In the meantime I have been using Nextcloud on my own servers for several years and also an Office integration in order to be able to edit documents together with others directly in the browser. Originally, I chose OnlyOffice because it was much more mature than Collabora in 2018.
Topic: Computer
Use Ant Media with IPv6
Recently I wrote that AntMedia does not support IPv6, see also Ant Media Server mit Apache Reverse Proxy.
This problem is now fixed. Many thanks at this point for the quick help from the Ant Media team, who contacted me personally!
Ant Media Server with Apache Reverse Proxy
I’ve been using the Communtiy Edition of Ant Media Server for quite a while. The server is normally addressed via HTTP on port 5080. In principle HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt is also possible, but only if no web server is already active on port 80, which is not practical for my application. Instead, I configured a reverse proxy in Apache.
Home Assistant
Recently I’ve been working on a small craft project: extending an IKEA Vindriktning air quality sensor with a D1 Mini to read the data and forward it to a server via MQTT.
See also Sören Beye’s Github repository for the conversion. However, instead of this firmware, I use Tasmota based on these instructions from Blakadder, which is much more convenient to set up and configure. See also the Tasmotizer on Github.
When I was looking for a suitable server, I quickly ended up at Home Assistant. This is a free software solution for integrating numerous smart home devices and can also be used on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. In my case this is a Raspberry Pi 4.
Update 2022-08-14: In the meantime I have expanded this with another sensor for CO2, relative humidity and temperature, see the article here.
Retbleed
Does anyone remember Meltdown and Spectre? These vulnerabilities were discovered in June and July 2017 and publicly documented in early 2018. As a result, countermeasures have been taken by software manufacturers for both operating systems and applications, some of which also lead to reduced performance.
As reported on https://www.ncsc.admin.ch/retbleed-en, researchers of the ETH Zürich now discovered a vulnerability in one of the counter measures – retpoline – affecting CPUs by Intel and AMD which got the name “Retbleed” (CVE-2022-29900, CVE-2022-29901). Also see the description at https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/retbleed/.
Full text search in Nextcloud
Nextcloud supports a search via the web interface and in the clients. However, only file names are compared and not searched for in file contents. However, there is the option of setting up a full-text search.
Origin of modern smartphones
Apple is considered the inventor of smartphones… are they really?
By the way… I used a Palm Pilot and a Sony Clié N770C myself a long time.
Computer animation in 1972
An impressive example for the state of the art in the year 1972. You find more about this on https://computeranimationhistory-cgi.jimdofree.com.
Betterbird
Recently I discovered Betterbird – a “soft fork” of Mozilla Thunderbird, which exists since sommer of 2021 and was created to provide a better version of Thunderbird.
Fast SSD with NVMe
NVMe is the abbreviation for “Non Volatile Memory Express” and describes a standard for connecting SSDs via PCI Express. With SATA the speed is limited to 600 MB/s. In addition, AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) used by SATA was primarily developed for hard drives and limits the possible I/O operations per second (IOPS). With NVMe both have been improved – PCI Express enables significantly higher transfer rates of up to 32 GBit/s or 4 GB/s via PCIe 4x and more than 500000 IOPS.
After one of the SSDs in my “retro PC” started reporting checksum errors I installed an NVMe drive with a PCIe adapter card for M.2 as a replacement.