UPS Backup Battery for Raspberry Pi? PiSugar Solderless Setup

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 4 Comments /
PiSugar - Top with LED Battery Indicator

I’ve had the original 900 mAh PiSugar UPS backup battery for the Raspberry Pi Zero for several years now and it’s an absolute game changer. With the wireless capabilities of the Raspberry Pi you have a completely portable and networked computer available that is extremely tiny. It’s much more capable than hooking it up to a power brick and is actually designed for the Raspberry Pi!

In this article I’ll cover how to set up a full UPS battery backup with several hours of available power using the the PiSugar as well as the PiSugar 2 and some of the shortcomings in the first version the 2nd revision fixes. Let’s get started!

A Good Alternative to Canned Air / Duster for Electronics

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / Leave a Comment / ,
OPOLAR Air Duster for Electronics / Computers

As a computer technician / technology enthusiast I have a lot of electronics that need to be kept clean. I used to use canned air / duster for this task but it’s pretty nasty stuff to work with. It is extremely cold, you don’t want to contact any coolant with any components, the bottles run out at the most inconvenient times and generate a bunch of waste, etc.

For this article I just wanted to share a tool I found a couple of years ago that made my life a lot easier. It is also cheaper over time and much more environmentally friendly!

Modding IT Racks for Sound / Noise Reduction w/ Acoustic Foam

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TUFFIOM 15U Full Side View w/ Hanging Foam

Extremely powerful hardware tends to be very loud. Enterprise servers, networking equipment, cryptocurrency miners are three major offenders. This type of equipment tends to have very small fans that rotate extremely fast and emit a high pitched “whine”. This is fine if you are stuffing all of your equipment in a closet somewhere but for some deployments and situations this isn’t always possible

There are extremely expensive racks that have sound dampening foam and other materials preinstalled for situations like this but they are extremely expensive (thousands vs . what we will be doing which only costs hundreds). In this article I’ll show you how I modified some (relatively) cheap racks available from Amazon with acoustic foam to reduce noise from ASIC cryptocurrency miners as well as other loud equipment

Review: ApeSwap Exchange / DeFi on Binance Smart Chain

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 20 Comments /
ApeSwap

The Binance Smart Chain can be a dangerous place. It offers a reprieve from Ethereum’s fees with transactions costing mere pennies but despite it’s centralized nature it has struggled with new platforms getting hacked, rugpulling, scamming, and many other pitfalls.

In order to continue the journey of learning everything I can about cryptocurrency I have decided to wade through the filth and blog about my journey and which services ended up being legit and having value and which ones were a total sham. Today let’s talk about ApeSwap!

Where to get the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS image for Pi 4 / 400

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 6 Comments / , ,
Pi 64bit OS - Forum Post

Last year a official 64 bit version of Raspberry Pi OS was released. There have been 3 versions of the image released with the latest one just having came out April 9th 2021.

It can be a little tricky to find and I’ve been asked in the comments here before on the site where to find it so I figured it was time to write a quick guide!

Life as a “Ledger” Wallet Data Breach Victim

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / Leave a Comment /
Ledger Security Notice #3 - December 23rd 2020

I have had two Ledger Nano X cryptocurrency wallets for a couple of years now. One of them died during a firmware update which they offered to replace but I didn’t print the label and send it in time. That’s on me and if that was the only problem I had I could have lived with it.

Unfortunately Ledger collects a lot of personal information about you such as your email address, phone number and even your home address! They failed to protect this information and got hacked and all of this data was exposed. Funds were not stolen because of the way hardware wallets work (your private key never leaves the device and is generated by the end user) but apparently everything else except the money was (all your personal data, how much you have, etc)!

I was a confirmed “victim” of this hack and I wanted to write this article to explain what (if anything) has happened since. Spoiler alert: plenty!

Backing Up Valheim Local Worlds and Characters Guide

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Valheim Local Character Backup

Valheim is still in early access which means there are definitely still bugs that can cause big headaches. One of these is called the “world eater” bug where your world will be reset to pristine condition (as if you’d never built anything). This can happen both locally and on dedicated servers.

It’s very easy to take a backup of your worlds and characters. This guide will show you how to do that so you can protect yourself from having to repeat previous progress (or all progress) due to bugs!

Backup Valheim Dedicated Server – World Folder Paths / Guide

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Valheim Dedicated Server Worlds Folder

Backups during Valheim’s early access period are extremely important. My dedicated server has already experienced the dreaded “world eater” bug. One time was during the very first update and the second time was during a routine restart. What happens is the world will be exactly the same (generated from the same seed) but any modifications/buildings/anything you did will be gone.

This guide will show you where to find the files and how to back them up/restore them!

Raspberry Pi 400 Overclocking / NVMe SSD Setup Guide

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 8 Comments / , ,
Raspberry Pi 400 Setup w/ NVMe SSD

The Raspberry Pi 400 is the first offering from the Raspberry Pi lineup that is meant to approach desktop level performance. The official raspberrypi.org site lists the Pi 400 kit as the “Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit“. It comes in the very interesting form factor of a keyboard with all the ports right in the back!

Although the performance on stock clock speeds and with a SD card was really great, especially for a Raspberry Pi, I would not call it desktop class performance. Fortunately we *can* make it desktop class performance with a few tweaks! This guide will show how to overclock the Pi 400 as well as set it up with a NVMe SSD to get the maximum possible performance we can out of it!

Raspberry Pi: Reclaim ~1% CPU Usage when SSD/USB Booting

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 4 Comments / , ,
SSD Ubuntu 'Top' - Fixed

Native support for USB mass storage device booting has made it’s way to all of the Raspberry Pi 4’s firmware release channels! With that exciting development an old issue from the Pi 3 and earlier USB booting days has manifested itself once again in the form of a constant 1-2% CPU draw even with nothing running.

This guide will show you an easy config.txt parameter to eliminate this problem and optimize your mass storage boot setups!

Fixing Valheim Dedicated Server Lag – Modify Send/Receive Limits

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 12 Comments / ,
My Valheim Dedicated Server Castle

Valheim is a really fun game where you are basically a Viking in purgatory trying to get to Valhalla that recently entered early access. It honestly works pretty well (I would say especially compared to recently ‘AAA’ titles like Cyberpunk). There are definitely still some issues though and a very common one is lag on a dedicated server.

This guide will show some methods you can use to help reduce lag on your Valheim dedicated server!

Minecraft Bedrock Dedicated Server Resource Pack / RTX Guide

Published: / Last Modified: August 31, 2021 / 24 Comments / ,
Minecraft Bedrock with Resource Pack / RTX

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!

Remove All Traces of Microsoft SCCM w/ PowerShell (By Force)

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SCCM Problem

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!