Computers

I’m running a TrueNAS Server using the Asus ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING motherboard. Because of all the peripherals like a LSI® SAS 9300-8i PCI Express card for my SAS disks, I didn’t have enough PCI lanes to run a “normal” graphics card. So I got an old Nvidia Quadro NVS 290 NVS290 PCIe x1 card that only uses one PCI lane and fits into a X1 PCI slot. But I would rather run the box without a graphics card and boot headless. But all the information on the internet told me that the Asus ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING Motherboard could not run headless. After several tries, nothing worked. But I finally found a solution ...

After installing my new pfSense firewall, I wanted to expose some of my servers to the internet. First, I had HTTP and HTTPS made available for this blog by using NAT. But that’s not very secure, so I found HAProxy, a module inside pfSense. It’s a reverse proxy, among other things. I configured it to use ACME, another module inside pfSense, to acquire SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, handle all SSL traffic and then send the requests to my internal servers. The internal servers no longer need to handle SSL traffic, so they talk to the HAProxy with unencrypted port 80 traffic. Thus separating the outside WAN from my servers on the inside LAN. I found an excellent guide on how to set this up. ...

When building my AMD Hackintosh, I decided to prepare for a future upgrade of my CPU. I based my current build on an AMD Ryzen 3900X, but I plan to update it to a Ryzen 3950X. So I decided to install a CPU water cooling system. ...

Here is an easy way to increase the speed of loading web pages by optimizing the DNS you are using when surfing the web. Everything you do on the internet will be affected by the speed of the Domain Name System you are using. So let’s try to make it faster. ...

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor – Made for photographers As a photographer you need to be able to really get the most out of your images, you need a color accurate monitor. You usually have to pay a lot of money to get a good monitor that’s factory calibrated and uses a IPS panel, a panel type that is better at showing correct colors than the more common (and cheaper) TN panels. But there are some reasonably priced monitors. One of them is the Asus PA246Q ProArt monitor. It’s factory calibrated and even ships with a printout of the calibration result from the factory. You can set the monitor to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998 color space directly on the front controls of the monitor. It’s also has fairly high resolution with 24" size 1920x1200 pixels. ...

[caption id=“attachment_978” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] Jamison Judd[/caption] I found this great shell script to test your MySQL server. You need to have your MySQL server up and running a while before running the test to get valid data. With all the possible setting variations this is can be a handy tool. Get MySQL Performance tuner here.

I used to be fascinated by the idea of a voice interface to the computer. That was until I actually used one. It feels awkward and it’s slow. Yeah it has some use in specific applications, but for general use, I think it will never be. Back in 1983 Hewlett Packard released a computer called HP 150 that used touch-screens. My boss thought that I needed to go though their authorization courses to learn about this new revolutionary computer they where going to sell. So I was excited (this was before the mac). It was kind of fun to see that the attendees was fascinated and used the touch-sceen for the first fifteen minutes, but it was just to slow and uncomfortable to use, so everyone, including the teacher, started to use the keyboard. So I just wrote that computer off. And I’ve been skeptical about touch-screen input ever since. Until I saw this and was blown away! If a tablet computer had something like this I’d sell my body to science to get one. And science would probably reject the body and demand a refund. But then it’s to late, I’m dead and I have a tablet computer! Muhahahaa!

So I finally got my 100 mbit internet connection. Yay! But after testing the speed through my WRT54G router/firewall, I could not get higher speeds than around 20 mbit/sec. After assembling an old 300 mhz pc with three Ethernet cards and the SmoothWall linux firewall I get around 70 mbits/sec. I will probably try to overclock the poor old pc to 400 mhz tomorrow. To try everything out, I downloaded the XCode 2.2.1 development image from Apple. It’s around 800 mb and it took just a couple of minutes. I could get used to this.

So I’ve been busy for the last five days setting up my Asterisk PBX. I’ve connected two different VoIP lines to it. I have the X-Lite VoIP softphones installed on all the computers and an FSX device so I can use my regular wireless phone. And it’s enjoyable learning something new. First, my wife thought that I was crazy, “Who needs a telephone switchboard at home!?” But I think she’s coming around. Now she can sit at her computer using a headset and talk to her friends without holding the line. And it’s easy to transfer calls between all the phones in the apartment. It’s also nice to have a digital answering machine and get the messages mailed to you. The added benefit of multiple lines on the same phone number and that it doesn’t cost anything to dial a phone in Sweden is a bonus. ...

IBM is getting to be an even cooler company. By embracing Open Source IBM changed my view of the company, and now they have given free access to 500 patents. Rock on! This is a statement from one of the biggest patent holders in the world. Software patents is bad for you.