Patshead.com Blog

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When I started co-hosting The Creativity Podcast last year, I started casually shopping for macro pads or a Stream Deck. We were recording our interviews locally with OBS Studio, and on the rare occasion that we did a live stream, we were pushing the stream to YouTube via OBS as well.

The most common and basic use for a Stream Deck here would be assigning each camera or scene in OBS to a different key, so you can focus the live stream on the right person.

Then we started using Riverside.fm to record our interviews, and they also have functionality for streaming our interviews to YouTube. Thats when I stopped investigating macro pads, because there really isnt much I can control while live streaming with Riverside.fm.

Then my friend and Creativity Podcast co-host Jeremy Cook designed a macro pad, and now I have absolutely no idea how I survived without one.

Jeremy has been sending me prototype PCBs since he got started, but I dont want you to think Ive been just getting free toys as an incentive to post about them on my blog. Jeremy has only sent me printed circuit boards. Ive had to buys keys. Ive had to buy keycaps. Ive had to buy Arduino Pro Micro boards, and Ive even physically broken and had to replace a couple of those!

Im not sure this is truly a secret. Ive been posting cheap mechanical keyboard deals on Butter, What?! for years. Some of those mechanical keyboards have hot-swappable switches. That means you can just pull them right out of the board, and you dont have to desolder anything.

Ive noticed that the E-YOOSO 87-key keyboard goes on sale all the time, it has hot-swappable key switches that just pull right out, and the switches and caps are the sort that work with LEDs! At its usual $26 price tag, it is a good deal. There seems to be a coupon code every week that pushes it down under $20, and I got mine for $18. I was bummed out taking it apart, because it seems like a fine keyboard for its price.

At the price I paid, it winds up being under $0.20 per switch with keycap. The bummer is that you cant really use all the keycaps, because each row is a different shape. You can see it in the problem in picture of my CNC pendant macro pad. I thought it was more important to have the letters X, Y, and Z on those keys than to have the correct shape!

If you and your friends are looking to save some money, maybe pooling together to make a handful of macro pads would be a good value! Theres enough switches on the E-YOOSO keyboard to build 10 macro pads, and I think Jeremys pricing on the PCB is a really amazing value. Maybe you have a friend who is proficient at soldering. You could have him do all the soldering work in exchange for a free macro pad!

Who knows. Im sure you and your friends can figure something out.

You can do a lot with the sample Arduino code Jeremy has posted so far, and I imagine there will be more of that available before the Kickstarter ends. Im pushing the limits quite a bit farther, but not in a clean way thats ready to be easily consumed.

What Ive strung together here are layers of kludges. It is working, it is a good proof of concept, but some parts need replacing and others need quite a lot of smoothing over. Im going to include all my code in this blog.

Before we get to how Im doing it, here is a list of the interesting things Ive been doing:

In what way is all of this a hack? Theres a script I run in the background that is calling out to xdotool once a second to check window titles. Theres another script doing math on the output of the ifconfig command to show me upload and download speeds on my OoberLights Micro board.

I have the keys and knob on the JC Pro Macro set up to output oddball key combinations like control-alt-F12. I forward those keys on to a script that checks the active window title to decide which real key to pass back on using xdotool. You might turn the knob right, the pad generates control-alt-F12, my window manager passes that on to my custom script, the custom script verifies that Davinci Resolve isnt active, so your turn of the knob sends a volume up keycode.

This is absolutely the wrong way to do this, but it is the most convenient to set up, and I can make changes to things effortlessly. I feel like the right way to do this is set up alternate layouts on the macro pad, then just send a command to the macro pad to change layouts when appropriate. If I did that, though, Id be flashing the Arduino over and over again.

Of course I can!

I like Jeremys idea of being able to have custom modes for different applications. This is similar to layers in the QMK firmware. I just didnt want to have to remember to switch modes, so I am adjusting the keys based on window title.

Most of the time, the knob is just a regular volume knob. If Im currently editing video in Davinci Resolve, the knob nudges the play head forward or back by a single frame. Theres also a button I can hit that toggles the knob between one frame at a time or one second at a time, and the color of the light on that key tells me which mode Im in.

I took that a set farther with my OBS Studio keys. Those keys become active any time OBS Studio is openit doesnt even have to be the active window! For lack of a better idea, those keys glow red, yellow, and green just like a traffic light. Theyre pretty simple. Theyre just tied to three different scenes in OBS Studio.

Theres some good home automation going on in my office. When Im not in here, the lights are off. If Im at my computer or in my recliner, the basic lighting turns on.

I also have video lighting at my desk and workbench. I dont have a good way to detect when those should be used correctly, so I have to manually change to those Home Assistant scenes. I was doing this in the web user interface, but now I have it bound to my macro pad.

When I first set this up on the original prototype macro pad, I was using three different keys. That seemed quite wasteful, and it encouraged me to work a little harder.

I now have four lighting modes bound to a single key. If you click it once, it turns off my overrides and the automation takes over. That sets the key to a green light.

Two clicks gives me a red light and my single podcasting light, three clicks goes cyan and gives me the brightest lighting possible, and four clicks goes purple and only lights up my workbench. This is a lot like double clicking a mouse, but I was sure to put these in the order I most use them!

The lighting overrides in Home Assistant are more complicated than Id like them to be. It is a Node Red loop that keeps checking a global variable, and Im setting that global variable by calling hass-cli via the macro pad.

This one bums me out a bit, because I dont like doing things that the system should be able to do for me. For a long time, I used a set of JBL Elite 700 Bluetooth headphones, and for a short time I connected my Bose QuietComfort 35 Gaming headset via Bluetooth. That was automated for me. When I turned the Bluetooth headphones on, my computer switched to them. When I shut them off, my computer switched back to the speakers. Easy!

Now Im plugging my Bose headset in to reduce latency. Now theres no way for the computer to puzzle out whether or not I have my headphones on, so I mapped two-handed, three-fingered key combination to toggle my audio output. Something I wouldnt accidentally hit, but something I could hit in the middle of a video game if I decide to switch outputs.

I mapped some JC Pro Macro pad keys to OBS for next weeks live stream. The scene keys are only active and lit red/yellow/green when OBS is open.

Im not sure that red, green, and yellow are the appropriate colors for this. pic.twitter.com/LbR0ykxJyp

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) October 16, 2021

One of the first things I did when configuring my JC Pro Macro pad was assign a button to swap audio outputs. I had no idea how much nicer this would be!

Sure, it takes two hands to put my headphones on, but it is still nice having an entire hand free while changing audio outputs. I can continue to adjust the fit of my headset. I can pick up my phone to check messages. If the game Im playing loads quickly, I can already be mousing around the menus. It just feels better.

Not only that, but Im setting the color of the headphone button based on the audio output. If the light is green, things are safe, and my output is going to the headphones. That means I wont accidentally pick up speaker noise on my mic while podcasting. Isnt that cool?!

As soon as I attached a big old knob to the rotary encoder, I knew that this had to be made to work with my video editor. I only have two functions set up here.

In the default mode, one click of the knob moves the play head a single frame. When I toggle the second mode, each click moves the play head one second. This makes it easy to fine tune a cut down to exactly the right frame, even when the timeline is zoomed out too far to be that precise. It also allows you to spin the knob quickly to zip around at higher speed.

I watched a video explaining how to use the real Davinci Resolve keyboard, and so far I havent been smart enough to replicate its fancier functionality. With their keyboard, youre able to hold a key while turning the knob to do things like move the connecting point between two clips forward or backward along the timeline.

Id love to be able to do that, and Resolve has an extreme number of functions that you can map to keyboard controls, but I cant for the life of me figure out how to replicate their own keyboards trim function!

When I got the first prototype of the JC Pro Macro pad in my hands, I immediately noticed the four solder pads on the right side behind the keys. I thought it would be a neat place to wire up some OoberLights, but we didnt have a small enough OoberLights board for that. We do now!

The new OoberLights Micro boards are about the size of the base of a Cherry MX keycap. There are three rings of RGB LEDs. The outer ring has 12 pixels, the middle ring has 8 pixels, and the center ring is just a single pixel. I think blinkenlights are cool, but what can you do with these pixels?!

This might be the first time Ive used any of my #OoberLights for their intended purpose! The blue and green LEDs are spinning at an RPM that is related to upload and download speed on my Ethernet interface! #Arduino #raspberrypi pic.twitter.com/p1vOCVvX0o

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) October 12, 2021

Im using a shell script, math, and my spinner Arduino code to display rotating bandwidth meters on my JC Pro Macro. A green pixel spins clockwise to show my download traffic, and a blue pixels spins counterclockwise to show upload traffic.

It isnt perfect. I have had a bug making the pixel jump in any counterclockwise spinner when changing speed, and getting the speed right for a bandwidth meter has been challenging. I wasnt sure what to do when there is nearly zero traffic, so theyre always spinning at an extremely slow rate. When they stand still, they look too boring!

This is most definitely just the tip of the iceberg. I have an OoberLights Micro board plugged into a Raspberry Pi, and Ive managed to add a clean mounting bracket to my favorite 3D printed Pi case. It wont be long before I have network spinners and disk usage pie charts on my Raspberry Pi Seafile server!

This deserves an entire blog post of its own, but I want to code up some improvements first.

My Shapeoko XXL CNC machine is plugged into a Raspberry Pi Zero W running CNCjs. One of my old laptops is sitting next to the Shapeoko. That laptop connects to the CNCjs web interface, and I sometimes use the laptop to make CAM and design adjustments between cuts.

Much of the time, though, I dont even power up the laptop. I have an old Nexus 7 Android tablet out there connecting to the CNCjs tablet interface. This works great, but you have to actually touch the screen in the correct places, and that means you have to look at the tablet.

A common thing to do is jog the Z-axis down 0.1 mm at a time until it touches a piece of paper. Thats how you know the tool is just above your material. If youre using the touch screen, you cant see the tool, the paper, and the button. You also cant feel the buttons.

Using a macro pad as a pendant is fantastic. I get the tool close, choose the Z-axis, and then set the jog speed to 0.1 mm. Every click of the wheel will move the router down 0.1 mm, and it is extremely easy to feel the wheel without looking. I can keep my eye right on the tool and never have to worry about touching the wrong part of the screen!

Ive done a bad job, and I have been pretty slow at writing this blog post. Jeremys Kickstarter campaign for the JC Pro Macro 2 is already way more than half over. By the time Google search starts sending many of you fine readers in my direction, it will probably already be over!

My JC Pro Macro keyboard is soldered together and working. I dont have any RGB LEDs on hand, so I left those off. I hope thats OK.

Which keys should I be mapping to my new macro pad?! pic.twitter.com/UmMClVXzsd

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) August 2, 2021

At the time I am writing this, you can only get the 8-key version of the JC Pro Macro pad on Kickstarter. The original 5-key version is available on Tindie, but Im sure the 8-key version will be stocked on Tindie after the Kickstarter orders have been fulfilled.

I like the original, smaller version of the macro pad. Five keys is actually a pretty good fit for use at my desk, but Ive grown attached to using the light-up keys as functional indicators, and the original pad lacks those lights.

Five keys is probably just enough to use as pendant for my CNC router, but the extra key and the lights make it easy to see which axis Im about to drive and just how fast it is going to move.

I dont really have a conclusion. I feel like Im only just scratching the surface of what my macro pad can do for me. All my software is a hack, and Im slowly working on reigning that in to make things a little less wonky.

Ive gotten a little derailed from the macro pad stuff by our OoberLights Micro boards. You cant imagine how excited I am to see an actual, working, spinning bandwidth meter attached to my macro pad.

What do I really want to know? I was to know what you think! Are you using a macro pad or the Stream Deck? Which macro pad are you using? Does the JC Pro Macro look like a good fit for you? Is there a better macro pad I should be using?! Let me know in the comments, or stop by the *Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Ive been using Seafile for my cloud storage and sync needs for more than eight years. I spent quite a few of those years hosting Seafile on my own colocated server, then I outsourced the hosting to a third party, until six months ago when I brought the operation back in house.

