Scott O'Brien

When working on my keyboard project, it's dawned on me how hard it is to build such a big project from scratch, and how I wish there was a breakout for the Holyiot 18010 nRF52840 controller, so, let's build one! This will be a good test bed for the USB connection, and charge controller too! Hopefully it can act as a proof of concept for everything that's going to go in my keyboard.

This page is to document my learnings from the ZMK Design Guide

After crashing my RC Plane I decided to experiment with the flight controller using the cheapest possible RC planes I could build.

I bought foam board from Dollar Tree. Having the free designs from Flite Test (I’m using their Simple Cub), it quickly became apparent that printing out the designs, cutting, lining them up, gluing, cutting takes hours and hours to cut out a design.

A big thanks to those who helped from the Ardupilot Forum

Last week, I took a few extra days off from work to give myself a nice long break over Thanksgiving week.

I spent a lot of time finishing an RC plane we had some replacement parts for. This one was going to be autonomous. I spent a few days soldering the flight controller and electronics, gluing the plane together, measuring and trimming everything perfectly. It was perfectly balanced, perfectly weighted. We finally took it out for its maiden flight today, Sunday November 27. Sadly, this story ends in pieces.

When deciding what to attempt to grow where in the unit we're renting, I decided to perform a light study of the backyard. To perform this, first I had used the 3D Scanner App to perform a LiDAR scan of the house. Areas of interest are the fences and the walls of the house. Once a scan is performed, I exported this to obj format, and loaded it into my favourite Blender 3D

At UOW we had a challenge.  We wanted to allow proxy-free internet, but wanted to keep an eye on how much data was being consumed by what sort of users.  For this we built Project Herbert http://uowits.github.io/herbert-gui/docs.html.

It uses netflow from inside our network and some syslog monitoring scripts to match up our private RFC1918 address space to the users who have it at that time, process the flows in near-realtime so we can adjust throttling and firewall policy to be reactive with the environment.

The idea was to build this as a distributed system and allow it to scale-out to deal with more load

At the organisation I'm currently working for, we recently experienced what appears to be a common issue, VLAN's trunked down to ESXi nodes were inconsistent.

In our DC, we're still running the old school Cisco Catalyst switches.  If we were running a fabric, or Nexus switches we could put port profiles to action or if we lucky enough to have some equipment running Junos ❤️ we could be using apply-groups for this.

This article is about using the Asterisk PBX and exploiting Google's voice recognitionAPI built for voice search in Chrome to build an address book that technology inept people (my grandmother) can use to place cheap telephone calls over VoIP.

This tool is built for my grandmother; a lady who has macular degeneration making her legally blind.  She doesn't want to invest a great deal of money in this solution or have much of a learning curve, it took long enough to get her using the two button audio book solution on the iPod.  The basic idea is to purchase a direct inward dialing (DID) number and program it into her speed dial, this will connect to an Asterisk virtual machine that will launch the voice recognition to listen to who she wants to dial, look up the number in her address book then connect the call through, all at the rate of about $0.11 for a national call (actually saving her money!).

We all know the problem, some sites are restricted to certain countries based on the IP address you're using to view them.  When trying to access over-seas, some solutions are HTTP proxies, Socks proxies and the like.  The problem I have with all of these is that they're annoying to set up whenever you want to to view the site and I don't want to have to do that for all my devices (iPad, computer, etc).

This solution will tunnel only the sites you want over a VPN connection to be NAT'd out the other end, all on the gateway

This article is the second in a series (see part 1 here).  Please see HA Network for the first part in setting up the network topology to be highly available.

It’s all good having a redundant network design, but putting web servers and the like on our hypervisors doesn’t make them redundant.  In the event where there’s a failure on one of our servers, all virtual machines on that server will die.  Looking at our previous network design, we can see a failure on a web server or database server would cause service outage.

EDIT:It looks like Google has recently starting peering in more places in AU with an anycast solution that fixes these issues.

On a little side note to the tutorial series I've been writing up lately for building a ZFS fileserver. This one is about Why Google DNS is bad for your performance (well, depending on where you live) A real quick run down, we all know what DNS does yeah? It translates domains like www.scottyob.com into IP addresses like 112.140.183.97. A DNS server has a job of translating these domain names to the IP addresses we can use.

Note: This post is one in a series aimed to be a tutorial eventually, it’s not currently finalised and at the moment exists as a place for collating thought and collecting feedback

Setting up the FileSystems is a trivial task.  First, you can see that when we’ve created a storage pool ‘datastore’ it created a filesystem for us (also called datastore) that can act as a container for child file systems.  I’m going to go ahead and create a place to store my media and downloads now

As you may have been aware from my previous blog posts, I've been trying to make my life digital, that means any papers I get, I scan and file on a FileServer (with remote backups, etc, etc).

My scanner at home has a document feeder on it. The problem is that it doesn't do duplex, only a set of sides. So far, I can scan one side of the document, flip the paper of, then scan the back pages. This will result two PDF's with two sets of pages ``` Set A: 1,3,5,7 SET B: 8,6,4,2 ````

Is your Apple Mac feeling slow?

(this is a joke)

It’s a new year and time to start getting new years resolutions into action. I’ve moved into my new area in the study so I’ve started setting it up how I like.

The first step is to get my router set up. The router I’m using is a little ‘fit-pc’ box with two ethernet cables. As you can see, it’s pretty tiny but doesn’t pack much in terms of power.

More blogging to come. I saw a movie last night with Rebecca and one of her friends Kat. It was pretty good, we got to see Mark Zuckerberg's portrayal in The Social Network

It has made me realise a few things though. I mean, this guy is using open source tools to create some amazing things. I don't code half as much as I'd like to any more.. this is going to change. I have never used emacs before.. This is going to change. I need a new computer, that's pretty much it for now

In my previous post I mentioned how I didn't back up or migrate any of my data before we stopped paying the hosting company, so it's all lost.

This has me thinking how much of a shame it would be if I build a wealth of information or a blog that I can use to identify myself and my work, only to have it go if the machine it's hosted on dies. That would be bad, so this post is a short tutorial on how perform nightly backups of your website without you having to lift a finger.

Hello everyone. Ok, so this is a brand new blog. What happened to all my old content? I'd like to say I just wanted to start fresh, but truth is, I was lazy and didn't back up any data from my hosting company before my term ended with them.. so I lost my database and content. I'll re-post the good stuff, hopefully more in-depth on this site though. Stay tuned.

This blog is going to be a lot more personal then my last. It's going to have technical and personal posts where I'll post about anything and everything that takes my fancy. Good times 🙂