Category: News

Raspberry Pi 4 with Pihole, Pivpn and PADD

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Another project during the isolation at home. I got a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM. Nice little thing. Not as powerful as other SBCs out there but Raspberries have a huge community to support and myriad of projects. On the plus side it was the quickest to have in my hands.

I used Tiendatec to buy it online. Nice very fast shop. On top of that I got a 3.5 inch TFT screen. The brand is Wavesharethe brand is not important any Raspbian supported screen will work.

So what I wanted to do is to have another Pi-Hole DNS/Ad blocker server and to show statistics in the screen using PADD

How to get started? Grab imager from Raspberry Site or use the good old Etcher and copy Raspbian Lite in a good quality micro SD card. 16Gb Should be enough.

After you finish with the installation and you have done the initial configuration you can install Pihole (https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/basic-install/) after that I installed Unbound DNS server which I strongly recommend.https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/

It is quite simple so far. I also installed PiVPN (I prefer watchguard over openvpn) which also was very straight forward. At that point I had a fully capable DNS/Ad Blocking server that is accessible from anywhere through VPN. I have a vpn client on my mobile for ad free browsing.

After that I installed the TFT screen following the instructions here nothing complicated. I had small terminal up and running. Finally I installed PADD following their wiki and although everything should go fine I had trouble with displaying correctly the info. I tested different fonts but with no luck. In the end after reading a post somewhere I edited the PADD script and removed 1-2 “=” characters that fixed the issue. Apparently it was adding a line or two and breaking the display. So all good in the end.

And here it is the final outcome. (Yes I know I need a nice box). Also I have to say that Raspberry Pi 4 gets really hot!

 

Vintage DIY Internet Radio/MP3 player

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During the lock down  I was looking for a project. I run onto this http://www.celia-perah.com/r-series.html. I liked the design very much. Simple yet elegant.

The best part is that it comes as DIY kit! What more to ask. So ordered one. (The only bad part is that the cost of transportation and taxes was equal to the price of the kit). It came very fast. The quality of the kits and components is very high.

I decided to paint it so it looks more rustic. It took me two afternoons to finish. Mainly waiting for glue and paint to dry. So enjoy my photos.

Blockchain as answer to democracy.

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Blockchain as an answer to luck of direct democracy.
Voting or e-voting is struggling because of trust or the luck of it. Blockchain could solve this since it is all about trust and transparency.
Giving a tool to people able to directly affecting the decisions is the epitome of democracy. Direct democracy. Scary and exciting at the same time.
Is it possible? It is.
Is it worthy? Definitely if you believe in democracy.
We have all the ingredients to achieve direct democracy through blockchain we need to put the together.
Who is against? All who do not want transparency, who do not want people to have such a power and all buerocratic state of minds

Web server on OrangePi Zero running Armbian

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Part I

The hardware

So I have a new side project. To build a web server to run WordPress on it. What’s the excitement on that you may ask. Well I wanted to build a server with the lowest consumption possible, tiny footprint (both physical and from OS point of view). I started searching for a small developer board. I already own a RaspberryPI but I wanted something else. There are numerous of boards out there. Do not get me wrong RaspberryPI is the pioneer and they opened the road but I wanted something else and why not cheaper. I stumbled upon OrangePi. A lot of boards there. I chose OrangePi Zero board. A tiny little thing that is an open-source single-board computer. It can run Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian. It uses the AllWinner H2 SoC, and has 512MB DDR3 SDRAM. It is only 48 mm × 46mm. It is impressive that this little thing has more power and more memory than my first web server in the ’90s ( a Pentium MMX 166 if I remember correctly, with 256 MB RAM). The company provides a very good support through their website. There are a lot of resources there and a good community. So I got the board from AliExpress for around 8$. Not bad at all. The OrangePi Zero so far ticks most of my boxes. Cheap, small, low power consumption and open source. Functionalities can be added by extension board. I bought the NAS extension board which adds an mSATA and a SATA connection among other things. The goal is to boot and run the system from an mSATA disk. Next stop what to run on it.

The OS

OrangePI offers a lot of distributions to choose from and download.Each of them are customised to the board. This includes Android, Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian and others. I tried couple of them but since I heard of Armbian project I wanted to try it. Armbian is “Lightweight Debian Jessie or Ubuntu Xenial based Linux distribution”. The project supports a lot of boards not only OrangePI obviously. There are detailed instructions to burn the image on an SD. It is pretty straight forward. It took maybe thirty minutes to install to SD, boot up and config my OrangePI. Its name is portokali which means orange in Greek. You can check some statistics here.

Part II

Fine Tune

Coming soon

Installing the WordPress

 Coming soon

The Cult of Done Manifesto

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  • There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  • Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  • There is no editing stage.
  • Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
  • Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  • The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  • Once you’re done you can throw it away.
  • Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
  • People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  • Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  • Destruction is a variant of done.
  • If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  • Done is the engine of more.

Source

Της Δικαιοσύνης Ήλιε Νοητέ

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Της Δικαιοσύνης Ήλιε Νοητέ – Μίκης Θεοδωράκης

Στίχοι: Οδυσσέας Ελύτης
Συνθέτης: Μίκης Θεοδωράκης

Της δικαιοσύνης ήλιε νοητέ
και μυρσίνη εσύ δοξαστική
μη παρακαλώ σας μη (x3)
λησμονάτε τη χώρα μου

Αετόμορφα τα έχει τα ψηλά βουνά
στα ηφαίστεια κλήματα σειρά
και τα σπίτια πιο λευκά (x3)
στου γλαυκού το γειτόνεμα

Τα πικρά μου χέρια με τον Κεραυνό
τα γυρίζω πίσω απ’ τον καιρό
τους παλιούς μου φίλους καλώ (x3)
με φοβέρες και μ’ αίματα

Της δικαιοσύνης ήλιε νοητέ
και μυρσίνη εσύ δοξαστική
μη παρακαλώ σας μη (x3)
λησμονάτε τη χώρα μου

18 Μαρτίου 2021 για να μην ξεχναμε