Explore, Create & Enjoy

Winter Gas / Energy Use

Home Improvement Project: New Furnace! In cold months, we are saving nearly 50% on the Gas bill with a new high efficiency furnace!

See the chart for 30F months (think January), the use goes from 30 mBTU down to 15 MBTU. The only change was the new furnace. Half the gas bill, same nice warm house!

Tandy LT1400 – Power Supply Repairs

On a quest to connect to packet radio, I pull out my 1991 Tigertronics BayPac BP-1, plug it into the 1987 Tandy LT1400 laptop and Yaesu radio. The boot disk is already in the computer… Took a bit to locate the modem software. Flip the power switch…. and…. blank screen…

TrueNAS Drive Monitoring with S.M.A.R.T Scripts, MySQL and Grafana

In this article, we have TrueNas Core with a ZFS filesystem for network attached storage. We would like to have some warning and monitoring of the hard drives before they completely fail, a historical data collection feature, and a nice visual dashboard.

Restoring the Commodore 64 – Part 2

TLDR: Broken trace Under a ram chip, Bad Kernel Rom & oscillator IC, random jumper Dead Test Cartridge The dead test cartridge is exactly what it sounds like. You have a dead commodore 64 computer, plug in the cartridge, it runs a rom and program and tells you what the issue is. Remade versions of…

Note: ElasticSearch, Kibana, FSCrawler on TrueNAS

When you finally realize that searching through decades of documents has become a challenge, it is time to acknowledge that you have reached a “big-data” stage. Now, you need some big data utilities to understand, index, search and find out where and what you’ve got. This process is a nightmare. Bits of instructions are scattered…

Notes: Autostart VNC server on Debian/RPi

To share a desktop on a remote computer using a VNC server. This is done on a Raspberry Pi desktop. The Pi computer auto-starts and logs-into a default user. SSH is already enabled, since the computer is fully remote. If local access, this can be done at the PC. Start with a SSH connection into…