Blake Hartshorn

Blake Hartshorn

Introduction to Centralized Logging with Loki and Nginx

Introduction to Centralized Logging with Loki and Nginx

If you're reading something like this, you probably have at least one service connected to the internet. You probably occasionally grep and tail its logs by hand. Would it be cool if we could introduce an enterprise log aggregation system, just on a smaller scale? Yeah, let's do it. There

Advanced Partitioning in RHEL9 Text Mode Installer

Advanced Partitioning in RHEL9 Text Mode Installer

Red Hat's Anaconda installer is a wonderful and intuitive thing... if you have a graphics card in your machine. My HoneyComb LX2K is running with only a serial port and nothing else. Attached to it are 3 2TB hard drives that I wanted in an mdraid with encryption and LVM.

Using Tasmota Smart Plugs with Telegraf

Using Tasmota Smart Plugs with Telegraf

How to use Telegraf and a TSDB to get historical data of your power usage.

JVC CRT issues where only component video is in color

JVC CRT issues where only component video is in color

Some mid-2000s JVC D-Series and I'Art televisions have a firmware bug where suddenly color will only be present on component video. My I'Art went to black & white on composite, S-Video, and even RF. It's as if it were expecting two more color sources on every other input. This happened the

240p CRT Gaming With a Raspberry Pi

240p CRT Gaming With a Raspberry Pi

In my previous article [https://www.blakehartshorn.com/using-a-raspberry-pi-with-a-crt-television/], I discussed using a Raspberry Pi with a CRT television. You may have already found a use for this, even if just using it as a monitor for something that usually runs headless. A very common use case for this is

Beginners Guide to Using a Raspberry Pi with a CRT Television

Beginners Guide to Using a Raspberry Pi with a CRT Television

If this headline catches you off guard, yes, newer Raspberry Pis have composite video out for NTSC or PAL just like the earliest model did, but it's hidden in the 3.5mm audio out jack. It's such a secret that the output is actually turned off on the Pi 4

Using Nagios or Icinga to get a Playstation 5

Using Nagios or Icinga to get a Playstation 5

Okay, so maybe this is silly, but before a friend of mine pointed out Hotstock [https://www.hotstock.io/] to me, I decided to use Selenium [https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/] to track stock of Playstation 5s as it's so hard to get one. I wasn't enough of a jerk

Install Ghost on FreeBSD 13

Install Ghost on FreeBSD 13

A guide to installing Ghost on FreeBSD 13 from scratch.

Secrets Storage With Vault On Your Home Server

Secrets Storage With Vault On Your Home Server

You may be looking for a self-hosted solution for storing passwords and other secrets that you may not feel comfortable having in the cloud. Vault by HashiCorp [https://www.vaultproject.io/] is an enterprise secrets storage solution with both web based and command line access. It's open source and you

Graphing Nest vs the Outside

Graphing Nest vs the Outside

Getting acquainted with Google's new Nest API

About Nagios Plugins and How to Write Them

About Nagios Plugins and How to Write Them

A quick explanation on how to develop custom modules for Nagios compatible monitoring systems.

Monitoring and Graphing with Etekcity VeSync

Monitoring and Graphing with Etekcity VeSync

How to monitor power usage with VeSync smart plugs

HoneyComb LX2K, first impressions

HoneyComb LX2K, first impressions

The HoneyComb LX2K [https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-workstation/] is a developer workstation board by SolidRun that first came to my attention via this Phoronix post [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HoneyComb-LX2K-Sep-Perf], boasting 16 2ghz ARM A72 cores in a mini-ITX form factor. I was

Installing Debian on Existing Encrypted LVM

Installing Debian on Existing Encrypted LVM

It isn't easy to reuse a LUKS encrypted LVM in Debian's installer. Let's do it anyway.

A distro agnostic guide to Graphite with venv

A distro agnostic guide to Graphite with venv

How to install and configure the Graphite TSDB on RHEL8, Debian 10, Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Install Ghost on FreeBSD 12

Install Ghost on FreeBSD 12

A guide to installing Ghost on FreeBSD 12.1 from scratch.