Im not new at this. As expected, I didnt have any real problems. Things are certainly built on a more fragile foundation this time, but reliability has still been great.

Eight years ago, my Seafile server lived in a datacenter in downtown Dallas with redundant links to the Internet. I dont remember how fast those connections were, but they were faster than the gigabit Ethernet adapter in my old 1U servers. My server was built like a tank, had redundant power supplies, and my data lived on a small RAID 10 array.

My new Seafile server is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a single 14 TB USB hard drive, and it lives on my friend Brians home network. He has a symmetric gigabit fiber connection from Frontier. I have the same ISP, but I have a 200-megabit symmetric fiber link.

Sometime in my new Seafile servers first month of service, it completely disappeared. I couldnt ping it. The Tailscale admin interface said it hadnt seen it check in since the night before. Brian couldnt ping it, but thats to be expected, because just about everything on my Seafile server is blocked on the local interface. Including ICMP packets. The only way in is via Tailscale.

Brian power-cycled it for me, and everything came right back up. It hasnt happened again since.

In an effort to keep my Pis microSD card going, I have disabled just about everything that writes to the root file system. This includes disabling just about every ounce of logging, so even if there would normally be a trail to follow, I wouldnt have anything to look at.

My Raspberry Pi isnt plugged into a UPS at Brians house. If the power blips, my Pi reboots.

The root file system isnt encrypted, so Linux boots back up without a problem, and it immediately connects to my Tailscale network. The 14 TB external hard drive is encrypted, and it needs me to enter a passphrase to unlock it. If theres a power outage, I have to ssh in and run a script that mounts the encrypted file system and starts Seafile.

This should happen less often now, because Brian invested in a Tesla solar and Powerwall setup. If theres another outage any time soon, I will be quite surprised!

First, theres the problem that Im running Linux. Google Drive doesnt have an official sync client, and Dropbox has been doing goofy things with their Linux client.

Then theres the paranoia factor. In almost every IT department Ive ever worked in, I have had the ability to read your email. Ive never wanted to, and I always thought it was creepy when management wanted to check an employees email history. In every one of those IT departments, there has always been at last once person that was EXCITED to tell you that they can read your email. They thought it was awesome.

I planned to do a nice, smooth S-turn over those trees at the other side of the field, but then I had to play a game of is-that-a-dude-or-an-electrical-box. It wasnt a dude. It was a power box.

And why was that other tree so low?! pic.twitter.com/ZWHOIcZhX8

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 19, 2021

Last time I checked, Dropbox has the ability to decrypt your data. I have no idea how Google Drive works. These are big companies, and my brain immediately imagines the clones of my old coworkers that are excited about being able to poke around in our data. If you saw the glee in their eyes, you wouldnt want them nosing around in your files.

Then theres cost.

Im currently up at 4.4 TB of data on my Seafile server. That includes my data, my wifes data, and some episodes of The Creativity Podcast. Well over 3 TB of that data is my own.

Googles largest storage plan is 2 TB for $99.99 per year. I dont think theyll let you stack two plans to get to 2 TB, but if they did, I guess it would be $200 per year.

Dropboxs individual plans are 2 TB for $119 per year or 3 TB for $199 per year. I dont fit into either of these plans, but at least I am close!

I can move up to a Dropbox business plan, but the minimum number of users is three. That puts it at 5 TB for $450 per year, or you can pay $720 for unlimited storage.

The 14 TB USB 3 hard drive cost me $230, and a 2 GB Raspberry Pi kit cost me $54. Thats less than $300.

NOTE: I cheated a bit here! I had a 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4 here as part of my Pi-KVM kit. The whole Pi-KVM setup only uses about 200 megabytes of RAM. Seafile fits quite nicely in 2 GB of RAM, but my Seafile Pi is up and running 24/7, and it is located off-site. I figured I may as well put the 4 GB Pi out there, since theres a chance I might decide to host something else on there!

Addendum to the note: I took a peek, and my Seafile server was using 1.8 GB of RAM after about six weeks of uptime. I restarted Seafile a few days ago, and it is sitting at around 300 MB of RAM. There must be a leak of some sort. If youre on a small Pi, you might want to schedule Seafile to restart every once in a while!

A fresh #RaspberryPi and 14 TB USB hard drive arrived today. I have Raspbian installed, Tailscale is up and running, and Seafile seems to be working now.

Seafile was being a butthole, and it was half my fault. pic.twitter.com/OsMeh6zUwx

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 24, 2021

Ive been using Googles storage pricing for arithmetic that justifies my choices because theyre a little cheaper than Dropbox. I am aware that Google wont actually let me stack a pair of 2 TB plans onto my account, and Im mostly ignoring the fact that I am well on my to needing more than two plans worth of storage.

I am six months into my experiment, and the gamble is well on its way to paying off. Not having to pay Google has saved me $100, so I am more than 1/3 of the way to paying off my hardware.

If you sign up for Dropbox, you dont have to do any real work yourself, and that is awesome. You just install their client, and everything starts syncing. It is absolutely fantastic, and this has a HUGE value!

Then you read stories about people getting locked out of the Google accounts. Sometimes it is an absolute nightmare getting things straightened out. I dont know how to measure the risk of losing my data to something like this, but Id imagine it is infinitesimally small.

I am quite confident that having to fight to get my Google account turned back on even once would feel like it cost me hundreds of dollars of time, effort, sanity, and frustration.

We hope that Google and Dropbox are doing a good job replicating our data, but it is pretty opaque to us. We have no idea what is really going on up there.

I know for a fact that my Seafile server has no redundancy. Even so, that server is an integral part of my backup plans. Seafile is configured to keep all my data for 90 days. If I save a jpeg 20 times today, each version will be available on the serverassuming Im not saving faster than the files can sync!

I know that safety net can disappear instantly. The most important data on my Seafile server is synced to my desktop, my NAS, and my laptop. If the Seafile server disappeared right now, I would still have three copies of that data. The NAS even has a few snapshots.

I dont have three copies of all my data outside the Seafile server. The video I regularly record is just too big to fit on my desktops SSDs or even my laptops second hard drive. I sync the current years video files to my laptop, but the previous several years just wont fit. Im keeping it simple here, but this paragraph could easily be turned into a 1,500-word blog post.

Maybe. Sort of. What Im really going to be giving up on is the centralized file server. Ive been slowly working toward this for at least the last eight years, but the tiny SSDs we had back then were holding me back, and I really did need bigger volumes than a single hard drive could give me, so I needed to build RAID 6 or RAID 10 arrays.

Things are different now. I can easily fit a years worth of the content I generate on a single SSD. My laptop is pretty beefy, so it has room for an NVMe drive along with a 2.5 hard drive.

There are four hard drives in my server. I bought them a long time ago, so theyre small, but they cost $150 each. Today I could shuck two 10 TB drives to stick in my server and desktop, and grab a 4 TB or 5 TB 2.5 drive for my laptop. Then I could sync every bit of my data to three different drives on three completely different machines in my house, and Id still have a fourth copy with full history on a Raspberry Pi off-site.

I enjoy the idea of replicating my data almost instantly among a redundant array of inexpensive computers.

It is nice that I dont have to move entirely in one direction. Im straddling the fence between centralized and decentralized storage today, but the drives will start failing as my NAS ages. When they do, Ill likely just find myself accidentally sitting fully on the other side of this fence!

Every good backup plan includes backing up your data at a second location. More locations would be even better, but Ill settle for just the one.

Theres a copy of my data on my NAS, desktop, and laptop. If I drop the laptop, I wont lose anything, but if the house burns down, Id be in big trouble! Thats why my Seafile server is hosted on a Raspberry Pi at Brian Mosess house.

Holy Potatoes! I left my Seafile + #RaspberryPi +@Tailscale server at @briancmosess house about twenty minutes ago. I got home and figured Id start a ping running so Id notice when he got around to plugging it in. It is already up and running?! https://t.co/YQfwUfSbJu pic.twitter.com/uH5fc8gG8M

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) March 5, 2021

Uptime isnt critical. If the power went out at Brians house for a few days, that would be OK. If either of us were having issues with our Internet connections, that would be fine. I dont need to spend extra to host my Seafile service in a real datacenter with redundant connections to the Internet and on-site power generation.

My little Pi server is sipping about as much power as a 100-watt-equivalent LED light bulb, so Im not much of an imposition. Im also more than willing to return the favor.

You should think about finding a buddy to swap Raspberry Pis with, but it should definitely be someone you trust not to exploit your Internet connection for nefarious purposes!

In the old days, if you wanted to share files, you would use a centralized file server. Everyone working on a project would map a share on that NAS, and theyd access the files on that remote machine. If that server lived on the other side of the world, it might feel quite slow working with the files. It might only take a few extra seconds to open a document or spreadsheet, but working with a remote database might be quite slow.

When using a sync service, every time a file is changed, that change is pushed to your local machine. When I am editing video files for The Creativity Podcast, they are already on my local SSD, so I am always editing a local file. All the video files are on my desktop and laptop, so I can work on them anywhere. Even if Im on a slow 3G cellular connection.

Most of the work I do, like this blog post, is stored in text files, and I commit those files to Git repositories. The trouble with this is that I have to remember to commit my changes. Sometimes, those changes arent really ready to be committed and pushed to the server.

If I forget to push my changes, and I walk out the door with my laptop, it can be challenging to continue my work. Tailscale will let me easily sneak back in to fix this mistake, but what if I dont have Internet access on my laptop?

This used to be a pretty common scenario, but Im rarely completely without an Internet connection. With Seafile, I dont have to worry. My laptop is up and running right now. As long as it takes me at least 30 seconds or so to walk away from my desk and pack up my laptop, this blog post Im working on right now will automatically be synced to my laptop. I can ride to the park, open my laptop, and I wont have to wait to work.

I realize that Im repeating a lot of what I already said six months ago. Im trying to emphasize the most important bits while adding as much new information as I can. One of those important bits is Tailscale.

I stopped hosting my own Seafile server because I was sick of rushing to keep my software updated. If a security flaw was patched in Nginx or Seafile, I had to rush as quickly as I could to get my server updated. It was sitting out there facing the entire Internet. Anyone could be poking at it.

I was already using Tailscale for a few months before I decided to host my own Seafile server again. I knew I wasnt going to put the new server on the Internet. I knew it was going to only be accessible on my Tailscale network.

Tailscale is a zero-config mesh VPN. You install the Tailscale client on two or more machines, log into your Tailscale account, and all those machines can talk directly to each other over point-to-point Wireguard VPN connections. Tailscale is ridiculously easy to set up, it is reliable, and the pricing is fantastic for us home users.

My Tailscale machines can talk to my Raspberry Pi no matter where they are located. My Seafile server is at Brians house in Texas, while I could be on hotel WiFi in New York with my phone connected to T-Mobile 5G. All three machines can ping each other directly.

Tailscale also lets you share machines with other Tailscale users. My wife has her own Tailscale network that includes her laptop, desktop, and phone. Ive shared my Seafile server and our Home Assistant server with her. She can sync all her files, and she can check the thermostat when shes away from home. How cool is that?!

Ive also shared my Seafile server with my Creativity Podcast co-host, because neither of us have enough spare room on our Google Drive accounts to hold much more than a single episode of the show. I just export my work, it lands in our shared library, and it starts syncing right away.

Should you be hosting your own cloud storage and cloud sync service? Maybe. Especially if you have to store and sync more than 2 TB of data. Dont forget that your time is valuable, and setting up a Pi and keeping all your software up to date will add up to at least several hours. Maybe youll find that tedious, maybe youll find it enjoyable.

I wholeheartedly believe hosting my own Seafile server on a Pi using Tailscale was the right choice for me. My Pis hard drive is encrypted. Seafile encrypts every block on the client side. My network traffic is encrypted with Seafile. I know my colocation provider has no interest in breaking into my stuff.

I am saving money. Ill be saving more money as my storage needs keep growing. Im pleased with my increased level of privacy.

