Some stuff
Because engineering is not just a profession, it's a life philosophy!-
Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 remote controller LIRC setup
I’ve used my USB sound card for almost a decade now, but somehow never got around to set up the remote controller until very recently. This post documents how to setup LIRC for the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 (SB1090) external USB sound card with the Creative RM-850 remote controller under Linux.
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Address book based e-mail approval in procmail
Spam filters can be a bit too aggressive and sometimes mark e-mail coming from my friends and family as spam. Since I check my spam folder at most once a week it’s easy for some messages to go unnoticed for a long time. In order to fix this I’ve decided to add a new a rule to procmail, that will approve all e-mails coming from addresses in my contact list, preferably without manually syncing the address book to procmail.
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Improving RNG entropy under Linux
On my headless compile and compute box I’ve bumped into the low entropy problem, where the machine takes almost 10 minutes to become available during startup, as the kernel cannot gather enough seed entropy, blocking systemd and OpenSSH from finishing initialization. Though enabling RDRAND instructions in the kernel mitigated the issue of slow booting there was still not enough entropy post boot. This prompted me to dive a deeper into random number generators (RNG) under Linux to understand how it all works and what options are available to improve my entropy pool size, and if possible, the quality of it too.
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OTP car sweepstakes checker script
2019-09-16Author: Zoltan PuskasSince most Hungarian banks do not pay much interest on certificate of deposit (CD) type of “investments” for some time now, but me still wanting to have some amount of easily accessible cash reserve, one thing I did was to get an OTP car sweepstakes deposit for fun, and potentially profit. However due to the nature of this CD one has to check each month whether it has won. Recently my automated checker script broke due to changes on OTP’s site, so it was time to update my script too.
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Raspberry Pi 3B heatsink benchmark
The Raspberry Pi single board computer will throttle under heavy load to prevent the CPU core from overheating. Most boards when purchased will come without a heatsink or just with a small one. However there are custom designed, differently sized heatsinks some even with a tiny fan. The tiny heatsinks merely delay full thermal throttling, while medium sized ones reduce the amount of throttling. I was wondering if it’s possible to get full compute power out of my Raspberry Pi 3B only using passive cooling or is it doomed to throttle at full utilization unless I get active cooling.
