Desra Blog

I started using android Auto, and found that with my S8 , google maps would be inaccurate, and not update location, and display 'searching for gps' occasionally. This turns out to be the power saving feature enabled on the s8, it disables background location checks.  Unfortunately disabling power saving makes me need to find a charger in the middle of the day, and I pretty much get through a full day without needing a charger. So, I looked at how I can remedy this situation and settled with using Automate to create a workflow, which is triggered when car-mode is enabled.  This workflow then calls a tasker plugin called securetask , which you grant special perms to.  This plugin changes the power state , disabling power saving, so it fixes the problem.  when car mode is exited, it turns powersaving back on.

get radiologos here  and extract to an SD card then get the list of stations, and their PI from https://fmscan.org  , generate the list for you country. each station has a PI, which is in hex, convert it to decimal, and rename the png logo file to sid_<decemial>.png do this for each station, and store it in the logos directory on the SD card insert the SD, start the unit, and select install from the menu that pops up. vw let you download a zip of your countries logos, but you still need to rename them

You can calculate the size of your buckets with commandline tools, or using the analytics feature.  However, all of these incur charges. Alternatively you can run a ' usage report ', save it as a csv , and then do some math cat report.csv | awk -F, '{printf "%.2f GB %s %s \n", $7/(1024**3 )/24, $4, $2}' | sort -n

Time to talk about google app engine, flex , standard , php, and google cloud storage. I've been doing some experimenting using GAE to make a service like cloudinary.  It's pretty simple to do, using imagick, which is installed in GAE.  But here are some simple discoveries; 1)  GAE flex, sounds like GAE standard, but it's not.  if using php55 it's quite different.  with php72 now launched in standard, it's closer to flex, you need a front_controller, and your app.yaml is simpler 2) GAE standard scales really quickly, like to 10k instances in 1 to 2 mins.  Flex takes a LOT longer, think 30 mins 3) GAE can use imagick, imagick is not fast, and cpu intensive , fetching an image from a GCS bucket and rendering it cropped or resized is a 1-2 second operation. you could use appengines image api, but for php it's limited to getservingurl functions. unless you want to write protobuf interfaces . In python, it's way more useful, you can do all the usual t...

I have used apache bench, and more recently artillery.io tools, but it still wasn't ideal.  I came across this tool which will do a better job for basic testing https://github.com/wg/wrk

Using a sky Q compatible LNB, you can still tune with a regular digital tuner.  The analogue inline tuners won't get enough voltage to work right. I use a satlink ws-6933, and set it to a vertical transponder and hooked it to the vertical output of the LNB, without doing that you will get a signal measurement with no quality measurement Below are the screen shots of sky Q signal on the meter and in the sky Q UI too.

Yes there are supported images of amd64 freebsd available in GCE to boot, but I needed an i386 variant so here are the steps I took. I downloaded the mini memstick image, converted it to a disk format virtualbox recognised VBoxManage.exe convertfromraw FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.vdi  --format vdi Then made a virtual machine with that as it's disk, booted and chose the shell option, then remounted as read/write, and put this into /boot/loader.conf mount -o rw /dev/ufs/FreeBSD_install / boot_multicons="YES" boot_serial="YES" comconsole_speed="115200" console="comconsole,vidconsole" then shutdown the machine (gracefully!) now I have an image that supports install via a serial port, just need to make it the right format for GCE to consider as a boot disk VBoxManage.exe clonehd FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.vdi disk.raw --format raw tar -Sczf /tmp/compress...