Shortly after getting my amateur radio license, I bought an old AWA RT85 2m radio from my club. It was already programmed for the local (VK2) repeaters, and all was good. Then I moved interstate, and the radio has been collecting the proverbial dust ever since.
I recently decided to get it back in service, which mainly means reprogramming it to local (VK7) channels.
A few years back, I got a Pebble Steel. Some years later, I also got myself a Leatherman Tread LT. The two obviously needed to be put together, using the Tread as the watchband for the Pebble. Unfortunately, the Pebble had a weird band attachment, which led me to try to mush two Thingiverse designs (a Pebble NATO attachment and a Tread watch attachment) into something that almost worked. Ultimately the plastic proved too brittle, and I got distracted by other things.
Fast forward a few years, and my Pebble, quite sadly, is a bit unhealthy. As a replacement, I received a Watchy with an Armadillonium case. So the question reemerged. This time, I pushed back the not-invented-here syndrome, and looked around for existing solutions. I discovered ChronoLinks, which looked perfect, but I wasn’t sure whether they would fit my case. At the price tag, I didn’t want to risk it.
Ultimately, I resorted to searching on eBay, then AliBaba, and found something that looked like it would do the job, at a price that wouldn’t make me too sad if it didn’t.
tl;dr: It did! (mostly)
Continue readingUntil last year, work had Mitel 5212 softphones as the main devices on desks. This was the case since 2008, and was apparently high time to replace them. As they had nowhere to go but the bin, I grabbed a few in the hope to use them at home. While Mitel has a proprietary protocol (MiNET), they also support standard SIP through another vendor firmware, which allowed me to add a few more physical phones behind my FRITZ!Box.
I recently realised that the QNAP TS-212 NAS (running the latest QTS 4.2.0) can be used as a print server. No need to keep another machine on to print from anywhere!
Both UNICES, through CUPS, and Windows, through Samba, can use the printer straight-away. In the case of the Samsung SCX-3205, the driver under ArchLinux is the samsung-unified-driver (from AUR) which, fortunately, doesn’t install any useless binary beyond those needed by the PPD used by CUPS.
client$ pacman -Qs samsung local/samsung-unified-driver 1.00.36-2
The problem is that this is a combo printer/scanner. Moving the printer to the NAS requires a similar solution to CUPS to scan from the network. Fortunately, SANE can do this, and there is some documentation about setting it up on a QNAP NAS. In this case, however, this did not work smoothly, so I had to fix a few things.
Beware: some Western Digital MyBook Essential disk enclosures do some encryption in hardware (in the USB bridge, it seems). It doesn’t appear to be configurable, and renders the disk data inaccessible when used in any other way.