Articles
Monoprice Select Mini Modifications
Published January 19th, 2018 at 11:54 AM. by Joe Prochazka
Last week the controller board died on my Monoprice Select Mini. The v1 controller boards appear to be a hard to find item anymore with the only ones available coming out of China for US$65.00 and at least a month long wait until it gets here. So instead I have decided to replace the Mini's controller board with an Ardrino/RAMPS 1.4/LCD kit which I have on hand which cost less at a total of about US$35.00 to the door.
Being that the printer is already down and in need of a motion controller...
My Experiences Upgrading Ubuntu 15.10 to Ubuntu 16.04
Published April 22nd, 2016 at 1:09 PM. by Joe Prochazka
The following documents my experiences upgrading existing Ubuntu 15.10 installations to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Any issues or differences I may experience I plan to document here. This being said more information may be added to this article as my time dealing with the upgrades contiune.
Nginx, PHP, and MySQL
Both Nginx and PHP have been upgraded in this release and some attention needs to paid to these changes if you are running a web server using both of these applications. The Ubuntu 16.04...
Grub Configuration Hangs During Kernel Update On Ubuntu Running In Hyper-V
Published December 6th, 2015 at 10:47 AM. by Joe Prochazka
There is an issue which you may encounter when updating an Ubuntu kernel when running Ubuntu in a Hyper-V environment. When trying to update a kernel you may encounter text such as that displayed below after which the update process will cease to continue and just stall at this spot.
Generating grub configuration file …Warning: Setting GRUB_TIMEOUT to a non-zero value when GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT is set is no longer supported.Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.19.0-15-genericFound initrd image:...
Using Collectd And Dump1090-Tools To Monitor Dump1090-mutability
Published October 15th, 2015 at 10:27 AM. by Joe Prochazka
First off this walkthrough is meant for those interested in manually setting up performance graphs for their ADS-B receiver running dump1090-mutability using the same author's dump1090-tools. If you are looking for a more less involved approch to setting up graphs for your receiver xforce30164 on the planefinder forums has created a great bash script you can download and run which automates this entire process on a Raspberry Pi however I am not sure how well this script works on Debian or...
Automatically Reconnect WiFi Connection If The Connection Is Lost
Published October 9th, 2015 at 10:58 AM. by Joe Prochazka
There has been occasions when either a WiFi router would hiccup or a wireless adapter would lose connection to the WiFi network causing connectivity between the machine and the WiFi network to be lost. The following script can be put in place in order to check if in fact the WiFi adapter is up and running as well as connected to the network. If in fact the wireless adapter is not connected anymore the script will attempt to bring the wireless connection back up until it is once again...
Intalling Ubuntu In A Hyper-V Environment
Published October 6th, 2015 at 11:56 AM. by Joe Prochazka
The following is a walkthrough on how to install an optimized version of Ubuntu within a Hyper-V environment. The steps basically follow the techNet articles related to the installation of Ubuntu within Hyper as outlined by Microsoft. As well a needed change to the Grub configuration as of Ubuntu 15.04 is covered as well.
Before we create the virtual machine using the Hyper-V Manager we will want to create a new VHDX file which will be used as the operating systems main hard disk. We will...
Setting Up Dump978-mutability On Raspbian, Ubuntu, or Debian
Published October 4th, 2015 at 1:21 PM. by Joe Prochazka
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS
Last updated October 14th, 2015
Updates will be posted as progress is made.
I am currently waiting on a spliter for my antenna in order to get better coverage in order to pick up 978MHz signals. The stock antenna is not receiving anything so I am unable to confirm this is in fact working even though it theory it should be. I will post results once I am able to confirm everything is working.
Tonight I began work on setting up dump978 to receive UAT transmission....
Setting Up Watchdog To Automatically Reboot A Hung Raspberry Pi
Published October 2nd, 2015 at 1:18 PM. by Joe Prochazka
A watchdog timer is used to detect when a device is hung or in an unresponsive state. Generally it is a hardware based timer which counts down to zero. In order to stop the timer from reaching zero a software based daemon running on the device in question continually resets the hardware based timer so that it does not reach zero. If the timer reaches zero the hardware figures the system is in a hung state due to the fact it had not been reset by the software based daemon and reboots the...
Mounting a Windows Share In Ubuntu on Boot
Published August 24th, 2015 at 10:42 AM. by Joe Prochazka
The following is how to mount a Windows share at boot time in Ubuntu these instructions should work on other distributions as well. However depending on the distribution you are using the packages and the way in which they need to be installed may differ. Before going on make sure you have created a Windows share and that the Windows account you will be using within the Linux operating system has the proper permissions within Windows to access it.
First you will need to install a few...
How To Change The Email Font In ProductCart v5
Published August 19th, 2015 at 11:30 AM. by Joe Prochazka
Recently we had a client who disliked the default font used by ProductCart when sending emails from the application. By default ProductCart sends the order received, order confirmation, order shipped, and order cancelled emails using the Courier New/Monospace font. For some reason you can not change this font in places you would think you should be able to apparently. After looking through the adminstation area and then the settings files used by ProductCart with no luck at all of finding...