WordPress to static

Finally I also moved my homepage to a static one. First started ambitious with Gatsby but a bit shocked that it seems that I have to redesign my template, I went with the most simple way:

  • copied WordPress site to local -> https://localwp.com/
  • installed the plugin Simply Static by Patrick Posner
  • exported the site to static files (relative URL)
  • uploaded to AWS S3
  • added AWS CloudFront for ssl / https
  • added a CloudFront function for new URL schema (with the static pages it’s subdirectory/index.html instead of subdirectory/), Example: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/example-function-add-index.html

And finished with some minor bugs but hopefully a better experience for everybody – including preserving the old URLs for web search.

Posted in IT

Netgear Smart Switch GS716T v3: Firmware update to V6.3.1.39

Trusty old switch still supported with this July update, Release notes and download link.

How to get the Image to the switch? Go to Maintenance > Download > HTTP File Download and select the image file. Click Apply in the lower right corner and wait until the process finished.

Note: I had to shrink the image filename a bit as the switch didn’t like the length.

Then you can choose to reboot from that image next time

Don’t forget to click on Apply in the lower right corner.

The final step is to reboot the switch which activates the new firmware image.

Big Sur – fix for issue with second display

After updating to macOS® Big Sur I had the issue that when attaching the MacBook Pro® to a docking station, the application windows moved to undesired positions.

The fix which helped me is to create a colour profile for the displays.

Go to System Preferences > Display > Colour and add a new colour profile by clicking through the Calibrate… dialogue.

After new profiles were added for all the displays my issues were fixed.


Tested with macOS® Big Sur 11.0 / 11.1

macOS® / MacBook Pro® is a trademark of Apple Inc.

Mamiya M645 1000S & Bergger Pancro 400

After cleaning the camera, renewing the light seals of the film compartment and checking basic functionality I can finally fill up a roll of 120 black&white film into this Mamiya M645 1000S, quite a step up in medium format camera compared to the Agfa Billy Record. With 6×4.5 it will be 15 pictures, and already three test shots have been done to see if the lens alignment is sharp at the distances selected.

Let’s see how the result will look like. Used the 35mm version of the Bergger Pancro 400 together with the Minolta X-700 before so it will be quite interesting to see how the grain will look on three times larger images. Hopefully soon I can show the results.

Also I’m very interested in how my digitising process will hold up compared to 35mm film. Currently I do it with the Fujifilm X-T2 and the 7artisans 60mm Macro lens which works quite well.

Raid-10 on an Icy Box IB-3740-C31 – 4-bay USB-C case

Just got an Icy Box IB-3740-C31. Packaging was thankfully good as it was not delivered in a brown box around it.

Adding 4 SSD drives was a bit of a fiddling, but once the two screws per drive were attached and the sliders were in the case it was fine.

Starting up, all 4 SSDs were directly detected by my MacBook Pro.

Noise level is not super silent but ok, maybe I switch the fan later on.

Setting up a RAID-10 with Apple Disk Utility

In Disk Utility, go to File > RAID Assistant…

Who would know that once you have 4 drives you can’t just create a RAID5 with the disk utility? The only obvious options are RAID0, RAID1 and JBOD.

But there is a trick here if you want to use the RAID Assistant. Just create a RAID-10 out of 2 RAID-1 combined by a RAID-0.

First, we create a RAID-1 with 2 disks:

For my use case I used the largest block size and named the first RAID-1 raid1_1.

Then I did the same steps again with the second two disks, named it raid1_2.

Now as you have 2 RAID-1s, it makes sense to combine them to a RAID-0 – set the same block size and works fine. Named it raid10 (finally).

Benefit

  • If you have 4 drives you get 50% of the capacity (e.g. 4x 1TB -> 2TB to use)
  • up to 2 drives can fail here and it would still work (1 on each RAID-1)
  • better fault tolerance than a JBOD
  • fast(mirrored & striped) compared to JBOD, single drives
  • a lot cheaper than a NAS
  • faster than a NAS with up to 10 Gbit/s via USB3.1 (Gen2, UASP)

Drawback

  • a software raid on top of another software raid, not sure yet if you can move it between macs?
  • RAID-5 would give you 75% of the capacity (e.g. 4x 1TB -> 3TB to use), but only one drive can fail there
  • Only attached to one computer compared to a NAS – but possibly more speed

Conclusion

The Icy Box seems to work fine so far, and it feels quite fast (no scientific test/speed runs here) to copy large files around – it’s definitely a lot faster and responsive than the NAS in the same room. Looking forward to video editing on it.

Would have loved to go with a RAID-5 but for now I can always use the provided system tools.

Raspberry Pi: Time sync

When I tried to do a regular update on a Raspberry Pi 1 with sudo apt-get update, I got this error message:

E: Release file for http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/dists/buster/InRelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 1d 14h 44min 54s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.

Checking the date I saw that the Pi was not in sync with time. Adjusting the date is easy:

$ sudo timedatectl set-time "2019-11-09 21:25:00"

and now it worked again. Thanks Patric Fromaget / raspberrytips.com for the solution I found with a quick web search.

MacBook Pro: full resolution

A fresh MacBook Pro 15″ 2017 with MacOS High Sierra. However, the cool resolution of 2880*1800 is not available to the mere user, even with usage of holding the option key.

Found the tool RDM which enables all those resolutions for me to choose.

Now on to testing responsive design with 5k resolution.

SWE2018

Back from the tour around south west Europe. We travelled around 5000 kilometres in May with the Jeep and everything went fine. Basically we did a tour around the Iberian Peninsula. Besides work, the goal was La Manga to visit a wedding of dear friends. Many different experiences, kind people and interesting weather – at first quite chilly and then still mild temperatures in the south was unexpected.

We stayed in different kinds of places, hotels, AirBnBs and we also did camping with the roof tent of the jeep.

Just to provide a short wrap-up of the locations we stayed:

From Germany we went via a small piece of Austria at Bodensee to Switzerland where we could travel fast and good to France where we stayed in Oyonnax just around the corner of Geneva. Next stop was on the other side of France at the Atlantic Ocean: Bordeaux. We stayed there for two nights to get a bit of an experience of this lovely city. Via Biarritz we moved on to northern Spain and stayed on a Camping ground near Santander where we also visited the Palacio de La Magdalena. Next stop was Santiage de Compostela, the place where pilgrims swarm to on the path of self-reflection. Then it was time to hit nature in northern Portugal where we stayed a couple of nights in a hut.

In Porto we checked out the vegan scene and walked around that very nice city. Via the highways 1 and 2 we went south to the Algarve and the southwest point of Europe near Sagres. We stayed at two locations at Algarve before we moved on to Cadiz, the oldest city of western Europe. In Almeria we had a short stop before staying at the wedding area of Cartagena and La Manga for a week including a short visit to Murcia.

Then it was time to drive back home via Barcelona, where we stayed for a night and did the walking tour. Andorra on the way to Carcassonne was quite interesting, however the building style did not meet our favours. In Carcassonne we discovered La Cite, an UNESCO world heritage site. On the way to a night in Aix-Les-Bains we checked out a single vegan eatery in the middle of meat world of southern France. From there it was straight back through Switzterland with a big traffic jam in Zurich and we were back home in Munich.