What do you think? Did I make the right choice by hosting my own cloud storage and sync? Should I be spending $450 per year on Dropbox instead, or did I make the right choice spending about $280 on this hardware? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the *Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Brian snagged me a handful of the original CloudFree smart plugs for Christmas. I immediately opened them up, attached them to my network, and I put various lights around my office under the control of Home Assistant.

The exciting thing about the CloudFree devices is that they dont require the servers in the cloud to operate. They arrive at your door preloaded with the open-source Tasmota firmware. You just have to configure them with the hostname and credentials of your Home Assistant server, and they will automatically be detected.

She seems to use about 800 watts while actively heating. pic.twitter.com/8DBbOVPp5M

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) June 27, 2021

I wanted more, but I was bummed out that they were out of stock.

When we talked to Kenny from CloudFree on The Creativity Podcast, he told us that the version 2 plugs are a huge upgrade. Hes discontinued the original switches, and he was waiting patiently for a big shipment of the new switches to arrive from overseas. Theyre shipping now, and Im quite excited.

The new switches cost a bit more, but I think theyre worth it. Theyre rated for 15 amps instead of just 10. They have power monitoring just like a Kill-A-Watt power meter. Their new form factor also allows you to plug two plugs into the same outlet.

My own Home Assistant setup is still quite dumb. Im collecting lots of data, but I havent automated anything yet. It is currently just a glorified remote control with zero automation.

Im hoping to use the power monitoring to help in automating my Rancilio Silvia espresso machine. If it is drawing power more often, that means Im making a latte. I should be able to use Node Red to use that information to create a virtual sensor in Home Assistant that keeps track of the last time I made coffee.

The idea being that I can automatically power down the espresso machine an hour or so after using it. Then Home Assistant can power it back up when I wake up the next day. Figuring out when Im awake will be its own can of worms.

This doesnt seem terribly surprising, but I was excited when I realized that you dont need any home automation infrastructure or even a WiFi access point to connect to in order to make use of the CloudFree plugs power metering.

An unconfigured Tasmota device announces itself as a WiFi access point. You connect to that access point with a phone or computer to configure the plug. You would normally put in your homes access point name and password, then you might put in the information to access your Home Assistant server.

The main page of the web interface shows power usage details. Just about everything you might use a Kill-A-Watt meter for is on this page.

How awesome is that? I might have to keep one of these in my laptop bag. Not only can you meter power, but you can of course still toggle the switch over WiFi. Have you ever had to holler across a building to have someone power cycle a device for you?

This isnt a big deal. The plugs use Tasmotas default telemetry reporting settings. That means they send data to Home Assistant every 60 seconds.

When I installed my first CloudFree plug on my Rancilio Silvia, it didnt seem to be reporting any information at all. Then I noticed the kilowatt hour meter was indeed slowly climbing. The trouble was that my espresso machines heater doesnt run long enough to be active when data is uploaded to Home Assistant.

My quick Google-fu told me to change the TelePeriod setting. The minimum is 10 seconds, and this certainly did the job. I was seeing my espresso machine jump to 800 watts every time it turned on.

This worked, but it wasnt the correct answer. Adam from the Local Bytes store told me to check out Tasmotas PowerDelta setting. This doesnt use a timer. Telemetry is sent to Home Assistant whenever the power usage increases by a set number of watts. I set mine to 5 watts.

Now there is almost no delay between the espresso machine heating up and Home Assistant knowing about it.

Kenny Stier from CloudFree told us how he uses the power metering to make his deep fat fryer smarter. He is able to power up the fryer from his phone before he heads home, and the power metering on the CloudFree smart plug lets Home Assistant tell him that the oil is up to temperate. Thats pretty slick!

Im going to work on putting together the last few pieces of my own puzzle here. In my old OpenHAB setup, I used a combination of data to determine whether I was sleeping or not. Are my computers idle? Is my phone charging? Has the Fire TV been used in the last hour? Is my phone screen off? Is my phone at home? If all of this was true, I was probably asleep.

My charging habits are a bit different these days, so Im going to need to figure out how to determine when my espresso machine needs to turn on in the morning. Once I do that, Ill just need to figure out when to have Home Assistant turn it back off.

What do you think? Are you using power metering to aid in your home automation actions? Are you using Tasmota? Are you flashing your own plugs, or are you paying a few extra dollars to let CloudFree do it for you? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Ive only had my GVM RGB20W light for a day or so. I dont have a ton to tell you about it, but as soon as I got the light in my hand I was able to answer a question that didnt seem to be asked anywhere on the Internet. That seems like a good enough reason for a quick write-up.

Lets just get that question out of the way. How do they get a high CRI rating out of RGB LEDs?!

The answer is that they dont. There are three sets of LEDs in here: daylight, warm, and RGB. When in correlated color temperature (CCT) mode, the daylight and warm LEDs are mixed to provide the correct color temperature. When in RGB mode, the daylight and warm LEDs go dark.

When they say this is a 20-watt light, I am assuming the total output at 100% in either mode reaches around 20 watts. So it should be a 20-watt bicolor LED in CCT mode or a 20-watt RGB LED. Maybe. Probably.

I didnt actually set out to buy this light. My friend Brian Moses wanted one of these lights, but they come in packs of two at Amazon. He asked if I wanted to split a pack, and I said sure.

For around $125 you get two lights, two 9-volt power supplies, and two mediocre light stands. I think it was a pretty reasonable value.

I told @briancmoses! pic.twitter.com/9ISf7DPAcP

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) July 22, 2021

NOTE: Twitters compression demolishes the video quality, but at least I can still tell that the lighting is better!

Ever since signing up to be co-host of The Creativity Podcast, I have been trying my best to improve my video recording setup here at my desk.

I was bouncing a random 100-watt quivalent LED bulb in an IKEA Tertial arm lamp off of a card then onto my face. This left me looking a bit green, so I upgraded that to a 100-watt equivalent high-CRI Cree bulb. That helped a lot with my white balance, but my camera still needed to correct towards magenta.

The GVM light is most definitely an upgrade. Im struggling a bit trying to figure out where to mount it and how to diffuse it, but the white balancing my Sony ZV-1 with a gray card is working great. It isnt pushing towards magenta at all. It is dead center, and that is fantastic.

I was eyeballing the much more expensive GVM 80-watt chip-on-board (COB) light with a soft light dome for $160. Mostly because I really want a nice light dome.

I just cant use something like that at my desk, and this is where I need to be to record episodes of The Creativity Podcast and The Butter, What?! Show.

The body of the big GVM light is probably 8 to 12 deep, and the dome is another 18 or 24 deep. Theres just not enough room between me and the wall for that light.

Even if I could squeeze it in, I would have to take it down between shoots, and I really want something more permanent. I would feel uncomfortable with that giant light dome looming over me while Im working.

I cant tell you for sure. I dont have equipment to measure this.

Heres what I can tell you. The Cree bulb Im replacing claims to be an 18-watt bulb, and Cree is a reputable LED manufacturer.

The GVM light definitely seems brighter, so I have no reason not to believe them. It is probably a 20-watt light.

I dont have a ton to say. It seems like the GVM RGB20W is a fine video light, but I havent used it long enough to tell you much else.

Are you using the GVM RGB20W video light? Are you using other lights from GVM? Did I make a good choice with this light? Should I have bought something completely different? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Am I excited about the Steam Deck? Im pretty sure I am! Im not quite excited enough to order onegaming on the go just isnt something I do all that often.

The problem with the Steam Deck is me. Im quite boring these days! I dont commute to an office. I dont visit clients. I dont spend a week working away from home in a hotel and fly home on weekends. I dont spend a month at a time away from home. I do most of my work right here in my home office.

I used to do all of these things, and that has the gears in my brain turning. If you carried a Steam Deck in your laptop bag, what could you do with it besides play games? It is just an x86 laptop. Youre supposed to be able to install Windows on it, so Im assuming we can boot it from external media.

The Steam Deck is a low-end laptop in a different form factor. It has a smaller screen, built-in gamepads, and lacks the keyboard and mouse. My quick searches say that it costs about the same as most four-core Ryzen laptops with similar specs. Some comparable laptops cost more, some cost less.

I feel like this needs to be near the front of the post. If youre flying to a new hotel every week doing consulting work, the cost of the gear you carry in your bag probably isnt your primary concern.

You have a limited amount of space in your carry-on bag. You are probably trying to cram as much functionality in that laptop bag as you can manage.

If money is no object, I could try to stuff my laptop, a Steam Deck, a Nintendo Switch, and an extra laptop into my backpack. They may not all fit, or it may get ridiculously heavy, but I can certainly try.

What Im trying to do here is figure out what roles a Steam Deck in my laptop bag might play. Can it add more value than just gaming? Can it replace hardware I am already carrying today?

The Steam Deck is supposed to work with pretty much any USB-C docking station. There are big, fancy, more expensive docking stations. There are plenty of options under $35, and there are also simple USB-C to HDMI adapters for around $13.

That means it will be easy to plug your Steam Deck into the TV at your hotel. That will let you play local video files directly off the Steam Deck or a thumb drive. Youll also be able to use Netflix, Hulu, and friends from a web browser.

Id be excited if this meant I didnt have to pack a Fire TV stick in my backpack, but the USB-C dock will be roughly the same size and price. I guess the advantage here is that I could use the dock with my laptop as well. You might already be carrying a dock anyway!

This is the idea I am most excited about. The part of the job I am doing right at this moment doesnt require a lot of hardware. All I need is a screen, a keyboard, and a text editor and I can be writing blogs all day long. The screen doesnt even have to be that great.

I have an old, cheap Bluetooth keyboard here that isnt much bigger than my Nintendo Switch. I wouldnt be surprised if it is smaller than the Steam Deck. I could throw the keyboard and the Steam Deck in my small laptop bag when I take a ride to the park.

I could sit in the shade and play some Dead Cells, then stop at a picnic table and write a blog post.

Maybe this setup is just enough to have with me in an emergency. Having a real Linux box with me to troubleshoot problems would be a step up from just having my Android phone. It wouldnt be as comfortable to work on as a real laptop, but the only real problem would be comfort.

If this were my Steam Deck, Id want to avoid messing with the host operating system as much as possible. Ive been a Linux server guy for more than 20 years, so Im not afraid to tinker with things, and I expect to be able to reverse any changes I make. Im assuming SteamOSs kernel will ship with everything required to run KVM and QEMU.

If youre new to Linux and worried about breaking your gaming handheld, you might want to boot your alternate configuration from a USB SSD or hard disk.

This is the first thing that came to mind when I saw that the Steam Deck ships with 16 GB of RAM. How many virtual machines can I cram on this thing, and what should they be doing?!

Maybe you are a C or C++ programmer using distcc, and you would benefit from having four extra cores nearby compiling your code. Maybe you are a 3D artist, and your work would go faster if you could farm out your Blender rendering to your Steam Deck.

I might set my Steam Deck up with Davinci Resolve so it could render YouTube videos for me while I edit the next one on my laptop.

Do these need to live inside virtual machines? Not necessarily, but it would be nice to separate them from future SteamOS updates that might break their configurations.

What might a developer set up here? Virtual machines where they can run Docker, Kubernetes, or k3s? Groups of virtual machines for each client?

You might boot a different SSD for each client? Maybe you have a separate encrypted partition for each client on a single external SSD? You could boot your Steam Deck off that SSD, then you can boot up the correct set of machines for your client, and if you dont have your Steam Deck available, you could probably boot those same virtual machines on your laptop.

I imagine most folks would do this sort of work in the cloud, but maybe that just doesnt fit your workflow. Maybe you already have a squadron of virtual machines running on your laptop.

If you do, maybe the Steam Deck would let you offload some of that to another device to free up resources on your laptop.

The Steam Deck is just another computer.

I already carry a tiny HDMI-to-USB dongle in my bag for my Pi-KVM. Will this work with my Steam Deck? I dont see why not!

This is definitely a ridiculously small niche of a use case, but Id find it handy. I use my Sony ZV-1s HDMI output as a webcam for live streaming. If youre some sort of YouTuber, you probably packed at least one camera anyway, but why would you want to connect it to your Steam Deck?

