2017 Posts

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Security

That Time I Became A 76-Year-Old New Yorker

Or, what happens when you send an email to the wrong place. Note, for the time being, I have redacted the names of the company and doctor involved as I am attempting to follow through with a responsible disclosure process for this security issue. I had something very strange happen to me today. It all began with a random email to an address that I don’t use much anymore, but still have in Mail. It’s an email account I’ve had for over 13 years, so it still gets the occasional stray email. The subject read as follows: Welcome To <redacted> Patient Portal Followed in quick succession by another one: Welcome To <redacted> Patient Portal Wait, what?
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Linux

The Brilliance of Linux

I’ve been a Linux user for many, many years. Going all the way back to Red Hat 5.2, which I picked up to install on an ancient Packard Bell 486 in the late 90s. Since then there’s always been at least one Linux machine in my dorm, apartment or house somewhere. At various times I’ve even run it for my desktop OS, although these days I use macOS for that. For much of that time, Linux was the choice of hackers, but was definitely not a choice for everyday users and required a significant amount of technical knowledge to run. That’s not true so much anymore, but growing in that environment I learned a lot about how computers and operating systems work.
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Raspberry Pi

Using the DS3231 RTC (Real Time Clock) with Raspberry Pi

Using the DS3231 RTC (Real Time Clock) with Raspberry Pi
In my last post about building the pet feeders, I alluded to one of the limitations of the Raspberry Pi has: it lacks a real time clock. This is an understandable omission. They take up extra space and cost, are not needed for a lot of applications and can be pretty easily added if they are. One of the limitations I found is that, if there is a power outage that lasts a significant amount of time - long enough for the UPS batteries that keep the wireless up go dead, for instance - that the Raspberry Pi’s may “lose” track of time if they can’t reconnect to wifi and, thus, sync up by NTP.
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Python

Rebecca's Raspberry Pi Powered Pet Feeders

Rebecca's Raspberry Pi Powered Pet Feeders
As with many of my projects, it started with something that made me angry. In this case, it was this: The Petmate Le Bistro Pet Feeder. Okay, let’s back up a little bit. Back to about 8 or so years ago. We had a cat at the time, Pumpkin, who as objectively not a good cat. She was foul tempered on the best of days and very difficult to love. But she was my wife and I’s first pet, so we did love her all the same. She had a habit of wanting food precisely on time. And if it was late, she would raise all manner of noise until she was fed. Often this came at some ungodly early time in the morning. So I bought a Petmate Le Bistro Pet Feeder.
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Python

Using Pipenv with Systemd

So I’ve been doing a bit of Python recently for a project I’m working on on a Raspberry Pi. There will be a longer blog post about that in the next few weeks. But one thing I ran up against was that I wanted to start my daemon, written in Python, using a systemd service on Raspbian. Normally, you would just shove a script invocation into a systemd unit and call it good, but in my case I had made use of Pipenv, which is a bit like Bundler in the Ruby world and Composer in the PHP world, to manage my project’s dependencies.
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Space

The 2017 Total Solar Eclipse

The 2017 Total Solar Eclipse
Sometime in the mid 90s, I downloaded an astronomy program for my computer. I don’t even remember what it was called. In poking around on it, I discovered that it could plot future total solar eclipses and that one would pass, from the resolution of the map, very close to where I then lived in eastern Tennessee. The date was August 21st, 2017.
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Release Announcements

Collecting Unifi controller data with collectd

As you can tell from the last few posts, I’ve been having a lot of fun with collectd and instrumenting my systems. But I had one glaring hole until recently: my Ubiquti Unifi AP access points. Well no longer!
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Linux

Options Have Meanings, or, How I Made an rsync Seven Times Faster

Warning: Doing this is making a clear tradeoff between security and speed. Do not do this on the public Internet or across a network you do not trust. rsync is one of those tools that is in every computer user’s toolkit. It’s fantastic for moving large amounts of data around and for migrating data from one system to another. rsync also has a ton of options and, after awhile, you get to where muscle memory means you just type the same few options over and over again. With me, that was -avz, archive, verbose, compression. Recently, I was migrating several terabytes of data from a NAS to a computer. As is often the case, I fired up an rsync job and watched it. It maxed out at about 35 megabit. Across a gigabit switched internal network.
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Release Announcements

Harvesting Nest Thermostat Data For Fun And Profit

Harvesting Nest Thermostat Data For Fun And Profit
Okay, no profit in this, but it certainly is fun! I have two Nest thermostats in my house and, after some teething pains (yay the life of an early adopter) they have been pretty solid. But they’re also black boxes that I know little about. I know they’re collecting mountains of data and sending it back to the Google mothership. Wouldn’t it be nice to get at some of that data and build my own reports?
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collectd

More collectd and pfSense Fun!

Extending my post from last year, here’s some additional data I’m grabbing from pfSense and stuffing into collectd via a script. I’m now grabbing: DHCP Leases CPU Temperature Thermal Zone Temperature SSD Drive Temperature UPS information (via NUT) Here’s the exec script:
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Javascript

Extending ngResource To Access Metadata

AngularJS’s built-in ngResource is a great tool for natively supporting REST APIs in your Angular application. But what happens when you need to support something besides a simple call that retrieves a list of JSON objects? You quickly run into the limits of ngResource. Here’s a great case where you might need to do something more complex: paging. Say you want to get a list of objects, and there’s 10,000 or so of them. You don’t want to send 10,000 objects to your frontend app. You want to send a portion of them, but you still need to indicate to the app that there are more. Surprisingly, considering how widespread this pattern is in web development, there does not seem to be a native way to accomplish this. But you can extend ngResource. Here’s how I did it.
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About the Author

Hi, I'm Rebecca Peck (she/her/hers.) I'm a blogger and software developer. I'm into bike riding, photography, writing, making wine, listening to history podcasts, 3D printing, home automation, being a complete and hopeless Apple fangirl, and anything involving airplanes, trains and model trains. I am based in Huntsville, Alabama.