Day 90 of #100daysofhomelab (nearly finished!) and I have done a couple of bits and pieces:
Day 89 of 100daysofhomelab
Day 89 of #100daysofhomelab and it’s mostly been updates and monitoring.
Not much else going on… Hopefully back to normal tomorrow…
iPhone next wish list
Back in March, I posted about what I wanted to see in the next iPhone. Well, on Wednesday 7th September, Apple announced the iPhone 14, 14 Max, 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max (along with new Apple Watches, but that’s out of scope for this post). So, based on my wishlist, what did the Apple account release? Were they listening to me? Spoiler alert. Nope…
- USB C - Nope… not going to happen this time around.
- External reporting of video: Also looks like it’s a No… It does seem that Filmic has the option of outputting a clean HDMI feed for video, but it also says it’s not good enough (due to compression) for recording externally…
- Better Camera: Yup. Looks like the main camera is now 48MP.
- Recording from external Cameras: Nope. this would have depended on the USB C input…
- Center Stage for Front Camera… This is a partial one… So, I wanted to use the iPhone as a camera for the Apple TV. That does not seem to be an option (yet) but there is the option of using your iPhone as a camera for your Mac. It uses the rear cameras of your phone and supports Center Stage too. I have tried this, and it works, but I don’t have a proper mount for the phone. Hopefully, they get released soon enough.
So, overall, I got 1 of my wishlist mostly fulfilled (i would have liked to see the 48MP shooters on the other 2 cameras as well…) and a partial… We see what happens next year…
Moving back to Edge
After moving mostly full-time to use a Mac as my main machine (I still RDP/SSH into GodBoxV3 and other Windows or Linux boxes for some tasks), I originally started using Safari, since, well, that’s what I (have to) use on my iPhone. It also has the nice feature of Apple Pay built-in… But after a while, I started having issues with it, so I moved to Firefox.
Firefox worked perfectly for a long time, and only 1 or 2 pages would not load because it wasn’t Chrome/Edge or Safari. It was about as fast as Edge and Safari on my machine, and all worked well…
But in recent days, Firefox won’t load Google search, Gmail or some other Google sites. I have no idea why! If I load Safari or Edge on the same machine, it works without issue! So, given that I use edge on Windows boxes, I have moved back to using it on my Mac. I know it’s probably not a popular option, but it’s based on Chrome, it has less Google in it and works just as I need it to. If you start fiddling with the settings for turning the stupid home page off, things work better. So far, so good!
day 88 of 100daysofhomelab
This is an extension to my main #100daysofhomelab tweet for day 88.
tweaks to Sophos XG to include SD-WAN Stuff. I have an LTE modem (hooked up via Ethernet, a NetGear LB2120)
I seem to have lost the connection between my IoT network and the rest of the network… I need to figure out the full details of how Sophos XG does routing… More doc reading is required…
Still trying to get OpenStick working on my new 4G dongles…
testing image uploads
Using Typora for writing stuff, it has a feature for uploading images automatically… Let’s see if this works.
that seemed to have worked… let’s try to customize the domain?
yea. that seems to have worked! [Update… ignore the domain up there… it should be miniblog.tiernanotoole.ie… ]
I'm Back
Trying out a new editor called Typora. It is meant to be one of these minimal editors, and so far, it is. But it’s also a little confusing… Mind you, I do not read docs, so that’s probably why I’m confused…
On other notes, still working on the #100daysofhomelab on Twitter. Still running my own ASN, swapped my firewall to a Sophos XG home edition, and I’ve been playing with some other things too. For more random updates, check out my Twitter feed @tiernano. Hopefully, I will start posting stuff here more, eventually…
day 87 (attempt 3) of 100daysofhomelab
day 87 (attempt 3) of #100daysofhomelab:
- vertigo is not too bad today…
- I managed to install Sophos and swapped it over for the main network.
- going to swap the IOT net and Media Nets over next.
Going back in time
I just finished watching the LTT Video Intel Predicted the future and had to laugh at some of the things in it. But it also brought me back in time, thinking of things we have now that we didn’t have back then…
- 1995 I got my first PC. It ran Windows 3.1, had a 486 33Mhz proc, 8MB of RAM and 200MB HDD.
- around 1996 I got an upgrade to a 133Mhz Pentium. it has 16Mb of RAM, I can’t remember the HDD space, but it had a 56K Modem! That’s the year I got online first!
- around the early 2000s, we got Cable Modem into the house… BROADBAND! 150Kb/s down! After a couple of iterations, we got 300Kbs, 500Kbs, etc… I’m now on 1Gb/s! on that same Cable provider (changed names a few times!). Being online all the time made a big difference. No more dial-up!
- Around the Windows XP days, we got Digital TV installed with half a billion (ish) channels. I got my hands on a couple of TV tuners, built some sort of a machine and turned it into a Windows XP Media Center. We could watch and pause live TV, record multiple channels, etc. All these are things a standard Sky or Virgin TV box can do now, but back then, Woah! I remember family and friends getting very confused that we could rewind live TV. “How the hell did you do that?!”
- I got my first “Smart Phone” around early 2001-2002ish. I remember a couple of years later, I was an intern at Microsoft, and walking around the shop. The phone beeped, and I checked it. An Email, from none other than Bill Gates! It wasn’t direct to me, it was company-wide, but still… Walking around a shop, probably around 2003 or 2004, reading email on a phone. Now, that’s normal… Back then? Not so much.
- That same phone had a “massive” 64MB SD Card. I would fill it will (legal…) MP3s and listen to it on the bus to work. 2001-2002, give or take. Just after the iPod came out. But this was different. This was ON A PHONE!
well, that made me feel old… I mean, back in 2011, I wrote a post “5+ screens and a cloud”. That was nearly 11 years ago… and Did I get anything wrong?! Maybe the Xbox Kinect… got replaced with Alexa or Google Assistant… I miss Cortana…
Its been a while
So, It’s been a few months and I have been busy with random stuff… I started on the #100daysofhomelab challenge and so far have broken a lot of different things. I tweet about it every day so far on Twitter.
I am in the process of building the CloudShed, by converting my old sheds into something more secure, weatherproof and connected to the servers of my home lab.
I got IPv6 working in the house with my own ASN.
I also got a second internet connection in! 2Gb/200Mb/s Fiber to the Home. Very sweet and fast!
So, I’ve been busy…
I really should get back to writing stuff here…