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I wouldnt mind being able to live stream to YouTube remotely without bringing my admittedly gigantic laptopthe Steam Deck is probably less than the size.

Every once in a while I wish my live-streaming gear wasnt plugged into my desktop PC. Maybe Id like to shut down the PC to eliminate the fan noise. Maybe Id just like to not worry about software on the PC goobering up my live stream. Maybe plugging the camera into the Steam Deck would just help with cabling logistics.

I know there arent many people who would do this, but Id be excited to have the option.

I am guessing it would be super awkward, but it might work in a pinch?

I use a 7 Android tablet as a book reader. Using a color theme like Solarized Dark is quite pleasant when reading with the lights out. Could I leave the tablet at home and read science fiction books on my Steam Deck?

If the software existed, the Switch would do a fantastic job at this. All youd have to do is pop the controllers off.

The controllers are integrated into the Steam Deck, and theyre much wider than Switch controls. Valve has been pretty quiet about the dimensions and weight of the Steam Deck, but Im willing to bet it will make the Switch look petite.

If I were stuck in a hotel room at 2:00 a.m. itching to read a few chapters, would I be able to do it on the Steam Deck? Can I surf Reddit, Imgur, and Twitter? Can I read Hacker News? The answer to all these questions is definitely yes, but would I be comfortable doing so? Thatll be the question!

I want to hear from you. Are you planning on buying your own Steam Deck? Are you just going to use it as a game console? Are you going to use it to augment your other computing devices when you travel? Will you use your Steam Deck as a small laptop for writing blog content?

Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Im excited about this! Ive had my Gotway Tesla V2 for just over a year now, and Ive been riding for about four months longer than that. It is easily one of the best toys Ive ever bought. An electric unicycle (EUC) is a good fit for where I live, and it gets more useful every day. The EUC is a hobby all by itself, but it also does a great job supporting my FPV drone-flying hobby.

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Not long after we bought this house, I ordered an inexpensive folding electric scooter. It was fine for what I used it for. Im two houses away from Planos amazing paved bike paths. Theres probably a dozen miles of trail to ride without even having to cross a street. It was fun to take my laptop or FPV drone backpack out riding with me.

The scooter wasnt portable. It sounds portable because it folds. Fifty pounds doesnt sound too heavy, but it is when youre trying to heft an awkwardly shaped 4-long tube with handlebars into the back of your tiny SUV. I wanted a personal electric vehicle (PEV) that I could easily take anywhere.

My friend Alex told me I should get a OneWheel XR, but theyre about $1,800. I didnt even know if I could ride one. Then I discovered the existence of EUCs. I happened to see a refurbished InMotion V5F for $399 shipped. Could I ride a unicycle? Would I ever use it? At that price, it seemed worth finding out!

The InMotion V5F has as much power, range, and nearly as much top speed as a OneWheel XR at a fraction of the price. It was a good deal, and it got me hooked. Ive been lending the V5F out to friends so they can learn to ride, but it came back last month with a dead battery. I suspect theres just one or two dead 18650 cells in the pack, but I havent opened it up to check.

To tell you the truth, I didnt really outgrow my InMotion V5F. I would have been content to ride it for at least a year, but my friends made that difficult for me! My friend Tanner bought a Gotway MSX Pro, and my wife upgraded to a Pace Aventon 350 e-bike. Both of these easily go faster than my InMotion V5Fs 17 mph top speed. I was getting warning beeps all the time when I rode with those two!

My scooter had me shying away from buying one of the biggest wheels with huge batteries. The V5F was less than 25 pounds. [Tanners MSX][mxp] was 55 pounds. Do I really want to spend even more money on a heavier wheel? If I have a 40 mph top speed, am I going to want to go that fast? Probably. Eventually.

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There are so many choices of wheel between my InMotion V5F and Tanners then top-of-the-line MSX Pro. Which one should you choose?

A discount at eWheels on the Gotway Tesla V2 nudged me in that direction. It has almost three times as much battery and nearly double the top speed of my little InMotion V5F, and it only weighs 42 pounds. I believe it was on sale for $1,350, and it shipped almost immediately. Tanners top-of-the-line wheel would have cost $650 more, and it wouldnt have shipped for a month or two!

Not as much as Id like! When I had around 700 miles on the odometer back in March, I was joking that Id like to put another 700 miles on it before Id had the wheel for a year. While this was absolutely within the realm of possibility, I expected I might actually hit 1,000 miles. I didnt even manage that! Theres something just shy of 850 miles on the odometer right now.

I do the majority of my riding on our local bike trails. Theres a fantastic picnic table in a secluded spot quite a ways from any parking about four miles from here. I like to take my laptop out there and write blogs for an hour. The vast majority of my rides wind up being 8-mile rides because of this.

The weather has been keeping me home. A lot of days were just a little too windy and chilly to be sitting outside at my laptop. Weve had a lot of heavy rain, but weve also had a ton of days with light rain.

The rain washes fine silt onto the bike path, and that stuff is ridiculously slippery, and every puddle could have a layer of that stuff at the bottom. If it rains today, I probably wont want to ride tomorrow. If it rains twice in a week, Im unlikely to get out.

It is so easy to throw the Tesla in the car. Now that my friends and I are fully vaccinated, it wont be long before we start driving out to places and going for rides. That will be fun and exciting!

Not only that, but there are a handful of places I can ride to that are within 5 miles of home. Many of these places are just off the bike trail, so I barely have to deal with cars and traffic. Im looking forward to hitting up the donut shop, Napolis pizza, and the frozen yogurt shop.

The pandemic isnt stopping me from stopping at the donut shop. The trouble is that they close at noon, and I am not a morning person.

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We eat pizza from Napolis almost every week. I dont even know if theyre open for indoor dining. I assume and hope that they are not, but when it is time for that, I look forward to heading over there with my laptop on hot afternoons so I can work in some air conditioning while eating delicious pizza!

The yogurt shop seems icky during a pandemic, because it is a self-serve shop. As far as I know, that is still the case right now. Id feel much better about one or two employees touching all the toppings and ice cream dispensers. Knowing that all the folks that cant even figure out how to put their mask over their nose are touching the gummy bears and peanut butter cups creeps me out.

Everything will be getting better, and Ill be excited to use my wheel for all these activities I had in mind when I ordered my first EUC before the pandemic!

The Tesla V2 really does sit in the sweet spot for me. I do my best to not ride faster than about 20 mph, because I dont wear enough gear for that to be safe, so the Tesla still has speed that I can grow into. I rarely ride farther than 12 miles on a single day, and Ive gotten 34 miles out of a single charge, so the range is quite reasonable for me.

At its price point, the Tesla is an amazing wheel.

Yes. Most definitely. My Tesla is fantastic on the buttery-smooth bike paths, it does just fine on the rougher streets, and it does well enough when I need to take a shortcut off road to avoid obstacles or people.

Ive put a couple of miles on Tanners Veteran Sherman. I always joke that it really does ride like a tank. The first time I tried it, I rode to the end of my street, but I couldnt turn it around in our cul-de-sac. I leaned and twisted as hard as I felt comfortable doing so, but it just didnt want to turn. I felt the same way when I got on my Tesla after spending months on the tiny InMotion V5F.

The Sherman just goes where you point it. It is big and heavy, and that knobby tire just wants to stay on course. Every time I put a few miles in on streets instead of on the bike path, I kind of wish I was riding a Sherman. Id feel more confident, and I know itll handle any surprise bumps or small potholes better than my Tesla.

When I bought my Tesla V2, the KingSong S18 was just about to be open for preorders. It was a tempting wheel at the time, but Im so glad I chose the Tesla. I would have been waiting months for the S18 to ship, and the quality of the first batch was pretty awful.

It sounds like the current revision of the KingSong S18 has ironed out most of the problems. It sounds like a fun, agile wheel, and I would love to have a suspension.

On paper, the KingSong S18 is basically a Tesla V2 with a suspension, though Wrong Way says the S18 goes quite a bit farther on a charge!. The extra $500 gets you a bit more battery and power, a little more top speed, a suspension, and a wider tire. I would pay the extra $500 just for the suspension. The rest is a nice bonus!

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If something happened to my Tesla today, I would almost definitely order a KingSong S18 to replace it.

There is no way I would buy an S18 to park next to my Tesla. Theyre just too similar. If I were going to own two wheels, Id be looking at something like a Sherman or Gotway RS19. Something big. Something with more range. Something that just plows through grass and rough terrain.

Among other minor changes, the Begode T3 has a hollow motor and a bigger battery. In theory, the hollow motor should be a big upgrade since it allows for a much bigger bearing. In practice, people have been having trouble with bearings failing in hollow-motor wheels. Well see how that goes.

I wouldnt mind having 50% more battery, but I worry that this is going to push the price too high. Im waiting for the Tesla V3 to show up at eWheels before I decide whether I think it is a good value. At $1,350 the Tesla V2 has been an easy choice. If that gets pushed to $1,550 or more, then Id be more tempted to pay a little more for an 18 or 19 wheel.

The changes make sense for Gotway/Begode. The Gotway MCM5 v2 specs and pricing make more sense if they also push the specs of the Tesla up a few notches.

It has held up way better than the InMotion V5F! I cant really blame InMotion for that. I dropped my V5F A LOT while I was learning. At least four other people besides myself practiced on my V5F, and I am assuming they all dropped it quite a bit. It is scuffed, bruised, and a bit cracked. I wouldnt be horribly surprised if the drops are the reason it is no longer holding a charge.

I have dropped my Tesla a few times, though never in the spectacular ways my V5F has crashed. There are a few scuffs on the Tesla, but no cracks. The dipping pedals have scraped the ground a bit, but overall it is in fine shape.

I havent done a range test since the first few weeks I had it, but I did do a pretty long ride last month. I clearly remember being impressed that the battery was still working well, but I cant find photographic evidence to back up my memory. I recall riding around 15 miles and still having about 70% charge remaining.

I am quite confident that I can still [get 34 miles on a single charge][gtrt].

When I rode my little 14 V5F, I usually only wore my cheap bicycle helmet. I used to average about 10 mph with short bursts up to 15 mph. I was always able to jump off and jog to a stop when things went wrong.

Then I bought the Tesla. My average speeds quickly climbed to 15 mph with short bursts up to 20 mph. These days I have EUC World set to give me warning beeps at 21 mph. Most of my rides average 15 mph still, because I do have to spend time navigating around other people, but Im bursting up to 25 mph, and Im pretty good at staying just 1 mph short of the beeps.

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I started wearing my wrist guards as soon as I acquired the Tesla. When I noticed that my average speeds were getting to 15 mph, I knew I needed a better helmet. Theres a much higher chance of falling flat on my face now, so I wound up buying a Bell Super 3R helmet.

I tried a cheap motorcycle helmet, but visibility and airflow are both poor. The Bell cost three times as much, but it looks like a block of Swiss cheese. I get plenty of airflow even if Im moving slow, the face hole is quite large, and I have that sturdy guard protecting my chin.

Im in Texas. Well be over 100° most days every summer, and it definitely isnt a dry heat. The Bell Super 3R is worth every penny.

I wish my experiences could be a little more relevant to you. I dont think the Tesla V2 was released more than a year before I bought mine, and as of a few months ago, stock of the last of the V2 models seems to be running out everywhere.

Im excited that I can tell you that Ive had a good year with my Tesla V2, and that it has treated me so well. Im disappointed that you cant directly repeat my success. Sure, the new Tesla seems like it will be a fantastic wheel, but Im not expecting it to be the right wheel for someone that would be eyeballing the Tesla V2!

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As near as I can tell, it is difficult to choose a bad wheel. There are some obvious gotchas to watch out for. Youll probably hate lugging a 77-pound Veteran Sherman up three flights of stairs every day, and commuting on a tiny MTen3 will probably be uncomfortable.

These wheels are all made by companies in China that are looking to cut every corner they can get away with. Some wheels have been catching fire, though the problem doesnt seem to be nearly as rampant as the hoverboard debacle everyone probably remembers.

