I recovered from a small disaster today using the neko dockerised web-browser.

I set up a remote backup with Proxmox running on a HP mini and a Synology a month ago at a friend's house 3000 km away. I thought I'd reserved all the IP addresses, but last night the Synology IP address changed, so the NFS shares to Proxmox and Jellyfin broke. That wasn't to hard to fix remotely, but I don't want it to happen every time the DHCP lease expires.

So now I need to log into their router and reserve the IP addresses...

I can get on the local network there by ssh-ing into one of my entities (via Tailscale), but how do I get to the web interface of the router?

Enter neko. It spins up a browser in a Docker container that can be accessed over a web address. So I created an LXC, installed docker and spun it up, then was able to use that to open the local-only web interface to the router.

neko is intended for watch parties, so multiple people can be logged in to the same browser window at a time - there's a toggle to take control of the window for clicks and typing, but apart from that it's all pretty straight forward. There's a very noticeable lag, but it got the job done.

Perhaps there was an easier lighter-weight way of doing this? In the old old days there was a text browser called Lynx - so perhaps there's some modern iteration that could have done this job?

Edit: There is an easier lighter-weight way of doing this!

Thanks to @SteveTech@programming.dev, @Dewege@feddit.org and others who mentioned 'ssh tunneling' - TIL I could just connect a local port (8080 in my case) to port 80 on the router (192.168.1.1:80 in my case) via the VM I have ssh access to over tailscale (thirdbreakfast@100.126.38.117) with:

ssh -L 8080:192.168.1.1:80 thirdbreakfast@100.126.38.117

ssh -L <local port to use>:<remote machine to access with port> <ssh address of jump machine>

When executed, that looks like I've just ssh'ed into that machine, but until I log out of that connection I can open up 127.0.0.1:8080 in my browser and I'm in the router's web interface - still a tiny bit of lag, but way smoother experience with less carry on.

Amazeballs.

Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.

I've had a fitbit wifi bathroom scale for a while. Getting the data out got suddenly more difficult when Google bought them, and I didn't love giving that data to google. It's finally died, and I'm looking at replacement options.

In a perfect world, I could just go to a store and buy a "HomeAssistant Ready" scale. If I can't have that, I'd like a scale that is on my local network and exposes the last x weigh-ins as an API on the device, then I could write something to poll it.

I haven't seen anything like those, but have turned up:

• a project to decode the bluetooth transmissions of a number of scales (after you build an ESP32 device for it)
• the Withings cloud based scale, but with a well documented API

Any other good options?

Today, we took apart the ModRetro Chromatic: a new entry in the handheld gaming market that might remind you a bit of something from the past. The ModRetro Chromatic really does hit us hard in the nostalgias, bringing home that Christmas morning feeling. - ifixit

For context, I'm new to retro-gaming & emulation.

How I got here:

The Steamdeck became available in my country, and I instantly desired one, but since I have a considerable Steam library that doesn't get played on my laptop and an Xbox S that hasn't been turned on for a year, I had to question if I really could justify something that expensive that might not get played much after a couple of months.

I've heard of Pico-8 games on an unrelated tech podcast, and that interested me. So I googled what handhelds I could play those on, and a few rabbit holes later I was here - a sub $100 handheld that can play retro roms, "up to" PSP - which I own a shoe box of UMDs for. I know my way around Vice City and would like to go back some day.

Screen Format:

The idea of playing PSP games was what tipped me towards a 16:9 screen rather than a squarer format. Perhaps that will turn out to be right for me, but right now I'm regretting it since I'm in a deep nostalgia dive of squarish format games.

Physical:

A lot of youtubers recommending the RGB10 Max3 point to the bulbous back as making it nicer than some others to hold for a while. It's fine - no where near as comfortable as a stock Xbox controller. A lot lighter than my distant memory of the original PSP and the buttons feel cheaper.

I got the transparent black one - I can't read the labels on the "start" and "select" buttons, but that's already staring to not matter at all after a couple of hours of on and off use. The power LED (which I understand can be turned off) is blinding in bed.

System:

I took the common advice to buy better quality SD cards and copy stuff over. In the process I flashed the system card with RockNix. I believe it comes stock with JELOS, but I never booted it with the supplied card so can't confirm. Even though this system is a collection of things from diverse developers, it's very manageable.

