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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 installing the excellent Atom Editor with Platformio-ide, the main window inside the editor would hang on my new Mac. I uninstalled the program and deleted the .atom directory and tried to reinstall, the application would freeze the main window, and I had to force-quit the program. After a lot of experiments, I finally found a way to fix the problem. (Having a problem with the Atom editor asking to restart over and over? Jump over here) ...

After finally building my first Hackintosh, I decided that the AMD Ryzen™ 3900X processor would be perfect, although Apple never made a Machintosh machine with an AMD processor. I used the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite motherboard because it has everything I need for my build. But I decided to upgrade my working machine with a Bluetooth/Wifi PCI-E card to be able to use the SideCar function in macOS. Being able to connect Bluetooth equipment is also lovely. After Googling around, I found a card that filled all my needs. It’s the Fenvi FV-T919, a Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11 a/b/g/n/AC compatible Wifi-card that uses ICs that are supported in macOS directly, so no patching needed. But after installing the card, there was a problem when trying to shut down the machine from the macOS side; the computer would shut down and immediately start up again. Fortunately, I’ve found a fix for the problem. ...

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. ...

This info is out of date! All you need is the script “update_all” MiSTer FPGA is an amazing open-source platform where they use an FPGA development board from Terasic as the base to be able to do cycle-accurate emulation of computers, arcade games, and gaming consoles. But to get everything set up isn’t very easy. My main interest is the arcade cores for being able to play my favorite old games precisely as it would be, playing on the original hardware. I’ll try to give you a rundown on how to get it to work here. ...

I’ve decided to learn how to program FPGA:s. So I got myself two Terasic boards, one Terasic DE10-Nano for testing out the excellent MiSTer FPGA hardware arcade/computer/console emulator and a simpler DE0-Nano for beginning to learn Verilog. But the software used, called Intel Quartus Prime 19.1, is truly horrible. The Windows version doesn’t work with high-resolution screens when using scaling; the text is cut off on the display. So I installed it on my Linux Ubuntu 18.04 machine instead. Now the display works, but there’s a lot of other problems, like getting the dreaded error message: “USB-Blaster unable to scan device chain”. I’ve written them down here for later reference, and maybe you have the same install problems, so this might help. ...

So my blog is finally back in business after being off the grid for many months. Things have happened in my life. A divorce, moving to a new apartment and trying to start rebuilding my life again. But now I’m back! ...

I’ve moved over from Squeezebox server to Roon as my multi-room music playback system. The new system works wonderfully, and I love it. However, there’s one thing that I’ve had a problem with, and that’s getting Apples AirPlay to work reliably with my Roon Raspberry Pi endpoints running Diet-Pi Linux. The Shairport-sync constantly crashed. After searching around the net, I found a solution to my problem. ...

PayPal has now added 2FA, so this info is no longer needed. Kept for posterity. Two-factor authentication today is a must to keep your online accounts safe. You certainly want to keep your PayPal account safe. Using SMS to add an extra authentication is a hassle and could cost you money as well. PayPal, in their infinite stupidity, has chosen not to use the regular 2FA two-factor authentication used by most of the online sites. Instead, they decided to go with Symantec/VeriSign’s design, where you need a proprietary iOS, Android app, or a dedicated hardware key. This method makes it very hard to get it to work with the worlds best password manager software, 1Password. However, with some elbow grease, there is a way of getting it to work. Here’s how. ...