First of all, I am hoping to not upgrade to something bigger and better this year. New toys are always tempting. Id love a suspension. Id enjoy a bigger, faster, even more stable wheel. More importantly, though, I would like a properly waterproof wheel. Not necessarily something I can submerge, but something that wont be likely to cut out on me in the rain. Maybe in a year or two there will be a nice suspension wheel that checks this box.

I am just going to continue to ride. I look forward to riding to the donut shop. I look forward to writing blogs while eating pizza. I look forward to finding new places to ride. In other words, I am looking forward to doing all the things that the pandemic has prevented me from doing!

What do you think? Are you riding a Gotway Tesla V2? Are you looking to buy something similar? Have you been riding for a while? Are you a casual EUC user like me, or are you putting a ton of miles on your wheel? Do you think I need to invest in the gear that will allow me to safely ride faster, or should I just stay casual? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

I have had my Sony ZV-1 for nearly four months now. It has been a fantastic little camera. It is doing the jobs I expected it to do, and it is doing them quite well.

I considered waiting another month or two before writing this follow-up blog post. Ive been very much underutilizing my poor ZV-1. Weve had month-long medical emergencies, cold, rain, a long cat-related medical emergency, and then snow, power outages, and extremely cold weather here in Plano!

I certainly expected that Id haul the camera and an FPV miniquad out with me on some rides on my Gotway Tesla electric unicycle and talk at the camera about something interesting by now. It just hasnt happened. Im confident that it will.

When Jeremy Cook invited me to be the co-host of The Creativity Podcast, I knew I needed a camera upgrade. If I wanted to be the best-looking guy on the podcast, I needed something better than my Logitech C920 webcam.

Under ideal conditions, the C920 isnt a bad video camera. I noticed last week when Brian and I tested the functionality of Riverside.fm for podcasting. Brians Logitech C922 didnt look bad, but something looked off. When I analyzed his locally recorded video, I noticed that quite a few frames wound up being doubled.

Does the Twitter butcher a screenshot of a video as badly as it does a video clip? Im betting that it doesnt! Thats the Logitech C920 tuned as best I can get it on the left, and the Sony ZV-1 on the right. pic.twitter.com/1AI7YiU2ME

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) February 28, 2021

Im using the Sony ZV-1 with an inexpensive USB-to-HDMI adapter. It is the same inexpensive HDMI adapter used by the Pi-KVM project. How cool is that?!

I dont seem to drop any frames. The ZV-1 really shines under poor lighting conditions, but when I light myself well, the C920 really isnt all that far behind.

Except for the inconsistent frame rate. Thats just awful.

I record all my podcasts using manual exposure settings. I want to get as close to a 1/60 shutter as I can. I also want as much blurring of the background as I can get, so I want to make sure the ZV-1 is wide open at f/1.8. That leaves me with control of the ISO, so it isnt difficult to tune things in.

The only problem is that the camera is looking right at me. Sure, the screen is flipped around, but I have to reach around the other side to work the limited numbers of buttons and knobs on the Sony ZV-1. Yes, up is always up, but left and right are reversed. I often move cursors in the wrong direction or hit the wrong button. Im glad I can get this stuff set up before we start recording an interview!

I have my new Sony ZV-1 plugged into my HDMI doodad, and it is working with OBS. Im still making a few adjustments. Is this scary!? pic.twitter.com/ZV0PzfA22G

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) October 30, 2020

I did finally manage to get the Android app working. It certainly helps with this, but connecting an app to make these adjustments brings its own kind of pain. You have to find the app, make sure the camera is in the right mode to accept a connection, and even then you might try two or three times before it works. Even when everything works correctly, this still takes quite a bit of time.

As soon as I heard about this firmware update, I downloaded it immediately. Could I really use my Sony ZV-1 as a webcam and skip my HDMI-to-USB dongle?!

Sort of. It works. With the new firmware, the ZV-1 does indeed show up as a plain old UVC webcam as long as you activate the correct options in the menu. It most definitely isnt a replacement for using a USB dongle.

The ZV-1 is limited to 720p via USB. It claims to run at 30 frames per second, but the output sure doesnt look like it. It is an upgrade in picture quality over the Logitech C920, but the ZV-1 has that same sort of stuttering frame rate problem over USB.

It is worth spending $20 on an HDMI cable and a USB dongle to get smooth 1080p or 4K video out of your Sony ZV-1.

It depends. Just a few weeks ago my friend Alex sold his Sony RX100 IV to my friend Brian, and Alex snagged a used Sony ZV-1 off Craigslist. They both got extremely good deals, and I am most definitely envious.

I got to do a good amount of research when Brian was trying to figure out if the older RX100 would be a good fit for him. The Sony ZV-1 is really an RX100 VIII. Thats four hardware revisions newer than Brians used RX100 IV.

NOTE: Thats Brian talking to the camera about Tailscale using his RX100 IV.

Brian wants to use his RX100 as a webcam and as his top-down camera in his recording studio. His older RX100 has a comparable lens and exactly the same 1 sensor as my Sony ZV-1. The RX100 IV also has good eye-tracking autofocus.

It is very well possible that 5 years of image-processing improvements mean my ZV-1 makes better use of that sensor, but at least we know theyre working with the same hardware.

Im quite confident the RX100 will work just as well as my ZV-1 would for his intended use case. I dont want to tell you how much money Brian saved.

Im not saying you should buy a used RX100 IV. It may not be the best value. For all I know, you can find newer cameras in the RX lineup for less. The MK4 just happened to be the one that traded hands within my circle of friends recently!

The Sony ZV-1 has some really nice upgrades over the previous models, especially if youre planning on doing the talking-to-the-camera shtick. The built-in microphone is much improved, and the screen has more comfortable articulation if you want to film yourself. Most of the RX100 series even lacks a microphone input.

Are these features worth $150 to $300 or more compared to one of the previous RX100 models? For me, the answer is easily a yes!

The older the RX100, the bigger the difference in price, but the difference in performance grows wider with age, too. It is easy to start pointing at improvements on the spec sheet to find $150 or more extra value in the ZV-1.

I told Brian that Id be buying that RX100 IV just to keep it mounted in my office if he didnt buy it. Even if I did buy that camera, I would still want my Sony ZV-1 to take with me for recording on the go.

I dont know that I have a lot to add to this part of the discussion since my first few days with the camera. I dont like using the ZV-1 for photography. It doesnt have a viewfinder. If Im going to hold a camera up in my hands without being able to help hold it steady with my face, I might as well just use my phone.

That said, the Sony ZV-1s dynamic range is much better than I ever expected! My aging full-frame Canon 6D is supposed to have somewhere around 12 stops of dynamic range. I did some pretty simple tests in my office. I shot very underexposed pictures on both the ZV-1 and 6D and pushed the raw photos up to a reasonable exposure.

The nightly builds of Darktable seem to understand the raw files from my Sony ZV-1. Twitter will likely overcompress both of these. Im hoping the difference between the jpg off the camera and the processed RAW will still be obvious. pic.twitter.com/ihqnqeXof9

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) November 24, 2020

My tests were terrible, and it didnt feel like a fair comparison. The ZV-1 seemed like it could be pushed even brighter from underexposure than the Canon 6D, but the 6D has much nicer color science.

I really only have one actual photo that Ive taken with the Sony ZV-1. At the time I took this photo of a hot air balloon, I didnt have a recent enough version of Darktable to edit the raw file, so I just published the jpeg on Instagram.

Ive since upgraded Darktable, and I can edit the ZV-1 raw files. I definitely feel like it is worth shooting raw on this camera. This isnt a heavily edited photo. The extra blue in the sky and the shade of green of the grass was probably my choice, but the raw file really let me recover detail in the shadows so you can see the texture of the grass. The jpeg from the camera just didnt have that possibility.

Im doing a bad enough job at taking my Sony ZV-1 with me. I havent gotten any vlogging done over the last four months except for a couple minutes of test footage. If Im not going to manage to take my tiny ZV-1 out with me, I would never manage to take an APS-C body and lens out on the road!

This is like comparing apples to oranges, but at least theyre both fruits. Theres a lot of overlap in functionality, and theres a lot that the Sony ZV-1 can do nearly as well as the Sony a6600.

Both cameras are going to do well when I can control the lighting. Sure, a nice lens on the a6600 would improve my podcasts a bit, but would that be worth spending three or four times as much money? Maybe someday!

The a6600 without a lens is larger and weighs nearly twice as much as the Sony ZV-1. Add even a pancake lens to the a6600 and it just wont fit in my front pocket. Having the option to drop the Sony ZV-1 in my pocket is awesome, and when I do, I am carrying a camera, lens, and reasonable microphone with me!

When I bought the Sony ZV-1, I was asking myself if I would continue to use the Osmo Pocket for vlogging. I wish I figured out the answer to that question over the last four months. Im sure Ill have a better answer over the coming months, but Im going to give you the facts.

I did some vloggy test footage with the Osmo Pocket, the Freewill wide angle lens, and a mic clown nose as a wind blocker. If you could see how windy it was, you would be extremely impressed by these results. pic.twitter.com/sr7Nt0YF15

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) March 27, 2020

Im excited that I can fit the ZV-1 in my pocket, but thats not the whole story. Theres only so much you can do without some sort of tripod. You most definitely cant hole the ZV-1 up in front of you and talk to the camera without a small tripod!

My smallest tripod is bigger than my DJI Osmo Pocket, and if I take the Sony ZV-1 out for a ride on my electric unicycle, Im going to have to bring a tripod anyway.

This is where I start to ask questions. Why carry two things when the Osmo Pocket is smaller than either the tripod or the ZV-1?

If I take the awesome Sony ZV-1 out with me on a journey where I want to talk to the camera, I have to bring a little tripod.

But the DJI Osmo Pocket is an entire vlogging camera that I can point right at my face without using accessories, and it is smaller than most any tripod! pic.twitter.com/g5xZRZWEOk

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) March 8, 2021

Ive tried vlogging with a phone. Every time you turn on the phone you have to unlock it, find your camera app, flip the camera around, then hit record. I can take the Osmo Pocket out with one hand and be recording myself in less than 5 seconds, and I dont even have to look at the thing to do it.

I dont have an answer. I expected I would have posted at least two or three vlogs with the ZV-1 by now. Ive been doing a bad job and it hasnt happened yet!

Yes. Were already to the conclusion, or at least the conclusion so far. Im doing a bad job. I should have used the Sony ZV-1 for more work over the last four months, but life has gotten in the way.

I will try to do a better job utilizing my new camera over the coming months, but so far it has been doing its primary job of replacing my webcam quite flawlessly. It is a huge upgrade, and Im happy to have it!

What do you think? Did I write my update post on the Sony ZV-1 too early? Am I underutilizing it? Am I missing out on some important features, or do you think I bought entirely the wrong camera?! Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Im not new to the world of Infiniband. I bought a pair of 20-Gigabit Mellanox Infiniband cards in 2016 to connect my desktop PC to my virtual machine host. It has been chugging along just fine, though Ive never gotten a full 20 gigabits per second out of this setup. Well talk more about that later.

My posts about my upgrade from gigabit Ethernet to Infiniband have always been solidly in my top ten posts according to my analytics, and that has only just barely been true lately. That got me thinking that my 20-gigabit setup is getting long in the tooth, and it might just be time for an upgrade!

No. I do not need to upgrade. When files are cached in RAM on my NAS virtual machine, my 20-gigabit hardware can hit about 700 megabytes per second over NFS. Thats more than twice as fast as it can pull data off the hard disks or SSD cache. Im most definitely not going to notice an upgrade to faster hardware.

Thats not the only reason to upgrade. You fine folks shouldnt be buying 20-gigabit hardware any longer. The 40-gigabit gear is nicer, and it costs about what I paid for used 20-gigabit gear in 2016. I dont like recommending things Im not using myself, so an upgrade was definitely in my future.

