All blog posts by James A. Chambers — focused on technology, hardware, SBC / Microboards, programming, scripting, gaming, and others!
On December 8th NVIDIA officially released RTX support on Minecraft Bedrock Edition for Windows 10. To use this feature you need to have a resource pack installed.
Fortunately the dedicated server not only supports resource packs, but in this guide I will show you how to set it up so that resource packs are automatically downloaded to your player’s device and activated!
Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) seems to usually work pretty well for 95-97% of the computers at the environments I’ve worked in. Unfortunately for the remaining few percentage points of computers that SCCM is *not* working pretty well for when SCCM does break it does so spectacularly with style and pizzazz.
This guide will show you how to use PowerShell to remove all traces from the computer so you can perform a clean reinstall!
I recently had a need to interact with a Google Sheets spreadsheet and it turned out to be pretty easy and worked pretty well!
I wanted to write this post to share what I learned and hopefully it can help some others out there.
Official support from Canonical for the Raspberry Pi has come a long way. We can now install officially supported Ubuntu on the Pi!
This guide takes it a step further and shows you how to get Ubuntu 20.04 / 20.10 working with a SSD!
The new Raspberry Pi 4 bootloader has finally come out of beta and made it’s way into the official latest Raspbian! This guide will show how to configure it.
We’ve now received over 20,000 benchmarks at https://storage.jamesachambers.com/! These are submitted by regular people from all over the world.
In celebration of that milestone as well as the launch of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 take a closer look at which device you should choose for your Raspberry Pi 4 as determined by science and measurement!
Microsoft recently added a feature called MDM coexistence into SCCM. Basically this makes SCCM shut off most of it’s functionality when a third party MDM is detected on the machine. You will see errors such as “You don’t have permission to install this software” when coexistence mode is enabled.
This post will outline a way I found to turn SCCM back on (with a caveat).
I’m really sorry to say that I was excited when I found out CenturyLink offered gigabit 1000 up 1000 down fiber to the home in the neighborhood I just moved into. Dreams of things like having enough upload speed to leave the cloud and operate jamesachambers.com independently in my own home seemed like they could finally be a reality. Dreams were quickly shattered when I realized what kind of incompetence and dishonesty I would be dealing with.
Hello everyone! It has been a crazy 2020 so far and I’m way behind on articles, pull requests, issues, etc. But even in these crazy times I do have some good news: the 1.16 Minecraft update has been released and I have updated my Minecraft setup/server management script for Raspberry Pi!
After receiving quite a few requests for a lightweight alternative to the default Ubuntu Desktop environment I have added Xubuntu Desktop to my Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS preinstalled image builds! The Xubuntu version feels much snappier and more responsive on the Pi. It also uses less overall memory freeing it up to do other things on your Pi.
All of the previous generations of Raspberry Pi contained all of their firmware on the SD card. Starting with the Raspberry Pi 4 the device actually has onboard upgradable firmware stored on an EEPROM chip separate from your storage. Updating this firmware is very important as one of the first released updates reduces power usage of the Pi by 30% which also reduces how hot it gets.
In this guide I’ll show you how to update the bootloader firmware (no, it’s not apt-get upgrade, it’s a new utility called rpi-eeprom!) and also show you how to make a recovery SD card if your firmware gets corrupted and needs to be reflashed.
This is a unofficial distribution of Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 for Raspberry Pi 4. It is provided with the purpose of letting us all play with the new Pi 4’s new increased RAM and other capabilities until Ubuntu’s repositories are updated with support for the newest Pi.
Once official support is released through the Ubuntu repositories this project will effectively cease to exist (until, dare I dream, the Pi 5?). The image supports KVM, has support for the Pi 4’s new 3D display driver, and can also be upgraded to a full desktop installation!
The support on Trezor was traditionally just a link to a third party service where you had to log in through the web interface and export your keys every single time. You can’t even see your balance until you do this!
Fortunately true native Ethereum support has arrived for Trezor in the beta! Not only that, but ERC20 token support was also added which has made Trezor now an extremely capable Ethereum hardware wallet. The beta wallet supports all Trezor wallet devices including Trezor One.
In this article we will examine these new features in depth and give a final verdict!
The Brave web browser is a really interesting experiment. For users it offers an out of the box privacy setup that blocks advertising/tracking. The browser’s rendering engine is Chromium based so website loading/rendering/compatibility performance is comparable to Chrome.
In this article we will take a closer look at Brave and the BAT cryptocurrency and discuss.
Ethernet over powerline tech has existed for a while but traditionally has frankly sucked. It was slow and had issues with reliability.
After decades of improving standards and technology this has changed dramatically and now makes a very cheap and attractive alternative to wireless in many situations. The latest iteration gives a 1200 Mbps connection right over your existing power lines in your house and is designed to work in “noisy” power environments without interruption.
