Aotearoa Daily Kōrero 8/4/2024
Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
I like doing hobby electronic stuff in my spare time (real beginner at it as well) and for some reason did a deep dive of DMM's (Digital multimeter), and now I really want to get one (even though I don't need another one atm) lol.
Digital multimeter as in testing voltage, amperage, etc? I used to have a non-contact voltage pen and I found it pretty useful for testing for live wires, mostly when drilling into a wall but also useful for other things occasionally. It was a cheap one off ali express so one day it just stopped working and I never ordered a new one.
It had a screen for the voltage but I only ever used it as a yes or no measurement. I probably wouldn't trust equipment worth a few dollars to be accurate, but I do see that ali express sells digital multimeters for not that much money.
I know nothing about hobby electronics, what sort of situations are they needed?
Yeah that's the one.
For my usecase, it's mostly been checking that Voltages and Currents align with what I expect them to be, checking components to see if they are what I think they are (e.g., Resistance of resistors, whether Diodes are faulty or not), checking whether two points are connected, checking whether signals into and out of microcontrollers are as expected etc,. Things like that off the top of my head. Though I'm probably only scratching at the surface of what they can be used for.
Doing a bit of a deep dive into some forums, it seems that paying more will get you better accuracy, but the more important thing is that the real cheap ones most likely don't come with a lot of protection, which is okay for when your looking at 5v type stuff, but if you want to look at anything to do with Mains voltage etc, comes into play.
I finally got around to setting up backups on my home server. Got borgmatic saving to a raspberry pi I have at my parents house with a big USB HDD attached. Took me weeks of chipping away at it trying to get my head its yaml config, cron jobs and SSH keys but feels good once its all working!
I've actually been thinking more and more recently around setting up a local backup (Nas?) But haven't really done much research and the more I think about it, I wonder what I have to really backup (other than my photos which are stored on an external hard drive and online).
Just before I read this, I actually saw a nice setup using a rpi5 and some SSD's. Is using a rpi a good way to go about something like this?
Yeah, it probably is - in terms of low overheads and electricity. Not great for long term, as SSDs can fail spectacularly, but if it's a staging post for cloud syncing or another device elsewhere rather than the ultimate endpoint, that's probably good.
To be fair, I'm way behind in this topic myself
Was that Jeff Geerlings video on YouTube? That was very cool! But using ssd's are not very cost effective... I'm only using a pi4 as I already had it sitting around. If I was to buy something id get one that can take hdd's natively without using USB or a random adapter from some unknown company online
Nice job! What kind of stuff are you hosting on the server?
I finally managed to get the pictrs update finished last night, so that's all sorted. Next up is the cache cleaner that will hopefully reduce the storage required (and size of backups) by a lot. If anyone likes technical details feel free to ask!
Over the weekend I also took one kid to see Kung Fu Panda 4 and took another ice skating for the first time.
Anyone get up to anything interesting?
The littlest was sick again, so not much fun was had here sadly!
Oh no! Hope they are on the mend!
BTW I currently have the instant pot cooking up this: https://thewoksoflife.com/taiwanese-beef-noodle-soup-instant-pot/
With a bunch of missing ingredients (including some I swore I had, somewhere...) so I'll see how it turns out.
Nah, just surfing the tension headaches all weekend :(
Arghh that sucks
Was KFP4 any good?
The kid enjoyed it. I thought it was OK. Nothing groundbreaking, entertaining enough, but not a whole lot in there for adults. Storyline was pretty generic really.
Plus I finished my popcorn before the movie started, so that may have tainted my experience.