My only previous brush with emulation was helping some kids building an arcade machine around a raspberry pie (a while ago) and I remembering it being a lot clunkier to move between emulators etc and getting games going properly. Rocknix/Retroarch is pretty great. A few key-combos to learn but that doesn't take to long. I haven't been getting into tweaking emulator settings, but the out of the box experience for just playing some games is good.

Screen:

Is really good. It's been a long long time since I saw my PSP so it's probably not fair to compare, but I would say the RGB10Max3 is better. Certainly better for viewing angle (which hardly matters for a handheld device).

Controls:

Nearly every review (I've obsessively consumed waiting for this unit to arrive) mentions the poor D-Pad. In some games I don't notice any problem at all, in others I get repeatedly squashed by barrels or eaten by ghosts because of it. Sometimes, swapping to the left joystick solves the problem.

So far:

I'm having a lot of fun. If I am still picking this up and playing with it in a year, that's probably an indication I should have gotten a Steam Deck, but if I've lost interest and passed it on to someone else I probably would have already gotten good value out of it. A third possible outcome is that if it turns out I keep playing 4:3 and similar format games (and especially if I have a go at developing some PICO-8), I might look at one of the DMG shaped devices instead - and possibly in the more pocket-able size since those less story-based games are consumable on the go.

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

Has anyone got some experience/advice for choosing between the options? It seems like they are:

• Minio
• Garage
• SeaweedFS

My usecase is just to have a local single instance for testing apps against. I prefer to spin stuff up in Docker on the homelab.

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *

I started on Elitedesk 800 G1s when Raspberry Pis got hard to find and expensive, and I now feel they are better in every respect if you don't need the GPIO pins.

Every time I open them up to upgrade something I'm impressed with the level of engineering. There are quality manufacturer manuals for them, the cooling is good and they look great

The P20iX is a tacticool type 21700 size light. It's very floody - perfect for inside buildings or close range outside where you need a big field of view, and bright enough at 4000 lumens .

The bumps on the front are something super tough for breaking car windows etc - so I guess aimed at first responder types. I quite like the double clicky tail switch. One is a really solid on/off click and the other cycles between light levels.

It has two modes, I use it in the everyday mode where it remembers the light brightness from when you turned it off. There also a hard core mode where it always turns on in max.

The hard plastic holster has a hole in the bottom, which I assume is to avoid melting it with the 4 x 4 x CREE XP-L2V6 leds, but I have occasionally just turned it on in the holster for general lighting if I needed both hands.

Since it's quite easy to pull it out of the holster, I do have a slight worry that it will come out by itself if I'm clambering around somewhere - but it never has yet. The holster is intended for clipping on those massive duty belts - it would swing around a bit otherwise. I have a vague recollection it came with some clips to use on narrower belts but perhaps I've thrown them away.

The 21700 battery it needs is a weird Nitecore one with positive and negative contacts each end. I wasn't wild about that, but in practice I never carry spare batteries, so they can be weird or built in and it's no particular problem. If you really hate this idea, there is an optional caddy for 2 x cr123s - but less brightness and lower run times.

The RovyVon A5x is my EDC at the moment, and I love it enough that I bought another one when I killed it in the washing machine (it's IP66 - but only with the charging plug in - long story at the end).

Like a few of these little lights, it has ancillary LED's on the side. I chose the white+UV side LEDs. The other option is white + red which would probably be more useful, except this is the glow-in-the-dark case, and the UV supercharges that in a couple of seconds.

The GITD is not amazing, but if you're camping away from city lights, it's still bright enough to find the next morning right up till the sun comes up.

The choices for the main LED are CREE XP-G3 or Nichia 219C. I went with the Nichia with a warmer CRI. The Nichia is 450 lumens vs the Cree 650.

The battery is rated 330mAh and is USB-C chargeable (I think my old one was mini USB?). The story with the charging plug on my old one was I washed it in the pocket of some pants, and it still worked, but I could see a drop of moisture inside. I pulled the charging port stopper right out since it kept half closing itself in the rice. Then I couldn't get it back in (probably could have with tweezers) so I thought I'd do that later, then washed it again the following weekend without the plug in. I went all out with the drying attempts, but it was properly soaked through, and never came back from that.

It doesn't really tailstand unless you've got the magnet on (I do) and something to stick it to. It's just a lovely little general use torch for your pocket.