good time to do so again. And to tell you how I have reorganized all of the photos at Dismal Manor. This all began when I noticed that the 2 TB MacOS system volume was getting skosh free space so I began looking into a potential solution. Read on to learn about the tools used and what I did.

Tags apple, macos, Photography, software, Technology

Personal Computing Photography Uncategorized

Shooting raw with iPhone Cameras

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 2, 2023

High clouds taken with iPhone 11 Halide Camera and rendered by Pixelmator

I prefer to shoot raw rather than JPEG and recently discovered that regular iPhones (the not Pro kind) can shoot raw using 3rd party camera apps. Today we will take a look at a couple of these apps, Halide Camera [6] and Obscura Camera [7] and compare these to Apple Camera.

Here I’ll highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Apple Camera, Halide Camera, and Obscura Camera that I have experienced in use.

To shoot raw, you need to develop the latent image using a rendering app such as Skylum Luminar Neo [9] or PixelMator Pro or Photomator from the Pixelmator Folks [8].

My blog Personal Computing

Mastodon Announcement Configuration

Post author By davehamby
Post date August 12, 2023

WordPress JetPack Mastodon account linker

With the change of management at the website formerly known as Twitter, new API pricing has made use of Twitter/X API’s prohibitively expensive for small websites such as mine. As a service to my friends, I announce my posts to my Mastodon followers. This post shows where the JetPack configuration.

Home automation Personal Computing

Network Power Update

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 30, 2023

Photo of the front panel showing the mains connector, load connectors, and status indication. — EB3A Image courtesy of Bluetti Power

I’ve been a user of APC small computer UPS products for 20+ years. It seems that whenever one is needed, the battery is flat. As yet another round of battery replacements started, I decided to switch to portable power station products for the UPS role in my home network. But which one?

Personal Computing

Are you satisfied with your backup?

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 21, 2023

You can never have enough backups. There’s an old saying, “One is none, two is one (maybe).” In reality, media goes bad, backups are missed or fail, there’s a ISP fade, etc, etc, etc…

And we’re here in hurricane country. In the US we hide from wind (shelter in place) and run from water (evacuate). At least one on-site backup needs to be easy to take with you.

Recently, a Mastodon discussion aroused my curiosity when authors reminded me that two backup tools I use have some weaknesses. Time Machine, used for local backups can occasionally corrupts its output sparse images. BackBlaze, used for off-site backups, was also known to be subject to ISP fades and other issues.

What’s a poor old duffer to do? Read on …