Your Warranty Is Void.com

Over the weekend, I was digging through the expansive parts bin known as the computer room and I had my old Unifi Video NVR jump off the shelf at me. While the Unifi Video product has long since been discontinued, giving way to the Unifi Protect line of NVRs and products, the hardware itself still has a bit of life left to it. In this article, I’ll go over the hardware of the derelict product and see what we can do with it going forward.

In Part 1, I discussed the research, physical installation, a bit of maintenance, and the overall basic operation of the Generac 22kW Guardian whole home generator. In this post, we’ll go over the monitoring of the generator and quickly outline the vendor’s supplied option as well as the Open Source option I decided on, and even up contributing to! Yes, even though I’m not a developer, I managed to contribute to an Open Source project and helped the developer out!

Being a homeowner isn’t for the faint of heart, there’s always a chance for things to go wrong, especially considering that we’re in Texas and well… *gestures at the Valentine’s day week of February 2021*. So with that being said, as soon as the ink was dry on our house contract and we had closed, I was already in process of soliciting for a standby whole home generator. This three part article will cover everything from the decision making process of the generator and its installation (this article), how I monitor the generator using GenMon, an opensource application suite on Github (Part II), and lastly, how I implemented Grafana, Prometheus, and SNMP Exporter (Part III) to get the level of monitoring I am comfortable with.

Raspberry Pi B+

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new arrival to their existing line of awesome little credit-card sized computers.  I was fortunate enough to get my hands on one and give it a go.  In the article (with pics!) below, I’ll cover what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and what you can expect from everyone’s favorite mini machine.

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Well, the annual gift-giving season has drawn to a close and now we are left with retailers trying to get rid of all that extra stuff that thy have left over in their inventories.  Of course as a hardware geek, I’m always on the look out for another great hack. While at my CVS I came across a Sylvania netbook device for under $100. Even better, I got mine as an open box for only $30 making it an awesome find.  Read further to discover what this little beastie’s hiding under its hood. (continue reading…)

I was given a very interesting product by a friend of mine that happened to catch a good deal on woot.com a few days ago.  Apparently Seagate has made a network fileserver device for their Freeagent Go line of portable USB drives called the Freeagent DockStar. (I can only think that this is a play on Battlestar Galactica’s Baystar – a cylon “aircraft-carrier” of sorts.)  When I went to look for pictures online of the hardware, I was dismayed to find nothing about the inside of the little thing.  So here they are in all their exposed glory, the innards of the Seagate Dockstar.

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In the first post for the new “Hardware PrOn” category, we will be dissecting a common point-of-sale barcode scanner.  This particular victim is the MS700 laser scanner manufactured by Metrologic (now owned by either Honeywell or Gilbarco) which reveals a very nice discovery inside.  So, grab your screwdrivers and let’s take a look. (continue reading…)

I’ve realized that I don’t have as much time as I’d like to post my hacks, mods, discoveries, and the like on here so I have decided to create a new category in order to be able to have a wider range of subjects to post on.

The new category is called “Hardware PrOn” and will include pictures of teardowns of various devices that I encounter as well as some ideas on what you could do with one if you happened to find one.