My server sides Infiniband card has 8x PCIe 2.0 lanes available. I dont have either an 8x slot or PCIe 3.0 4x slot available in my desktop. Either of those would just about double my speeds, but Im not willing to move my GPU out of its 16x PCIe 3.0 slot! pic.twitter.com/IqlsB5ztod

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) February 6, 2021

My old gear wasnt limited by the Infiniband interface. It was limited by the cards PCIe interface and the slots I have available in my two machines.

My server side has a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot available and my desktop has a 4x PCIe 2.0 slot. I knew I wouldnt hit 40 gigabits per second with the new hardware, but as long as they negotiated to PCIe 2.0 instead of PCIe 1.1, my speeds would surely double!

When I wrote about my 20-gigabit Infiniband cards in 2016, I claimed that the 8 gigabits per second I was seeing was a limit of the PCIe bus. I was correct, but in rereading that post and looking at my hardware and the dmesg output on driver initialization, I was confused!

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[    1.709385] mlx4_core: Mellanox ConnectX core driver v2.2-1 (Feb, 2014)[    1.709449] mlx4_core: Initializing 0000:02:00.0[    4.001247] mlx4_core 0000:02:00.0: PCIe BW is different than device's capability[    4.001301] mlx4_core 0000:02:00.0: PCIe link speed is 2.5GT/s, device supports 2.5GT/s[    4.001356] mlx4_core 0000:02:00.0: PCIe link width is x4, device supports x802:00.0 InfiniBand: Mellanox Technologies MT25418 [ConnectX VPI PCIe 2.0 2.5GT/s - IB DDR / 10GigE] (rev a0)        Subsystem: Mellanox Technologies MT25418 [ConnectX VPI PCIe 2.0 2.5GT/s - IB DDR / 10GigE]

Mellanox claims my old 25408 cards are PCIe 2.0. When the driver initializes, it claims the cards are PCIe 2.0, but the driver also says theyre operating at 2.5 GT/s. Thats PCIe 1.1 speeds.

This isnt relevant to the 40-gigabit or 56-gigabit hardware, but I think it is worth clearing up. All the cards in Mellanoxs 25000-series lineup follow the PCIe 2.0 spec, but half of the cards only support 2.5 GT/s speeds. The other half can operate at PCIe 2.0s full speed of 5 GT/s.

I looked at 56-gigabit Infiniband cards. I bought two, but I made a mistake. I accidentally ordered a pair of HP FlexibleLOM cards for only $25. FlexibleLOM is very close to being PCIe, but the pinout isnt compatible and the form factor isnt quite right. Actual PCIe 56-gigabit cards cost $80 on eBay.

I dont know why I ordered FlexibleLOM cards. I think I was just super excited about 56-gigabit Infiniband cards for only $13 each. Dont make my mistake.

No Infiniband upgrade for me today! I dont remember noticing that these arent standard form factor PCIe cards when I ordered, but they sure are!

If this werent for a blog post, Id just make them work, but Im going to reorder correct hardware. pic.twitter.com/xxJ1G1fzA9

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 19, 2021

NOTE: FlexibleLOM to PCIe adapters exist, and they might be a really good value, since you can get two FlexibleLOM 56-gigabit cards for $25 compared to $150 or more for a pair of PCIe cards. They didnt seem easy to source, so I opted to go the easy route.

I wound up downgrading to 40-gigabit Mellanox ConnectX-3 PCIe cards. The 56-gigabit cards wont run Infiniband any faster for me because my available PCIe slots are the real bottleneck here. If youre running Infiniband, this will likely be true for you as well, and you can save yourself $80 or more.

If you want to run super fast Ethernet using these cards, it might be worth spending a few extra dollars. My 40-gigabit cards can only operate at 10 gigabits per second in Ethernet mode. The 56-gigabit Mellanox cards can operate as 40-gigabit Ethernet adapters.

Ethernet is easier to configure than Infiniband, especially if all youre interested in is IP networking. I was hoping to test this out, because 40gbe would simplify my setup quite a bit. I opted to save the $80 and just continue routing to my virtual machines.

Im not encouraging you to buy brand new Infiniband cards. Youll pay at least twice as much for a single card as it would cost you to connect three machines with dual-port Infiniband cards from eBay.

The 20-gigabit Infiniband cards I bought in 2016 were already 10 years old when I started using them. The 40-gigabit cards I just installed are probably around 10 years old as well.

Not easily. Im using a 1-meter QSFP+ cable to directly connect one Infiniband card to another. My desktop computer and KVM host both live in my office and they sit right next to each other. These QSFP+ cables can only be about 3 meters long.

Oh good. The Mellanox QSFP+ cable I ordered has a sticker that says FDR on it. Thats an indication that I ordered the correct cable to match the pair of 56-gigabit FDR Infiniband cards that will be arriving Monday! pic.twitter.com/sMwCbcsY0k

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 16, 2021

If you need a longer run, you have to use fiber. Im seeing some 50 lengths of fiber with QSFP+ modules on each end for around $70. There are QSFP+ transceiver modules for $30. Youd have to find your own compatible fiber to plug into those modules.

The vast majority of Infiniband cards on eBay have two ports. Thats enough ports to directly connect three machines. This is what my friend Brian did with his 10-gigabit Ethernet setup. In practice, our configurations are pretty similar. I just have one fewer machine on my super-fast network.

My desktop and VM server live on two different networks. Theyre both connected to my homes gigabit-Ethernet network, and theyre both plugged into my tiny Infiniband network. The Infiniband network has its own subnet, and Im using the hosts file on my desktop to make sure the Infiniband connection is used to connect to any virtual machines that need super high-speed connections. This is especially important with my NAS virtual machine.

You could install even more Infiniband cards, but I wouldnt recommend it.

This is where my old 20-gigabit DDR Infiniband adapters had the edge. It was easy to find 8-port 20-gigabit Infiniband switches on eBay for $100 or less.

There are a few small 40-gigabit QDR Infiniband switches, but most are huge 36-port beasts. Theyre not expensive. Some are as low as $150, but most are closer to $250.

This is quite a bump in cost compared to plugging three machines directly into one another in a star topology, but using an Infiniband switch also simplifies the network configuration considerably. It is still a fraction of the price of 10gbe over CAT-6 cable.

It just sounds cool, doesnt it? It often starts fun conversations too. When people are chatting about network stuff, and you mention that you run Infiniband at home, folks are often surprised. More often than not theyve never even heard of Infiniband. You also get to say goofy things like, To Infiniband and beyond!

For me, Infiniband makes my NAS feel like a local disk installed in my desktop. The virtual machine host where my NAS VM lives isnt exactly high-end these days, and I didnt build it to saturate a 10-gigabit connection. It has a pair of mirrored 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSDs and four 4 TB 7200 RPM hard disks in a RAID 10. The SSDs are the boot volume and are also being used as lvmcache for the hard disks.

I usually see read and write speeds in the 300 megabyte-per-second range. Small random writes get propped up by the SSD cache, but most of what I hit the NAS for involves video editing. The storage in my cameras is much slower than this, and my disks are rarely the bottleneck when editing video.

The fastest disks in my server are the 850 EVO SSDs, and their top benchmarked speed is somewhere around 350 megabytes per second. The spinning RAID 10 probably tops out around there too. My disk access wouldnt be any faster if they were installed directly in my desktop.

This just means I have room to grow. I could upgrade to faster solid-state drives for my lvmcache and triple the count of disks in my RAID 10, and I would still have a bit of extra room on the network. Thats awesome!

Infiniband supports Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). This allows memory to be copied between hosts without much CPU intervention.

The most common use of RDMA is in conjunction with iSCSI devices. iSCSI normally operates over TCP/IP. When using iSCSI on Infiniband, the IP stack is bypassed and memory is transferred directly from one machine to another. This reduces latency and increases throughput.

If youre connecting virtual machines to a Storage Area Network (SAN), this may be of interest to you.

Ive really only ever used iSCSI to say that Ive done it and to tell people how easy it is to do. Im not interested in setting things up here at home to rely on iSCSI and a separate storage server.

Everything I wrote about setting up Infiniband in 2016 works today. Sort of. A few weeks ago I upgraded my KVM host from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 and then immediately to 20.04. One of those upgrades decided to rename my Infiniband interfaces.

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[   11.960168] mlx4_core 0000:01:00.0 ibp1s0: renamed from ib0[   11.975603] mlx4_core 0000:01:00.0 ibp1s0d1: renamed from ib1

This goofed up my configuration in /etc/network/interfaces. Not only that, but the old network configuration using /etc/network/ has been deprecated in favor of NetworkManager.

Im still using the old-style configuration on the server, and it works fine. All I did was pull the old 20-gigabit cards, install the new 40-gigabit cards, and all my configuration was just working on my first boot.

If you have a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 or any other distro that is using NetworkManager, I have to imagine that it is much easier to just use NetworkManager.

There are two solutions for running regular network traffic over Infiniband. Theres Ethernet over Infiniband (EoIB), which runs at layer 2, and theres IP over OB (IPoIB) which runs at layer 3. EoIB is not in the mainline Linux kernel, while IPoIB is. IPoIB just works out of the box.

I wanted to avoid using EoIB because it requires installing software from Mellanox. What if I want to upgrade my desktop to a bleeding edge kernel that Mellanox doesnt support? What if theres a conflict between my Nvidia driver and the Mellanox EoIB driver? I dont want to deal with any of that.

That created a new problem. Since IPoIB runs on layer 3, I cant just bridge virtual machines to that device. Bridging happens at layer 2. This means I am forced to route from the Infiniband interface to my virtual machines.

I touched on this a bit earlier when I mentioned that 56-gigabit Mellanox cards could also be used as 40-gigabit Ethernet devices. If you want to use drivers in the mainline kernel AND be able to plunk your virtual machines onto a bridged interface, it may well be worth spending the extra cash on 56-gigabit cards. The Ethernet drivers will have no trouble with this.

This is already a long blog post. I wrote about my adventures in getting IPoIB to work well with the 20-gigabit Infiniband cards, and the configuration hasnt changed. There are some gotchas in there, for sure.

You need to get your MTU up to 65520. If any interface in the chain is stuck at the default of 1500, you might experience extremely slow speeds to your virtual machines. I had a persnickety interface hiding on me.

Even with everything configured correctly, youre going to lose a little throughput when routing. On the 20-gigabit Infiniband hardware, I was losing roughly one gigabit per second when talking to the virtual machines. Im doing better with the 40-gigabit gear, so your mileage may vary here.

This is the part Ive been waiting for ever since I pulled the trigger on the new Infiniband cards. Heres what I know.

I tend to see 300 megabytes per second when connected to my NAS VM with my old 20-gigabit Infiniband hardware. Thats about three times faster than gigabit Ethernet, and it is pretty much the top speed of my solid-state and hard drives. This isnt going to be improved, which is a bummer.

Lets start with what the logs say when the driver initializes the Infiniband cards:

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Desktop:[   16.270996] mlx4_core 0000:06:00.0: 16.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth, limited by 5.0 GT/s PCIe x4 link at 0000:02:04.0 (capable of 63.008 Gb/s with 8.0 GT/s PCIe x8 link)KVM server:[    9.313679] mlx4_core 0000:01:00.0: 32.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth, limited by 5.0 GT/s PCIe x8 link at 0000:00:02.0 (capable of 63.008 Gb/s with 8.0 GT/s PCIe x8 link)

If I had a PCIe 3.0 slot with 8 lanes available on each end, my maximum speeds would be around 64 gigabits per second. Id need both ports to reach speeds like that!

In the server, there are 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes available giving us up to 32 gigabits per second. My desktop has 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes available, which is my limiting factor here. The only faster slot in my desktop is the 16x PCIe 3.0 slot where my Nvidia GPU lives. Im just going to have to live with a 16-gigabit top speed.

Next up is the iperf benchmark. This will give me a more realistic top speed including all the IP network overhead.

