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Transition your old USB-Printer to a Network printer with scanning capabilities

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If you are like me, you almost certainly bought a cheap USB printer for your immediate needs during COVID. I myself bought a Canon MG2500 . It's a cheap, reliable and small printer. At the time of the purchase it had everything I needed to quickly print a couple of documents when required. Since I planned to use it only for myself, the USB only connection was not so much an issue, besides the occasional unplugging when I changed the height of my standing desk. Fast forward to today... It's still here but is now desperately missing a ethernet port or wifi connectivity. Which makes myself feel like a printer server : "Can you print the Mail I send you", "Can you print the Whatsapp?", etc. Also, the integrated scanner was barely usable due to the flaky driver in Windows 11 and the amount of handling involved. For scanning I mostly used the OneDrive app - with mixed results. Network printers with scanning capabilities offer several advantages over USB printers,

Home Assistant in Docker with Nginx and Let's Encrypt on Raspberry Pi

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This guide will help to you to setup home assistant as a docker container and make it publicly available behind a ngix proxy, all running in containers. Additionally, we'll use certbot to keep your ssl certificates in sync and Duck DNS so that you access it even with a dynamic ip address. There we go... Dockerized Home Assistant behind Nginx with Let's Encrypt and DuckDNS :) This guide is partially based on the generic guide on how to install Ngix and Let's Encrypt by Philipp ( Nginx and Let’s Encrypt with Docker in Less Than 5 Minutes | by Philipp | Medium ) In order to start, please make sure you have the following setups done already Home Assistant installed as docker container and available under port 8123 Create a DuckDNS account and register your subdomain You know how to redirect a port from your router to the computer running docker We'll be using docker-compose, which is much simpler to use than the plain docker cli. If you are not familiar with docker-compose,

Kernel Integrated exFAT Support Performance has saved my Chia farmer

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In case you did not hear, great exFAT  support has been  integrated in the Linux Kernel 5.7 quite some time ago. Unfortunately, that Kernel is not the default kernel for all Linux Distributions, namely Ubuntu. In this article we will see how drastic the improvements compared to the FUSE implementation are, and how to upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to use the Kernel integrated  exFAT  drivers. The result on my Chia farm is actually spectacular. Previously I have missed many challenges and the system was partially slow. Upgrading to the latest Kernel with integrated  exFAT  support, this changed completely.  Before and after migrating to kernel integrated exFAT. Yes,  Seconds! Context There have been multiple ways how to operate a  exFAT  filesystem with Linux. The most popular might still be the first one, as it is the default method in many major distros extfat Fuse  relan/exfat: Free exFAT file system implementation (github.com) exfatNoFuse (with dkms):  dorimanx/exfat-nofuse: Android ARM Linu

Useful Linux Commands For Managing Chia Nodes

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I'm running two chia farms for about two months now. Chia has not made me rich yet - at least not financially. At the same time, it has motivated me to brush up my Linux and bash skills. I see that as a gain as well. My favorite remote shell: MobaXterm !  The below list is for myself, but maybe you also find some value on those. I started to use them quite frequently while managing my farms. Also see the following articles, where describe my setup and review some of the hardware used Chia Plot and Farming Setup with SystemD BMAX B1 Plus Mini PC Performance Review Lets get into it! Session Management Detach session and keep processes running If you start new processes in your shell, they will be terminated as soon as you exit. In cases where the processes already run in background, you can detach your session instead of terminate, by using the following commands: Ctrl + A , followed by Ctrl + D . To avoid that situation entirely, prefix your commands with nohup , which stands for &q

BMAX B1 Plus Mini PC Performance Review

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Intel's NUC category  has introduced a entirely form factor to personal computers already years ago. This highly integrated and obviously small form factor computers offer an interesting set of capabilities and performance at a very interesting price point. There is a wide range of CPU, RAM and internal storage available. Some of them are extremely cheap, at the cost at outdate processor, similar to Raspberry Pi's The BMAX B1 is such an candidate, it offers okay performance for office and light internet surfing. It has somehow limited capabilities when it comes to video playback. Full review can be found on techradar.com , it currently sells at USD 119.99 on AliExpress . I fully agree with the verdict from techradar.com, and this mini PC is definitely only an option for light tasks, and has quite some limitations on multitasking due to the 4 GB RAM. Improved Version: BMAX B1 Plus The BMAX B1 Plus the successor of the BMAX B1 (without Plus). It got an upgrade in both CPU and RA