Raspberry π

You could plug the sd card into a desktop an chroot into it to check the settings.

ssh -vvv gives more info too

I listened to a podcast yesterday and it reminded me of this comment.

It was Darknet Diaries ep. 74 and it was about professional poker players having their hotel rooms broken into and laptops hacked.

Crazy the lengths people go to

Cheers. It doesn't seem to be connecting at all now. Will probably just try and dig out a cable as I'm not sure if it's hardware or software.

Eventual upshot of this seemed to be a corrupted sd card. Fortunately I had a backup so just restored that. Unfortunately the cron job that I had set up to do the backups never actually worked so my only backup was from 4 months ago.

Quite like the look of this: keyboard with built-in 4GB Raspberry Pi.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-400?variant=32280738005075

That does look nice. My daughter has used a Pi for years now (using the educational Kano OS) and the faff of having a separate keyboard/etc is a bit of a faff.

Annoyingly Kano are discontinuing their Linux+RPi platform and moving to Windows and different hardware platform. Also the existing Kano OS can't update itself to run on a Pi 4 (but it can be done manually). I've got a Pi 4 on my desk that I should be sorting out for her but I could get one of these instead...

Came to post that.

Such a good idea for kids in particular.

I use the Pi keyboard most of the time for my work laptop, and I've got to say it's much better laid out than I originally realised. Depends on use but it's nice having F-keys on a compact board. The number function is still a bit too much of a faff to use over the top number keys.

Was coming to post that.

Bit of a shame there's no trackpad for an all-in-one solution.

Any recommendations for touch screen overlays? I've got an old 15.4" laptop panel that I was planning to incorporate into a photo frame for a neat pi-driven display but adding a touchscreen element to it would be useful.

Also, entirely unrelated, any recommendations for a PI UPS? Something that does a neat shutdown after extended power outage and reboots when it comes back on would be ideal. Or just a suggestion for battery pack with pass-through power beefy enough to power a Pi4 could do the job.

I bought a 400 as have no desktop / laptop and am happy to use open office/ gimp etc instead of the fancy versions.

It has sparked me to dig out old pi b to put to use. Obvious choice is Pihole for which I have some questions to follow, my google searches & results are often too ambiguous to help answer even some basic stuff.

I've got a zero & noir camera on way, plus a DAC zero hat, plus a zero & an amp zero hat so I can play with video & audio stuff for different purposes too.

Pihole users:

Do you keep your router & pi on 24/7? We switch off habitually at night / empty house. This seems ok for routers but could be bad for the pi unless we all know how to access it and shutdown safely, which isn't going to happen it'll just be mains plug switch off by others.

My partner is wfh, on chromebook iirc. How likely is it I'll screw up some of her work applications? I'm thinking unlikely unless they are on an ad service?

Any general learning tips?

Fwiw: I've set it up so it's just my phone going via the pihole for now. This is cos 1) I can't access the hub settings (virgin, printed on box "settings password" doesn't work) and 2) I don't want to stuff up all the other devices access just yet. I've a feeling the dhcp & dns settings mean it'll break temporarily me tomorrow once I power stuff back up.

I'm not a pihole user (I use NextDNS which is like a cloud version of pihole).

I'd say turning your router off at night is a bit unusual, nowadays there tends to be plenty of stuff that uses it day and night but whatever floats your boat. If you're worried about the pi then get a UPS for it, the decent ones come with software to shut the pi down when they detect a power outage or you can set it up to turn off when it detects the network has gone off.

Whether you screw stuff up will mainly depend on how aggressive you are with the blocking.

You can set the pinole Pi to run in read only mode so that it is totally safe to turn off without shitting down.

But, you'll have to remember to turn off read only mode when you do any updates or change whitelists etc.

Personally, I just used nextdns.io instead.

Do you keep your router & pi on 24/7?

The only people I know who don't are you and an 88 year old lady in the Austrian Alps who we sometimes stay with who turns her router off at 7pm "to save you from the air waves and help you sleep better".

Thanks all. ^ ^^ & ^^^

I've always turned stuff off, not just router. Seems daft to leave stuff on or on standby when everyone is either asleep or out, except fridge obvs.

I'm not against leaving router on 24/7 as it might make the noir camera projects more useful.

If my sleep suffers I'll be chucking my tin foil hat at you in a rage @Stonehedge ;)

Y u don't faraday bed?

I've always turned stuff off, not just router. Seems daft to leave stuff on or on standby when everyone is either asleep or out, except fridge obvs.

Routers/modems recalibrate based on line conditions. By turning it off and on again you're forcing it to recalibrate from base settings rather than just adjusting in response to change.

If my sleep suffers I'll be chucking my tin foil hat at you in a rage @Stonehedge ;)

Hey, my passive aggressive snipes dont come with a health guarantee!

In all seriousness, your position is sensible if none of your kit uses the internet at night. Imagine how much energy could be saved...

Routers/modems recalibrate based on line conditions. By turning it off and on again you're forcing it to recalibrate from base settings rather than just adjusting in response to change

Very good point. Although I'm not sure how long it needs to be off to trigger a new line stabilisation routine. I'd hope longer than overnight...

was on plusnet forums yesterday chasing them to push us a router firmware upgrade to fix some issues with my mums line that are requiring multiple daily reboots and the engineer said on the thread it's really bad to be constantly resetting your router even if it's just off then on again.

Imagine how much energy could be saved...

Maybe as much as 25p a month. Enough to boil an extra cup of tea every three days.

Does anyone monitor their BB speed regularly though?

(I set up MRTG to monitor mine a few months ago...)

1 Attachment

I have a Cronjob that runs a speedtest a few times a day and logs it

1 Attachment

Collection only, or will you post?