1234567891011121314151617

KVM Server as host:------------------------------------------------------------Server listening on TCP port 5001TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)------------------------------------------------------------[  4] local 10.42.253.1 port 5001 connected with 10.42.253.2 port 45530[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec  14.3 GBytes  12.3 Gbits/secKVM Server as client:------------------------------------------------------------Client connecting to 10.42.253.2, TCP port 5001TCP window size: 6.01 MByte (default)------------------------------------------------------------[  3] local 10.42.253.1 port 36662 connected with 10.42.253.2 port 5001[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  14.9 GBytes  12.8 Gbits/sec

The old cards topped out at 6.53 gigabits per second. The new cards are nearly twice as fast!

When routing to my NAS virtual machine, my iperf tests would run about 700 megabits per second slower compared to testing directly against the KVM host. I was super hyped up when I saw the new numbers!

1234567891011121314151617

NAS as host:------------------------------------------------------------Server listening on TCP port 5001TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)------------------------------------------------------------[  4] local 10.42.252.2 port 5001 connected with 10.42.253.2 port 37304[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec  14.1 GBytes  12.1 Gbits/secNAS as client:------------------------------------------------------------Client connecting to 10.42.253.2, TCP port 5001TCP window size: 2.50 MByte (default)------------------------------------------------------------[  3] local 10.42.252.2 port 59246 connected with 10.42.253.2 port 5001[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  14.9 GBytes  12.8 Gbits/sec

This is awesome! Im losing zero to a couple of hundred megabits per second to my extra hop. Thats a big improvement!

iperf is fun. I get to throw around gigantic numbers that I can point at excitedly. Thats great, but Im more interested in what these numbers mean for me on a day-to-day basis. What kind of speeds can my NFS server reach?

Caching and forcibly dropping those caches isnt going well for me in my attempt to reproduce these tests. Theyre all going too fast! Heres the tweet with my original NFS tests:

As with the 20-gigabit cards, Im getting about 270 megabytes per second on an uncached read over NFS. The 40-gigabit cards have brought a RAM cached read up to 1.2 gigabytes per second. A locally cached dd on my desktop is right where it always was at 9+ GB/s. pic.twitter.com/mO33YVeCGk

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) February 6, 2021

My unprimed, mostly uncached test copy of a 4 GB DVD image ran at 272 megabytes per second. Thats right around my usual speeds. It is limited by the SSD cache and the rather small number of ancient 4 TB mechanical drives in the server.

Then I dropped my local caches and transferred the same file again. Theres more than enough RAM in the NAS virtual machine to hold the entire DVD image in cache, so I should be testing the maximum throughput of my NFS server. You can see that Im hitting 1.1 or 1.2 gigabytes per second. Ive seen it hit 1.3 gigabytes per second just as often, so my NFS server is hovering right around the 10-gigabit-per-second mark. Thats not bad!

The most Id ever seen out of the old 20-gigabit hardware over NFS was around 700 megabytes per second.

The last dd command winds up testing the local cache on my desktop. That can move the file at nearly 10 gigabytes per second. Isnt it neat being able to move a file across the network at even 10% the speed of RAM?!

This is pretty much what Id predicted and exactly what I was hoping for. My Infiniband network speed has just about doubled. Thats fun!

Im not going to notice a difference in practice. My disks were my bottleneck before, and I knew they would continue to be my bottleneck after the upgrade.

Im actually maxing out my available PCIe slots. Thats exciting! Not only that, but my network is actually truly faster than Brians 10-gigabit Ethernet. Thats even better!

For most home NAS builds, the gigabit Ethernet interface is the bottleneck. My tiny Infiniband network is rarely going to be using more than 25% of its capacity. I can grow into a lot more hard drives and faster SSD cache before I saturate this 40-gigabit hardware!

Im pleased to be able to say that I feel the same way about the 40-gigabit Infiniband hardware as I did about the 20-gigabit hardware five years ago. At around $100 to connect two machines, it really is an inexpensive performance boost for your home network.

It may not have been a wise investment of time, effort, and $100 for me. Im not going to see any real advantage over my old gear. If youre already running 10gbe or 20-gigabit Infiniband, youre probably in the same boat, and there isnt much reason to upgrade. If youre investing in faster-than-gigabit hardware for the first time, I think you should skip that stuff and go straight to 40-gigabit Infiniband or even 56-gigabit Infiniband cards that can do 40-gigabit Ethernet.

What do you think? Do you need to be able to move files around at home faster than the 100 megabytes per second youre getting out of your gigabit Ethernet network? Is 40-gigabit Infiniband a good fit for you, or would you rather pay double for 40-gigabit Ethernet cards? Are you glad I paid for a useless upgrade just to publish my findings? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

I am a fan of Dropbox-style file sync services. Im not a fan of letting someone else have the keys to access my encrypted data. Back in 2013, I tested every open-source self-hosted cloud-storage solution I could get my hands on.

At the time, Seafile was the only Dropbox-style option that could meet my needs. Other software might work today, but Seafile hasnt failed me in 7 or 8 years.

In 2013, my Seafile server lived in a virtual machine on a physical server I already had colocated in a data center. In 2018, my last colocated server started having hardware issues, so I started moving services to the cloud. I wound up subscribing to Prometeus.nets Seafile service in Romania.

Some things have changed since then, and Ive decided it is time to bring Seafile back in house.

I completely forgot to list the parts I used when putting together my little Raspberry Pi server. Sure, I mentioned all the parts in various places, but it would be easier for you if I made a list. Wouldnt it?!

This isnt quite what I ordered. I borrowed parts from the Pi-KVM setup that Brian gave me. Aside from the case being transparent, this sure looks like thats the kit from my Pi-KVM. I kept the 32 GB microSD card with my KVM and used a random 8 GB microSD card in this Seafile build.

Aside from those two small differences, this seems to be exactly what Im using. The 4 GB Pi is definitely overkill. You can absolutely save yourself $20 and use a 2 GB model. You can even use an older Pi. Seafile and Tailscale arent terribly heavy!

This is my little #RaspberryPi Seafile server with its 14 TB drive. The Pis case is affixed with 3M Dual Lock, and there some stickyback Velcro keeping the cables tidy.

How did I do?! pic.twitter.com/dDWCN3vExd

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 25, 2021

You should MOST DEFINITELY shop around for a hard drive. When I bought the 14 TB drive it was on sale for $230. Theres always a USB hard drive on sale somewhere. Just keep your eyes open!

In 2013, Seafile was the only piece of software I could find that was both encrypted on at the client and could scale to tens of thousands of files. My hope was to sync my entire home directory. At the time, Seafile couldnt handle that many files in a single library well. I also decided it would be cumbersome to literally sync my actual home directory, but I did manage to sync every important subdirectory into its own Seafile library.

Seafile encrypts my data before it leaves my local machines, and the server doesnt have the keys to unlock my files. If youre paranoid, though, you need to be careful. If you access an encrypted library in Seafiles web interface, your keys are stored in memory on the server for about an hour.

Everything that used to be synced to my old third-party-hosted Seafile server in Romania has been uploaded to my little #raspberrypi setup, and my laptop and desktop are both connected and syncing.

My collection of years of flight footage is still uploading. pic.twitter.com/kwStowePao

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 29, 2021

This means that if someone hacks into my Seafile server, the attacker wont have the ability to read any of my data. If a thief steals my server, they wont have access to my data.

I want Dropbox-style file sync between my desktop, laptop, and a few other machines. I want a centralized server in a remote location storing an encrypted copy of my data. Seafile also stores historical snapshots of my data on the server, so if I accidentally delete or corrupt all my files, I can always download them again.

Seafile is at the heart of my backup strategy.

When I signed up at Prometeus.net, the bulk of my data was in the RAW photos from my DSLR. At the time, they consumed less than half the space in Prometeuss 400 GB plan. Today Im at around 380 GB, and Prometeus doesnt have a larger tier.

I planned to do a nice, smooth S-turn over those trees at the other side of the field, but then I had to play a game of is-that-a-dude-or-an-electrical-box. It wasnt a dude. It was a power box.

And why was that other tree so low?! pic.twitter.com/ZWHOIcZhX8

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 19, 2021

I also have nearly three terabytes of video, and that sometimes grows by hundreds of gigabytes in a month. Most of it is GoPro footage from my FPV drones. The video is stored on a RAID 10 on my NAS virtual machine. I dont have a backup plan for it. If my NAS dies, my GoPro footage will be gone.

Im not terribly concerned about this. Im probably never going to look at the older footage. Even so, if Im addressing my lack of storage, then I may as well include this data in my plans.

Lets just forget my paranoia and assume Im not worried about Dropbox peeking at my private data. Lets ignore the fact that Dropbox stopped working on some Linux file systems. We can also ignore the fact that Google doesnt even have a file sync client for Linux.

I was mostly looking at price. Google Drive is $100 per year for 2 TB, and Dropbox is $120 per year for 2 TB. Im paying $43 per year for 400 GB of Seafile storage from Prometeus. Prometeus was quite a bit cheaper in 2018, but Google One and Dropbox have adjusted their pricing since then.

A fresh #RaspberryPi and 14 TB USB hard drive arrived today. I have Raspbian installed, Tailscale is up and running, and Seafile seems to be working now.

Seafile was being a butthole, and it was half my fault. pic.twitter.com/OsMeh6zUwx

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 24, 2021

Neither service offers a large enough plan for my needs, but Im just going to assume I could buy 4 TB of storage for double the price of 2 TB. Im looking to sync a little over 3 TB, so a 4 TB plan makes sense to me.

Id be paying $240 per year to Dropbox or $200 per year to Google. Wait until you see what my do-it-yourself setup cost.

Tailscale is fantastic. Tailscale is a mesh VPN service built on top of Wireguard. You install the Tailscale client on every one of your machines, and each computer will connect directly to every other computer on your Tailscale network using Wireguard. Tailscale manages all the authentication and encryption keys for you.

One of the things I hated about hosting my own Seafile server on the public Internet was security updates. I had to constantly make sure my operating system was up to date. If Seafile or Nginx had a serious security patch, I had to race to update it as soon as possible.

Tailscale is hiding my Seafile server from the public. My Raspberry Pi server will be sitting behind Brians firewall, and I blocked every port on the Ethernet interface except for Tailscales port. I can only ssh in through the encrypted Tailscale network interface, and I can only access the Seafile services on that interface.

I wont have the entire internet banging away at my Seafile server. The only computers with access will be computers that I control. It will be so much less stressful!

Not only that, but Ill be able to share my Seafile server with my wife using Tailscales machine-sharing feature.

The stable release of Tailscale in their Raspbian repositories is version 1.2. I switched my Pi to the unstable repository, and that installed version 1.5.4. This doubled my network performance over Tailscale!

I wasnt smart enough to investigate this until after the initial upload of my 3.3 terabytes of data. This would have saved me considerable time!

I got this idea shortly after Brian gave me a full Pi-KVM setup for Christmas. I immediately plugged the whole setup into my virtual machine host to test it out. As soon as I saw that it was working, I installed Tailscale on the Pi-KVM. That got the wheels turning.

The next week, I ordered a 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 and a 14 TB Seagate USB hard drive. The hard drive was on sale for $230, and I overpaid a bit at $54 for the Pi with a power supply from Amazon. I figured it was worth it for the 2-day shipping.

Dont just buy the hard drive I bought. Theres always an external USB hard drive on sale somewhere!

I almost accidentally right into that tree! pic.twitter.com/ULjFr4nYjv

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 14, 2021

The Pi-KVM setup was using a 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4, but the entire setup was using only about 200 megabytes of RAM. I swapped the 2 GB Pi into the Pi-KVM setup, and I stole the 4 GB Pi for the Seafile project. Even the 2 GB Pi is overkill for the Seafile server, but I figured that Im more likely to find a use for the extra RAM on the Seafile server.

I could have saved a bit more money. Theres no reason for this to be a Raspberry Pi 4. Any old Pi would do the job. I ordered a Pi 4 to swap into the Pi-KVM because some of the accessories are USB-C, and older Pi models dont have USB-C ports.

At full price, my 14 TB Pi Seafile server would be just a bit over $300. With the sale on the hard drive, I paid a little under $300.

