Blake Hartshorn - Blake Hartshorn

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

240p CRT Gaming With a Raspberry Pi

In my previous article, 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 retro game emulation with intent

raspberry pi

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

Okay, so maybe this is silly, but before a friend of mine pointed out Hotstock to me, I decided to use Selenium to track stock of Playstation 5s as it's so hard to get one. I wasn't enough of a jerk to try to make a bot to buy one,

Install Ghost on FreeBSD 13

A guide to installing Ghost on FreeBSD 13 from scratch.

linux

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 is an enterprise secrets storage solution with both web based and command line access. It's open source and you can run it for

monitoring

Graphing Nest vs the Outside

Getting acquainted with Google's new Nest API

monitoring

About Nagios Plugins and How to Write Them

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

monitoring

Monitoring and Graphing with Etekcity VeSync

How to monitor power usage with VeSync smart plugs

honeycomb-lx2k

HoneyComb LX2K, first impressions

The HoneyComb LX2K is a developer workstation board by SolidRun that first came to my attention via this Phoronix post, boasting 16 2ghz ARM A72 cores in a mini-ITX form factor. I was in the market for a new home server and was interested in going ARM this time seeking

linux

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.

linux

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.

freebsd

Install Ghost on FreeBSD 12

A guide to installing Ghost on FreeBSD 12.1 from scratch.