Wednesday

pfsense-api-client

• updated the docs
• added support for a standalone requests.session object to support TLS ignorance
• moved the login functionality out to its own function, so it’d get better documentation in the manual

memes-api

• moved to aioboto3 to make things … work way better
• fixed pagination issues where certain counts would page wrong
• changed opengraph previews from the “full” image to the thumbnail to save some bandwidth and processing time for everyone

Thursday

Updated pyaussiebb to fix an issue acknowledging FetchTV services as a thing. Lots of testing and I re-learnt how to set up Home Assistant in a dev container so I can get someone who (thankfully) reported it as an issue and was willing to test it for me!

Messed around with some things in Nagios, turns out I hadn’t set up monitoring for The Mailroom then had to learn how to get it to output what commands it was actually running, so I could see why it wasn’t working right.

I got a debian build to work in the local version of OpenBuildService I’m running, woo!

c2eb44505fe3:/opt/home:yaleman/kanidm # dpkg-deb -c /var/tmp/build-root/Debian_10-x86_64/usr/src/packages/DEBS/kanidm_1.1.0alpha.7-1_amd64.deb
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-03-17 13:35 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root   8027672 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/bin/kanidm
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/share/doc/kanidm/
-rw-r--r-- root/root       282 2022-03-17 13:35 ./usr/share/doc/kanidm/changelog.Debian.gz
c2eb44505fe3:/opt/home:yaleman/kanidm

This was a long period of messing around over months to get this far, the documentation is … not good.

Friday

Serious yak-shaving day, rewrote a house-internal API gateway in FastAPI because the Flask one I’d written ages ago wasn’t extensible in a way I won’t ever use, but I like standardising on things.

Also rewrote my QBittorrent scraper API thing to use more modern packaging methods and added testing and typing.

Saturday

Big day in the “outside” - I was the one on the spot for the live streaming of the SCA Lochac March Crown Tournament…

Main learnings:

• Have multiple mobile data providers. Optus sucked with the “standard” antennas I was using.
• Don’t try and use a decade-old i7 macbook without site power, it won’t last.
• The Razer Kiyo USB webcam works great as a streaming cam for site events.
• The Ozito PXC 18V USB Power Station works fantastically, it powered the router and various devices all day.
• I used a GL-iNet GL-MiFi router running OpenWRT and it was great.
  • I really want ot modify it to have an external antenna, and this would really have helped.
• We used Streamyard and it worked OK.
  • It was utterly maddening that any time the stream dropped, it’d require you to re-configure the camera/audio all over again.
  • This wasn’t helped by the fact that anyone streaming up also had to stream down the full feed with no option to disable it. This was a huge waste of bandwidth for the mobile phones running as cameras.
• Having said the bit about the bandwidth, streaming about seven hours of video (4.5 cam1 + 2.5 cam2) only took about 2GiB of data each way?
• Multiple ways to attach cameras to things are a good idea.
  • Tripod strapped to a big, solid, roped down pole = good
  • Joby “octopus” mount on a wobbly tent pole was ok, but as soon as the wind picked up it was waving around.
  • The more access to the screen you maintain while it’s mounted, the better - having to reconfigure things or check view was hard when I had to keep pulling it out of the mount.

Were I to do it again:

For cameras, either a stack of iPhone’s (something model X or above) or M1 macbooks (for battery/USB charging) with good webcams and dedicated microphones.

Connectivity, I’d use the same thing again, with a better 4G antenna. Probably two of them, across Optus/Telstra. GL-iNet are a great piece of kit for under $100, the GL-MiFi has a battery that’d run an entire event, but they all sip power regardless.

I’m not sure about software, but it’d be nice to have something that allowed you to reconnect without having to configure things over and over.

Sunday

Significantly improved the typing on pyaussiebb and fixed the “check it’s a valid test before running line test” issue.

Found that my Ozito USB adaptor for the 18V lithium battery pack turns off when I TX between ~400-450mhz near it. That was… odd.

In closing…

All in all, quite the week. A lot of pondering how to do video things since it all basically came together during the week.