I have to admit that I was extremely tempted to buy a second hard drive to set up a RAID 1 array. It was easy enough to talk myself out of it.

Nearly doubling the price of the project wasnt exciting to me. Price per available terabyte would still compare quite favorably to Google One or Dropbox. Theres nearly 10 TB that Im not even using, though. Using a second hard drive would mean it would take 3 years of use to match Google Ones pricing instead of 18 months. Still reasonable, but not as interesting.

Recently Ive started saying that I have a redundant array of inexpensive computers. Theres a copy of my data on the Seafile server. Theres a copy of my data on my desktop. Theres a copy of some of my data on my NAS. Theres a copy of my data on my laptop.

Any one of these machines counts as my backup. If that cheap 14 TB drive in my new Seafile Pi server fails, I can replace it and reupload my data. Sure, losing out on Seafiles sync services for a few days will be an inconvenience, but it will be a minor one. These days I can always use Tailscale to access files on another machine in an emergency like this.

If I did buy another 14 TB Seagate drive, I would install it in my NAS instead of building a mirror on the Seafile server. That additional drive could be another sync point for a Seafile client, or I could do an rsync backup of the Seafile server. Either option would be a better value to me than mirroring the Seafile servers storage drive.

My Seafile server has been off-site backup since 2013. At first, it lived in a data center 20 miles south of my house. Then it lived in some random data center in Romania. My new Raspberry Pi Seafile server is going to live 6 miles away at Brian Mosess house.

The server is still in my house today, but Im treating it as if it was already living somewhere else. Everything on the local interface is already firewalled off, and I am uploading my data to Seafile using Tailscale.

Dont worry about my data. I still have my account at Prometeus.net, and they still have a rather recent copy of my data. If my house burns down, I might lose a few days worth of writing.

I told Brian he needs to colocate a Raspberry Pi server at my house. We should be making full use of the buddy system!

Everything is slower than I expected, but this is kind of my own fault. I did an iperf test of the Pi 4s gigabit Ethernet and saw 940 megabits per second. I ran cryptsetups benchmark and saw that the Pi could manage roughly 100 megabytes per second while encrypting the disks.

Tailscale wound up being the slowest piece of the puzzle. Tailscale doesnt use the Linux kernels Wireguard implementation. It uses a Go implementation. The Go implementation of Wireguard is slower than the kernel on Intel, and I wouldnt be surprised if the performance gap is bigger on Arm. This isnt a big deal.

Over Tailscale, iperf averages around 65 megabits per second. Much of the time, my Seafile upload has been staying pretty close to this number.

Not always, though. Theres a lot of encrypting and decrypting going on. Tailscale is decrypting AES, then Nginx decrypting SSL. Thats two extra layers of encryption on top of data that was pre-encrypted by the Seafile client on my desktop. Then the kernel is encrypting the blocks that are written to disk.

Writing to a USB hard drive is also a rather CPU-intensive task.

During the first part of my upload, all four of the poor little Pis CPU cores were maxed out, and I was averaging somewhere around 35 megabits per second. Im assuming this is because of the quantity of smaller files that were being synced one at a time.

I have nearly two terabytes left to sync. I havent looked at the average speed, but weve been up over 50 megabits per second the entire time Ive spent writing the last four paragraphs. Were down to RAW photos and huge GoPro videos, so Im not too surprised theyre going faster.

My Internet upload and download speeds are both 200 megabit, and Brian has 1 gigabit up and down. This would sync just as quickly if the server were already at his house.

I have to say that I was really tempted to design something! The biggest problem is that USB hard drives are significantly cheaper than SATA drives even though theyre usually plain old SATA disks on the inside.

If I were buying a bare 3.5 disk and a stand-alone SATA-to-USB adapter, then designing an enclosure would have been a no-brainer. Since Im buying a USB hard drive, the SATA-to-USB adapter is already included, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a nice enclosure.

Oh boy Im cutting for real now! pic.twitter.com/YPBbMxaUYn

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 7, 2021

I am using a Pi enclosure from Amazon. It is the one Brian gave me with the Pi-KVM. I DO want to design a custom case for that one! I just used some 3M Dual Lock to attach the Pi case to the Seagate hard drive. I also used some Velcro cable ties and a couple of pieces of sticky-back Velcro to manage the USB cables.

I think it is reasonably clean, and it shouldnt look out of place sitting next to Brians Octopi. If the hard drive fails, I dont have to worry about taking a replacement drive apart to fit the bare SATA drive into some sort of custom case. Ill just put some Dual Lock on the new drive, plug it in, and get going right away.

Im also not accidentally voiding the 1-year warranty on my 14 TB Seagate drive.

On one hand, Im getting 14 TB of Dropbox-style cloud storage for $300. That would cost me $700 per year from Google Drive, right?!

My hardware might fail and need to be replaced. I have to handle updates myself. Brians gigabit FiOS connection isnt going to be as reliable as Google, but at least it is already paid for.

Google and Dropbox both have access to your files. It is policy and not capability that keeps employees from sneaking a peek at your data. Ive worked in a lot of IT departments, and every one of them had one guy that was proud and excited that he could read everybodys email. Id much rather keep my own files to myself.

NOTE: Im not quite finished uploading in that screenshot, and Im already using 2.9 terabytes more storage than I currently have available at Prometeus.net.

Saying I have 14 TB of cloud storage feels disingenuous. Im going to be using 3 TB, and Ill probably accrue up to one TB of fresh data every year. It would be a long time before a service like Google One would actually cost me $700 per year.

For me, keeping my data on my own hardware has quite a bit of value. My wife and I will be saving a total of $86 per year, and Im pushing an extra 2 TB or more to Seafile right now for free. Ill have paid for the hardware in 3 years, and Im considering my labor to be the cost of keeping my data private and safe.

Dont forget that hosting my own Seafile server on a Raspberry Pi gives me the opportunity to write this blog post. I will see more clicks from Google. I might make tens of dollars per year on Amazon affiliate sales. Im also having fun writing this, and I had fun cobbling together this little server.

I can already see that this blog post is going to be approaching 3,000 words by the time Im done, so I dont have room here to document how I got things working. I stumbled quite a few times, but I didnt document anything. I also cut a few corners, and I wouldnt want you to follow me there.

The instructions for setting up Seafile on a Raspberry Pi didnt quite work. Seahub just didnt want to start, and its log file was empty. I bet I futzed around with that for two hours. I dont even remember what actually fixed it.

Then I had to put Nginx in front of Seafile to add SSL. I was hoping to use Lets Encrypt for my cert, but using Lets Encrypt for a host with a private IP address looked like it was going to be a real pain in the neck, so I just set up a self-signed cert. This was lazy, but it works.

I dont have a monitor and keyboard plugged into my Pi. I goofed up the firewall rules twice. That meant I had to power off the Pi, plug the SD card into my computer, fix the rules, and try again. This was slow going.

I didnt even have to write my own iptables rules, but I did. Tailscale already has documentation describing how to do to set up your firewall using ufw. I could have just copied from their example.

Id like to write about each of these things. I have an extra Pi, so I can replicate these processes, and I can do them correctly next time.

You can and should set up a Raspberry Pi Seafile server. Maybe you dont like Seafile, though, and youd rather use Nextcloud. In either case, you should look at using Tailscale so you can access this little micro server from anywhere in the world.

I almost accidentally right into that tree! pic.twitter.com/ULjFr4nYjv

Pat Regan (@patsheadcom) January 14, 2021

Maybe you dont want to use the buddy system. Maybe you want to keep your Seafile or Nextcloud server at home. Thats fine, but I still recommend the buddy system. The best backup is an off-site backup!

Theres plenty of free RAM on my Pi. You could definitely host other services on there. It is almost too bad Bitwarden only charges $10 or $15 per year, because this machine would be a good place to host my Bitwarden server.

This project hasnt even really hit the ground running yet. My giant collection of GoPro flight videos is still syncing, and the Seafile server is still here in my house. I have confidence in its success, though, because I ran my own Seafile server for quite a few years.

What do you think? Am I making a mistake by going back to hosting my own cloud-storage server? Should I just pay someone instead? Or is this going to be a fantastic value? Are you already using Tailscale for a project like this? Tell me about it in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

Last month, one of my friends asked me if Id help him test an upcoming Tailscale VPN feature. Im always willing to help out a friend, so I said yes, and he talked to the folks at Tailscale into giving out accounts access to their beta channel.

Before long I received an email from Tailscale letting me know that I now had access to the new machine-sharing feature. They were sure to let me know that the user interface is still rough around the edges, and this isnt truly ready for consumption by the general public.

I feel like he was exaggerating a bit. The interface is fine, and machine sharing works exactly as expected. You just click the drop-down menu next to one of your machines, hit the sharing button, and you will be given a link that you can share with another Tailscale user.

They click the link, log in to Tailscale, and the machine you shared will show up on their Tailscale network. It couldnt be simpler.

This seems like the part that needs polishing up.

Tailscale has access controls. I havent looked into exactly how these ACLs work, but the default rules show that you can restrict access based on a Tailscale user. It should be possible to restrict third parties access to your machines. I know Id feel better if I were only opening up my SSH or HTTPS port instead of my entire machine.

It would be nice if this was built into the sharing interface. Tailscale could ask which ports you want to open, and it could build the access controls for you.

The problem is that access controls are meant to be a paid feature. Basic access controls are part of the $10 per month plan, and identity-based access controls are in the $20 per month plan. I believe that you can access all features using a free account today, but this will be changing in the future.

Im not sure how they plan to implement this. It would be nice if a free user didnt have to open up entire machines to their colleagues using Tailscale.

Im also aware that this can already be accomplished with firewall rules on my end outside of the Tailscale service, but it would be friendlier if I could keep myself safe without leaving the Tailscale interface.

I have a use case in mind. I have a virtual machine here at home. It has Jekyll installed, and it has all the right Ruby modules installed to render butterwhat.com and creativitycast.com.

The machine runs local previews of each blog. It also regularly pulls down changes from Gitlab, and if there are changes, it publishes those changes to real sites.

If someone else is writing for one of my sites, it would be nice to be able to share this machine with less technical users. I dont want to help you get Jekyll up and running with the right modules so you can render the site. I can have a fresh instance up and running for you on my server in less than a minute. Why not just share that machine with you?

I mentioned this use case to my friend that got us into the Tailscale beta. He wanted to know why I wouldnt just set this up on Github and Netlify. It would be simple, and everything would just work. None of our blog posts are secrets. Who cares if someone manages to find them?

The trouble is that Google cares a lot about this sort of thing. If Google somehow manages to find one of the extra copies of my blogs out there, those copies will be indexed. Once theyre indexed, Google will be unhappy that theres duplicate content. Google may direct some of my traffic to the oddball extra sites.

This would be a disaster for me. Especially if I didnt see it right away. My search rankings would tank.

If I keep extra copies of my blogs safely behind Tailscale, Google wont accidentally find them!

I havent actually asked anyone at Tailscale which pricing tier theyre planning on including machine sharing in. Im not exactly sure how much Id be willing to pay for this feature, but thats mostly because I dont actually need to use it at the moment.

I hope machine sharing is included in the free tier, even if it is limited in some way. More importantly, though, I hope receiving machine-sharing links will always be free. I dont want to manage anyone elses network, but I most certainly would like to be able to invite others to work with things inside my organization.

Im not sure Id enjoy paying $120 per year to share a machine with one collaborator. By the third or fourth accomplice, it starts to seem like a more reasonable price.

I think it is quite awesome. I could safely share my NAS with friends who might want access to my collection of videos or music. I could share my PC so we could do some multiplayer gaming without punching holes in our firewalls. We could share our unused machines to speed up compile jobs with something like distcc.

These are just some of the things Ive thought of. Tailscale is starting to change the way I think about my networks topology, and machine sharing is going to add all sorts of new options.

What do you think? Are you using Tailscale heavily? Have you been able to try machine sharing? Do you have an interesting use for machine sharing that hasnt occurred to me? Tell me about it in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!